You Are the One You've Been Waiting For: Applying Internal Family Systems to Intimate Relationships

by Richard C. Schwartz

For reasons that will be discussed at length in the pages to come, your partner cannot succeed in making you feel good in a lasting way. For example, if you have had a hard life filled with rejection and loneliness, their love can only temporarily lift the cloud of worthlessness and self-loathing that will return whenever they are away or in another mood.

The not-unrealistic fear of sudden financial impoverishment also drives the anxiety and work pace of most people in the United States since the social safety nets have been shredded by years of conservative governing.

The inner battles between women’s caretakers and their assertive parts often built over time until, seemingly out of the blue, their assertive protectors would explode with an intensity that left their husbands stunned.

Given that men have highly vulnerable exiles that they try to keep locked up at all costs, it makes sense that criticism from their wives would trigger the shame those exiles carry, which would account for men’s extreme physiological reactions. In addition, men would experience the activation of all their protectors, including defensiveness and even anger or rage.

I believe that because women’s focus is so much on caretaking others and on getting their exiles cared for by a relationship, they are no better at nurturing their own parts than are men.

The fear is that once you expose those parts of you, you will be forever seen by that other as having those character flaws. If you both understand that those are just small parts of you—parts that carry burdens of worthlessness, insecurity, distorted sexual impulses, and so on; parts that simply need empathy and acceptance to heal—it’s easier for you to reveal them and for your partner to respond lovingly.

Many parts of each partner feel most unwelcome. Those parts will leave you with an underlying sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction, and, at some point, these parts will give up hope and begin to sabotage.

Many of my clients never or rarely experienced love from their parents. Instead, because of their parents’ parts, the clients were objectified in some way as children.

In addition to having fears about love, most exiles also believe they are worthless or unlovable. If this is true of yours, it is usually because somehow they got that message from one or both of your parents.

With the burden of unlovability comes not only survival terror, as mentioned earlier, but also an intense drive to be redeemed—to have the caretaker who originally gave you the message that you are unlovable change their mind and tell you that they do indeed value you. This drive for redemption will be a major factor in your choice of mate because you will seek someone who looks, sounds, or acts like the original redeemer.

Attachment reinjuries, then, are events in which you experience your partner as having betrayed, abandoned, or humiliated you, reaffirming the original message to your exiles that they are unlovable.

Couples who get caught in escalating slugfests like that usually wind up in one of two patterns. One is to lock away the issue and try not to talk about it again. That solution can keep them together, albeit with increased protectiveness. Couples opting for that pattern come to have an exiled issue that affects them in the same way that an individual’s exile does. It becomes an area of the relationship that they fear, and they avoid anything that might trigger it.

When our partner acts like one of our parts, we will relate to them in the same way we relate to that part. If we judge ourselves as ridiculously weak when we feel sad or needy, when our partner’s vulnerability triggers our own, we’ll overtly or covertly judge our partner as weak. If we learned to view our assertive parts as selfish, we’ll be uncomfortable with our partner’s assertiveness.

The hostile ones are often the parts that had a great deal of access to you before you got involved with the other person but became exiled by your decision to become a couple with that person.

the same qualities in you that I so love become threatening, and my protectors go to work to erode your confidence, rein in your independence, and suck out your vitality.

The prospect of being abandoned is so daunting in part because, in our culture, being alone carries the stigma of being an unlovable loser.

Babies will interact playfully with a parent for a period of time and then will suddenly turn away and disengage, as if they need a break from the intensity of interacting. So, from the beginning, we exhibit this alternating rhythm in intimate relationships.

It is only when you are able to calm your abandonment anxiety by caring for the parts that carry it that you can truly love your partner because you can put their growth above your need for security.

As a result, your exiles are constantly feeling rejected or abandoned, and you are always on guard. Physiologically, you are in chronic hyperarousal, a state that will lead to all kinds of stress-related health problems.

Many traumatized clients are hypervigilant—their inner sentries constantly scan the environment for danger and overreact to anything resembling the original traumatic interactions. “Never again” also applies to control. Traumatized people decide, often unconsciously, they’ll never again be that powerless.

You can just ask exiles not to overwhelm your internal system with the emotion they hold as you approach them.

Your partner may have parts that automatically react to vulnerability with contempt or that may use the revelation against you in a later fight.

If, soon after the fight, each partner can enter Self-leadership, allow the other to speak about the effect of the fight on their exiles, and then deliver a heartfelt apology to those hurting parts, neither walks away with additional burdens.

Often it’s not the conflict itself that makes fighting so scary—it’s the dread that it will lead to days or weeks of distance and mutual contempt.

The partners take a few steps toward each other and then get scared, and they distance for a while. That’s a natural process, and I have learned to respect it instead of trying to push couples toward consistent closeness.

What most of my clients find is that even when their partner is perfectly loving, it triggers parts of them that don’t trust they are lovable, that the love will last, or that someone who loves them deserves their love.

it’s very difficult for some couples to get their protectors to stop complaining about and trying to change the other person without a third party in the room that they both trust.

most people, when they are triggered, have no idea how they are coming across. They can describe in detail the hurtful acts of their partner but are unable to take in the impact of their own behavior when it becomes extreme.

Once I notice that I’m not very embodied, I know that my parts have hijacked me and that continuing to talk is not likely to be productive.

I used to always take the bait when someone would say something inaccurate about what I had done, and I would respond to correct the content rather than address the hurt feeling that was driving the outburst. I have a part that felt it had to make sure all the facts were correct, as if there were some permanent record of my life somewhere that would be tarnished if I didn’t constantly clarify distortions.

This inner reparenting may not be possible, however, in situations in which a client is constantly bombarded by a partner’s scary or demeaning protectors. To create enough safety in such cases, couples may need to separate.