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

by Richard C. Schwartz

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you have ignored for another . . .

When each partner has courageous love for the other, many of the chronic struggles most couples face melt away because each partner is released from being primarily responsible for making the other feel good. Instead, each knows how to care for their own vulnerability, so neither has to force the other into a preconceived mold or control the other’s journey. Courageous love involves accepting all parts of the other because there is no longer a need to keep the other in the confining roles of parent/redeemer/ego booster/protector.

Western culture bombarded you with messages about how great it would be when you finally found your “soul mate.”

As the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “The American marriage . . . is one of the most difficult marriage forms that the human race has ever attempted.”1 Couples were once surrounded by communities of relatives and friends, by people who shared their values and helped them out. Today, couples are frequently isolated, mobile units that are expected to survive on their own. Not only is the couple isolated from its community but each partner is often cut off from the other by the outrageous requirements of work or by the excessive demands of raising children far from the help of kin networks. Indeed, children can be one of the biggest obstacles to intimacy that couples face. Virtually every study of marital satisfaction has shown that it drops precipitously with the birth of the first child and doesn’t recover until the last one leaves. Finally, partners are cut off from their Selves by being raised in a society that is so concerned with external appearances that authentic inner desires are ignored and feared. Into this nearly impossible arrangement is poured the expectation that your partner should make you happy and that if they don’t, something is very wrong.

Thus the Western culture’s view of romantic love as the ultimate salvation exacerbates an already difficult arrangement. Many writers have blamed the unrealistic expectations our culture heaps on marriage as a significant reason for its high rate of collapse.

As long as we remain such a highly mobile, appearance-obsessed, work- and consumption-addicted culture, our isolated couples do need to find a high degree of satisfaction with each other,

the “empty self” that arose in this country after World War II. For Cushman, American individualism lost its soul at that point to the huge pressures of industrial capitalism. Whereas before the war our individualism was tempered by a strong ethic of community service, afterward that changed.4 The American Dream of ever-upward mobility, fueled by memories of the Great Depression and by increasingly pervasive national advertising, infused that war generation with a more selfish individualism. Their baby-boomer children inherited that perspective and, in addition, experienced less of the extended family and community-focused upbringing that their parents enjoyed. Many of us have lost our connection to connection.

The result is the empty self “that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning . . . a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger.”6 Our empty selves have been conditioned to sate that hunger with material possessions, which has created a powerful economy that gives us the illusion that we are doing well. But our inner lives are not doing well. It also hasn’t helped that political and other changes in recent decades have made it harder for people in this country to survive financially while we have been bombarded with media images of happy, wealthy, consuming people. The consequent striving for money and exhausting workweeks, whether motivated by the need to stay alive financially or to join the wealthy, leave an ever-larger emotional gulf between ourselves and our families and friends.

we become more materialistic and have to work even harder to support those materialistic habits. 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 striving for money and the isolation from a circle of caring people are enough to do in many marriages—not only because both partners are depleted by the pace of life and absence of nurturing contact but also because to work and compete so hard, they each must become dominated by striving parts that don’t lend themselves to intimate vulnerability.

Recently the United States overtook Japan as the developed country with the workforce that puts in the longest hours. We’re spending all our time at work, in places like office cubicles, meeting rooms, and factories; behind computer screens; and on the road to and from our place of work, often removed from nature and from family, friends, and spiritual connectedness. We eat poorly and are out of shape and sleep-deprived. We’re anxious about money and our appearance. Add to all that the burden of keeping each other’s heads above polluted water, climate change, and social unrest, and it’s no wonder so many marriages go under. Stress, depletion, and isolation make it harder to control our inner demons,

Another kind of happiness exists that you can feel steadily whether you are in a relationship or not. It comes from the sense of connectedness that happens when all your parts love one another and trust and feel accepted by your Self. When you have that kind of love swirling around inside you, it spills out to people around you, and those people become part of your circle of love and support.

When you don’t fear drowning because there’s no longer a dark body of water threatening to swallow you up, and when your inner world is one of abiding love, you don’t grasp for the life preservers our culture constantly throws at you. Your material needs are simple, and you value relaxed human connection over nonhuman escape. You have time and energy to nurture an intimate network that extends well beyond your partner, so they aren’t the only target of your parts’ desires.

My experience with couples is that living within the American culture where we are often isolated and depleted, it is extremely difficult for even the most psychologically healthy couples to create truly intimate and nourishing relationships. Those of us who carry additional baggage from our personal histories and gender socialization have even higher mountains to climb.

as you each become more Self-led and experience more inner and outer intimacy, you have less need for material distractions and become more interested in creating community—connecting with the Selves of others around you. During our therapy together, many couples spontaneously find creative ways to downshift their lives and increase their time with each other and with friends and family.

From those kinds of experiences, many of us learned to disdain, stifle, and try to eliminate not only our neediness and vulnerability but also our liveliness. We locked away our vitality, passion, sensuality, and courage because those qualities threatened someone we depended on. I have worked with many clients who were told by their family that they were “too much” and who had playfulness and daring shamed out of them. There are three primary reasons you wound up exiling your most precious aspects.

what is toxic are the emotions and beliefs the exiles carry—their burdens—not the exiled parts themselves. On the contrary, those parts are the vulnerability, sensitivity, playfulness, creativity, and spontaneity that are the heart of intimacy. How can we expect to enjoy our partner when we’ve buried our joy? When relationships seem bland and tasteless, each partner blames the other without realizing that they both forgot where they hid the spice.

Once you learn to love and care for them yourself, they will become the very qualities that make relationships sparkle.

If Mona can continue to show the exiled part that she can protect and care for it, it won’t project all those expectations onto Monk and will no longer live in the past. Instead, Monk will be the beneficiary of that secure inner teen’s irreverent sense of humor and cleverness. The other aspect of Mona’s account I want to underscore is that she used the fight with Monk to find and heal a key exile in herself. When partners can do this, they come to trust that such disconnecting episodes, as uncomfortable as they are, can be tremendously valuable opportunities to heal in ways that will serve the relationship in the future. For that to be the case, however, both partners must commit to the counterintuitive process of looking inside to change things when they are hurt by the other.

When we love our parts and they trust our leadership, they don’t have to distort our perception of our partner or take over and attack them. They are free to care about our partner’s needs because they aren’t starving themselves. They can lavish our partner with affection because they have plenty to spare. Thus, the issues that most couples struggle with—expressing affection, respectful communication, and sensitivity to the other’s needs—all flow naturally from a well-fed, Self-led inner system.

when you achieve a degree of trust in Self-leadership, you become liberated from these exiling dances. You can accept and encourage your partner to explore all of their parts because they don’t threaten you. Your partner senses that acceptance and freedom, which feel wonderful and unusual to them. They come to trust that they don’t have to protect themselves from you, and they keep their heart open.

However, it is true that because you are less anxious, you are no longer as reactive to your partner’s emotions, and, consequently, you feel more separate in that sense. But when you have courageous love for your partner, at another level you feel more connected and similar to them than when you were anxious. You understand what the nineteenth-century philosopher William James meant when he said at the turn of the century, “Every bit of us, at every moment, is part and parcel of a wider self.” You recognize that at the level of your Selves, you are not different because you are drops of the same divine ocean or sparks of the same eternal flame, part and parcel of the wider Self. It is this realization of connectedness that allows you to give your partner the freedom to grow.

When you become the one your parts trust and look to, you can have courageous love for everyone. Courageous love also means having the courage to love someone despite the potential for tremendous pain.

To face the terror of that potential loss and open wide your unguarded heart takes considerable courage. You will not have the courage to let your parts strongly attach to another unless they are already attached to you. If your exiles trust that even if you lose your partner, they will have you to help them with the pain of the loss and to care for them in general, your protectors will open the gate.

It’s quite a bit easier to seem as though you have courageous love for a partner’s growth if you never really let them in. If you don’t let yourself feel much for another, you won’t have that much to lose. The challenge is to do both—to love someone intensely and with abandon while simultaneously fostering their growth, even if it’s away from you, and accepting their parts. Not many people can do that.

It’s important to clarify that this discussion of courageous love is not a polemic against commitment. Instead, it raises questions regarding what you are committing to and why. Courageous love involves commitment to fostering the mutual exploration, healing, and growth of both internal families and Self-to-Self connectedness.

I believe there would be far less fear of commitment if you could trust that you were committing to a Self-led relationship based on courageous love rather than to a process that requires the exiling of your exuberance. As the Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig writes, “How often one observes how interesting, witty, and animated the married person is when alone, but then with the marriage partner present, every sign of liveliness vanishes.”5 That’s a steep price to pay for the false security of parts-based commitment.

a Self-to-Self relationship based on courageous love is so fulfilling that if you were to taste it, you wouldn’t be inclined to leave it. To have all of your parts feel accepted and embraced; to have the freedom to explore and express all of them so that your liveliness doesn’t have to vanish; to experience abiding encouragement to follow your trailheads and learn your lessons; to know that the loving support of the other’s Self is always there, no matter how life hurts you and no matter how the parts of each of you interfere; to feel the sacred “coming home” sense of connection to the divine in each other—for most of us, that is our heart’s desire. Why would you want to leave that?

You have the courage to drop all your defenses and totally open to your partner. You may remember the moments in your life when you felt fully yourself—unguarded and available—with another person. You remember them because they are rare and because they are so beautiful and precious. You felt unusually seen, known, and touched in those encounters because your protectors weren’t screening out your partner’s energy. Likewise, you extended an unfiltered love toward your partner. When you have courageous love, such encounters become much more common because the stakes are lower. If such utter vulnerability results in pain, you know you can handle it.

“Never again” also applies to control. Traumatized people decide, often unconsciously, they’ll never again be that powerless.

They are often high achievers who climb to positions of power and privilege from which they have the resources to make their lives as safe as possible. Others take control by avoiding people, hiding from a world that seems merciless. Either way, life is predictable, and no one gets close enough to hurt them. The boredom and loneliness of either kind of controlled life seem like a small price to pay to minimize the threat of reinjury.

“You are either angry or you are calm. How can you be both at the same time?” Once you get to know your parts and your Self, you understand that it is possible. Your Self becomes the “I” in the storm—the calm center of the inner tornado of your triggered parts and the outer hurricane of upset parts in the people around you.

When your protective parts are upset and speak directly to another person, invariably they will trigger parts in the other. When, on the other hand, you listen to your protectors and then speak for them, from your Self, the message is received in a very different way, even if you use the same words that your parts are saying. Your words lose their judgmental sting or their off-putting desperation and coerciveness. Instead, your respect and compassion for the other person will be heard in addition to the courage of your convictions.

by getting your parts to relax and trust you to speak for them, you become an empty vessel that can collide with other people without making them feel demeaned, competitive, pushed, repulsed, or otherwise protective. You have emptied your boat of egoistic parts, but calling it empty is misleading because your emptied vessel becomes filled with Self energy. Self energy has a soothing effect on any parts it touches, whether they are in you or in another person.

we can use any difficulty in life that produces an extreme reaction as a path to parts we need to heal. As the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes, “Other people trigger the karma we haven’t worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of boulders.” She adds, “The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings you need in order to open your heart. To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you are given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to learn how to open further.”

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. Because of our burdens and our reasons for choosing a partner, we will be triggered in important ways by that person. The question is whether we will use the relationship to illuminate dark dungeons we need to clear out or avoid looking in those dungeons by focusing instead on the partner.

When both you and your partner commit to this Self-led way of relating, it doesn’t ensure that your relationship will be forever harmonious. It does, however, mean that you both will use it to learn about and heal the burdens you brought to it. When you do that, you are doing what you are here to do, and your relationship will benefit. Your protective parts can relax with the knowledge that even if you have a big fight, your partner will do their work and will then show up again as their Self. Each of you will use the fight to clear more obstacles to your Self-to-Self relating. That knowledge brings the hope of connectedness, which helps couples persevere through the dark nights in their relationships.

when you can remain Self-led in the face of extreme parts of the other person, your Self earns tremendous respect from your parts. This brings new meaning to the term Self-confidence.

You may have noticed that I didn’t say I would call for a recess when I saw that my partner had been hijacked by a part. The goal is not to talk only when my partner is Self-led. This is because I believe that it is my responsibility to try to hold Self-leadership even when my partner has lost it. If I can do that, often my partner’s Self returns, and my parts gain confidence in my leadership because I showed them that I could handle my partner’s toughest fighters.

such challenging discussions are (1) opportunities to demonstrate to my parts that they can trust me even in the face of serious threat and (2) ways to access, and later heal, key exiles. If my partner holds this same perspective, our conflicts become arenas for tremendous growth, both personally and for our relationship.

you will be moved to find the right words. Actually, the words matter much less than your energy. Your Self will find a way to convey how sorry you are that your partner is suffering. What your partner wants is the same thing that exiles in general want. It involves three steps—for you to: 1. compassionately witness what happened from their perspective and appreciate how much they were hurt; 2. sincerely express your empathy for that pain and regret for your role in creating it (no matter how inadvertent); and 3. describe the steps you will take to prevent it from happening again.

the more you focus on what you did, the less your partner has to: “You, the offender, demonstrate that you’re fully conscious of your transgression and intend never to repeat it. You, the hurt party, become less preoccupied with the injury and begin to let it go.”5

When this positive feedback loop takes root, you become very interested in your partner’s inner discoveries and feel supportive of the work they’re doing while also being fascinated by your own. Now the two of you are intimate companions supporting each other through external and internal journeys of growth and learning. You know that you will trigger each other, but you also know that you will repair and reconnect. All parts are welcome because no matter how extreme their initial presentation, you each know they are just parts and that once they tell their stories and unburden, they will reveal their value and be welcomed into your two-person collective inner family. When couples really get this, they stop overreacting to each other’s mood swings. When one partner has a “parts attack,” the other stays Self-led and can encourage the triggered partner to help their part.

the first difference you will notice is in your perspective. For example, you will no longer expect your partner to make you feel complete, worthwhile, elated, or safe—in other words, to be the primary caretaker of your parts. While your partner may elicit all of those feelings in you at different times, you know that you can help your parts feel that way, too, so their welfare doesn’t depend on your partner. Then, when you don’t feel those positive emotions, you don’t blame your partner, and you don’t give your partner all the credit when you do feel them. Similarly, when you feel bereft, lonely, worthless, depressed, terrified, or humiliated, you don’t depend totally on your partner to pull you out of those dark seas. You also don’t grasp at the other life preservers our culture offers because you know how to turn to and love those hurting exiles. Or when your parts are so triggered that you can’t help them in the moment, you hold the awareness that it is just a “parts attack” and is temporary. You have the ability to remain the “I” in the inner storm, which also helps you stay the “I” in outer storms with your partner. Once the storm blows over and the part calms down, you go with love to the ones that were upset and help them heal.

It is important to remember, however, that your ability to remain the “I” in the storm is strongly related to your ability to be the primary caretaker of your own parts. Before my parts trusted that I could care for them no matter what happened with her, I could never have resisted automatically reacting to her. The stakes were too high—her words were like knives piercing the hearts of my little exiles because they were so desperately attached to getting her love. My protectors had no choice but to counterattack or to put up walls. Once my parts came to trust me, those knives became blunted and bounced off their little bodies. Now I can have courageous love for her. When I stay the “I” in the storm, it’s not to get her to change; instead, it’s in keeping with the practice of fostering trust in my own Self-leadership.

The other shift in perspective that is crucial regarding these episodes of couples conflict is away from the ever-loving soul mate concept to the idea of partner as valuable tor-mentor.

a primary aspect of intimacy involves knowing that you can reveal any part of yourself to your partner and trusting that you will eventually receive that person’s love and acceptance in return.

So, a second aspect of intimacy is the maintenance of an underlying Self-to-Self connectedness between you and your partner that provides a foundation for the risks you take with each other. This connection is built over time through the moments when the two of you drop your protectors and interact together in the calm, clear, confident, and courageous energy of Self.

There is a third aspect of intimacy

involves the connectedness that forms when each partner has a part that takes over and interacts with a similar or complementary part of the other. For example, some couples’ primary connection comes from the interplay of their sexual parts. For others, it’s from the playful banter of the ones that like to have fun and party.