This is my foundational blog series, me trying to dish out everything I’ve learned as a marriage and couples counselor. My goal here—for those of you who’ve attended my signature workshop series—is to spell out everything I said there, raw and real, with more granularity. If you have thoughts or comments—if something resonated or didn’t land for you, I’d love to hear them. Simply email me at admin@trustlinestherapy.com, and I’ll get back to you. I’m just here writing from the trenches of my Sarasota couples therapy practice. If you like to reference the next article in the series, it’ll be on my blog soon called, Foundations of Relationships: Part Two, Safety—What It Feels Like When It’s Gone. You can subscribe here.
Let me start with this: I’m writing for anyone who’s looked over at their partner and felt an uneasy tension—like there’s miles of space between you, which feels stormy. You want to reach out for them—and maybe you do—but what you get back is a sense of “they’re not here” or “they’re not hearing me.” Or worse, they don’t care. You’re left alone, that nervous buzz still there. Or, if you’re lucky or wired a certain way, you distract yourself to the point where you don’t even feel it. Maybe a habit takes its place—those careless nights where each of you watch your own shows on the television. The great interest and attention that’s paid to our phones, chasing Reddit rabbit holes, news feeds, or some silly game. But in all that’s unsaid between you and your partner, you think sometimes, “We might as well be roommates.” You wonder if they’re even aware of your discomfort—and maybe they are—but in all the silent unease, when a comment IS made, you pick up on sarcasm or indifference that feels pointed and intentionally hurtful.
In this state of affairs, it’s like a building tension—a storm rolling in, like an afternoon Sarasota downpour. Fight or flight moments feel ugly, each of you retreating to your own corner. When the storm hits, a fight erupts and from this disconnected place the most awful things are said. “You’ve never cared!” “You’re such a selfish person!” “I don’t want to be around you anymore!” Maybe you’re not proud of what you said and you want to bang your head against a wall. Maybe you caught the bullet, and you feel ruined—you can’t get past what they said to you. You don’t want to, but you even find yourself thinking about something you swore you never would—alternatives, separation. And just that thought scares you, and you feel stuck and helpless. You can’t go and it feels impossible to live this way. You’re not emotionally or financially prepared for the chaos—the impacts are too drastic for everyone.
If this is you, sit here by the fire with me. I’m a fellow traveler on the roads of relationship pain, but also a guide with a working map of the territory. Better yet—it’ll help if you really try to imagine this—I’m also something of a brother, uncle, or other loving relative—a well-wisher, a coach. I say this because, knowing the dark twists and turns of the labyrinth ahead as we unpack all this, it can only be done if you feel safe. And I want you to know—even if you’re reading this from miles away and you don’t know me from Adam—you are safe with me. At least it’s my job to earn that from you. I’m not perfect, but I’ll do my best.
You see, when you were little, someone older—a parent, an uncle, an aunt, or grandparent—knelt down, and when you looked into their penetrating eyes, those of a wiser, older being, you sensed they wanted to know about you. They asked you questions, their brow furrowed with intent, they listened, and you saw their connection, their concern, their care, and it felt like trust—which is so important to us when we’re kids.
The world is so big and mysterious; it’s a scary place.
I’m starting here on our journey of understanding marriage because you—an adult in an adult romantic relationship—to understand this, might require a leap of logic (“How did I get here?”), and what we talk about might even go against conventional wisdom. You see, it is one thing to talk about how we all have this “inner child” within us. It’s sort of like talking about Bigfoot. It’s another thing to actually see the molded plaster of an actual foot print of the monster. What I mean is, sure, we can believe we act on some type of faulty, childhood wiring—but actually seeing is believing, and in my experience, it’s actually shocking to see an example of this in the wild of your relationship.
Fixing relationship problems, which I do in my Sarasota couples therapy practice, is my business: my life’s work. And when I am approached by couples looking for that fix, I am invariably told that the problem is “bad communication.” But what is “bad communication”?
We may say “bad communication is the cause of relationship problems,” but does that encapsulate the gravity of the situation? Does that take in the biting sting you feel of the sarcastic remark, the shake-your-head-certainty that your plea will fall on deaf ears, the sense that no matter what you try, you are not able to please this person? Your sense of losing oxygen because they are making their viewpoint more important than yours? This leads me to my main point—the main point of this entire series.
Foundational point one: Relationship problems come from a shaky place—when we feel like there’s no safety.
Some of you will see the truth in this right away, and some of you will scratch your head.
Let’s get it to sink in, because I don’t just mean for some of you, safety is important. I’m saying, if any part of you recognized the scenarios I described in the intro, you must hear this and believe this: YOUR ROOT ISSUE IS SAFETY.
I’m going to tie this all together using my story—of how I’ve been a shaky mess, too alarmed and too certain that I’d not be safe to share vulnerability with a partner, especially when things take a nosedive. Some of you would get this right away.
But before I do this, I want you to see that it would be logical for some of you not to see a connection to, on the one hand, the moments of banging your head against a wall with your partner, and on the other hand, that all this stems from a lack of safety.
“Do you think I’m six years old, Nicholas?” You say. For some of you, I might even seem like a snake-oil salesman peddling a one-size-fits all solution, or worse, a pretentious, know-it-all, therapist—a jerk.
I would respond to this with another question, what do people do when their backs are against a wall? In movies like The Alamo, heroes fight when the odds stack against them. In life, we’ve all felt that—times as kids when we were utterly alone, believing no one cared. Maybe you tried to share a feeling, but a caregiver missed it, like you were talking algebra and they handed you an abacus. Or you wanted to be alone but got intrusive questions, your pleas ignored. Those moments taught you vulnerability’s risky, wiring you to push down pain to survive, like a trapeze artist with a broken foot, forced out onto the wire. I’m comparing love to these life-or-death moments because, in our brains, intimate connection sits close to survival instincts—research backs this up, as I’ll explore next post. You swallowed those feelings and pushed on, but that’s why safety’s absence feels so hard to spot.
That is why safety might not at first seem like the most logical root of the problem, because as far as relationships go, you have developed such a thick skin.
For me, I can clearly see a time when I took on this belief. I was nine years old—staying 200 miles away from my parents at my grandmother’s, and I got so frustrated with my parents that I hung up on them. I’ll call it “the phone hang up story.”
The backstory: Starting at around the age of four, I was always a kid with an active imagination, who didn’t want his parents to leave, fearing car accidents on those icy Maine roads, and my mom was often gone at nights for working. I remember running, crying, to the nanny, but it didn’t do any good. The nanny at nighttime, (a stoic, older New England woman who was raised on a farm), was not the warm-blooded empathetic Lebanese American mother I was used to in the daytime. I felt powerless—like something bad could happen, nothing I could do would help, screaming out wasn’t working, and no one would care.
Flash forward to age nine, I got so upset when my mom and dad told me they couldn’t come get me from my grandmother’s, that I hung up the phone in a fit of rage. “What did you just do?” My grandmother asked.
Who hangs up the phone on their parents? The phone just sat there staring at me, and I was left with my feelings, which now had a greasy coating of guilt and shame. It felt violent inside my chest. I felt gross—like I was too much. I told myself no one was going to understand this feeling. If I’d ever try to explain it, I’d shake, and who would want to hear that or even care? After all, I was the aggressor, the one who hangs up phones in violence, on the people I loved most.
This “kid-panic”—my buzzing nerves, told me that sharing was impossible. You might be surprised at how many clients have shared similar stories with me.
Funny enough, the “phone hang up story“ wasn’t something I was planning to share here, but when trying to brainstorm memories to illustrate a feeling of lacking safety, it came back to me. Suddenly with those memories, I could still feel that kid’s panic, and the breathlessness and heart-pounding accompanied me when I remembered thinking “I’m too much—I hung up on my parents.” A part of me STILL felt embarrassed to admit it, to feel the shame, and thought, “If any body could see this part of me, they’d want to stay miles away!” It was the voice of that shaky nine-year-old, still with me after all these years.
Now think of my former client “Ellen” (not her name, obviously), who would lovingly prepare dinner for her husband, a self-confessed workaholic. When he wouldn’t come home at the agreed on time, her food would sit there, getting cold. “Could you please not come home late?” She would say, an edge to her voice.
The next night, when he came home later, or the night after, even later, Ellen couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice, and her husband shot back, “Would you just give me a break.” Later on, after realizing she had single-handedly organized a massive family project, and he had forgotten to book a table at their favorite restaurant for their anniversary, she continued to ruminate on their relationship’s imbalance, and how she didn’t feel cared for.
His defensive tone, her boiling nerves, led her to her own certainty that he was not going to understand her hurt. “Why even bother?” she thought. She felt unseen and ugly, on the inside. She didn’t feel safe to convey these feelings to him. Sure, she would try. But it came out all shaky; she couldn’t find the right tone, and trying to point out the reasons why in the midst of these heated exchanges failed to change anything as he interpreted everything she said as criticism.
This then is the true beginning of the journey that I’m hoping to take you on in this series of posts—it’s the point of the story where we realize that each of the main characters have incredibly rich inner worlds, complete with hidden, irrational beliefs that could use some empathy (we’re all so hard on ourselves!), and devastating, vulnerable feelings that could use a friend to lend an ear to. But at the start of this journey, everyone is pretty sure this inner world should remain shut to the other, because it’s just too damn risky. There is no map. It all feels so hopeless.
To reiterate: Relationship problems come from a shaky place—when we feel like there’s no safety.
And I would add an amendment to this first point: when we get safety back, we fix relationship problems.
This is not just a simple, homespun truth, in my view. It’s a relentless law of nature, axiomatic, like “the day follows the night,” or “water boils at 212° Fahrenheit”. To me, it’s one of life’s great jokes that “irreconcilable differences” is the main cited reason on divorce papers, because I think this is a convenient lie.
In my experience helping many couples through this, it’s not the things we can’t agree on that kill our love, it’s the absolute certainty that we will not be able to share our real selves with the other person.
My business is called Trustlines Therapy, because I see these lines of openness between people—like the sturdy ropes used at harbors to secure ships—as being the key element of the healing process in relationships, and in all mental health. These ropes had started to fray and rip, but we are going to learn how to mend them.
When did you last feel unsafe to share your true self with your partner? What childhood moment—maybe a time you felt ignored or “too much”—might have wired that fear? Reflect on this, and let’s explore how to mend those Trustlines in the next post.
