You’re at a party with a big group of friends and your partner makes a joke that you find insulting.
You return from work one afternoon, exhausted and tired, and you can’t help but ask your partner why they left that huge pile of unwashed dishes in the kitchen. They snap at you and you get into a short fight that ends without either of you apologizing.
You don’t respond to your partner’s warm gestures because there’s a lot in your mind, or you’re just too tired.
What do you think all these scenarios have in common? They are all small ruptures. A rupture is considered a break in the connection between you and your partner.
As philosopher, author, and founder of School of Life Alain de Botton explains in this video:
“For psychotherapists, every relationship is at risk of moments of frustration or as the term has it, of ‘rupture’, when we suffer a loss of trust in another person as someone in whom we can safely deposit our love, and whom we believe can be kind and understanding of our needs.”
Often caused by hurt, resentment, and anger, ruptures are a normal part of all relationships.
However, they can also be big, serious, and destructive for a relationship: the greatest example of a serious rupture is, of course, cheating.
The problem is that repair should always follow these ruptures; otherwise, when they keep occurring in a relationship, after a period of time, walls start building up between the two people involved. Love gets replaced by frustration and resentment, eventually causing the relationship to erode.
In psychotherapy, the term “rupture and repair” applies to a breach in a relationship followed by its restoration and positive continuation.
In the words of Alain de Botton:
“Repair refers to the work needed for two people to regain each others’ trust, and restore themselves in the others’ mind as someone who is essentially decent and sympathetic and can be a ‘good enough’ interpreter of their needs.”
Here’s how you can restore the emotional connection between you and your partner.
1. Assess Your Situation
When ruptures continue to take place on a regular basis, or when serious, damaging ruptures start occurring — like affairs — , it means that there’s something wrong with your relationship.
Like any other problem, before you try to find the best solution, and hopefully, move forward, you need to understand its cause first.
Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- When did we started drifting apart with my partner?
- When did I first start noticing continuous ruptures happening in my relationship?
- Why do I keep fighting with my partner?
- Is my partner aware that his/her behavior troubles me?
- What mistakes have I made so far in m relationship?
Then, have your partner ask themselves the same questions.
You see, the more you and your partner look into your relationship and the more you analyze your bond, your habits, and the way you behave, act, and talk with each other, the easier it will be to understand why so many ruptures continuously take place in your relationship and what steps you can take to restore the emotional connection between you.
2. Replace “Past” With “Present”
When we face problems in our relationships, we can’t help but keep scanning through the past, remembering our partner’s mistakes, unjust behavior, or mistreatment. As a result, instead of repairing our relationship, we only drag it further down.
For true repair to take place, you need to focus on the present, the here and now of your relationship. Yes, your partner might have done a bunch of mistakes in the past, but so have you. But what good will it do to keep dwell on them?
If you want to restore your relationship and allow it to positively continue, you need to replace any thoughts you have related to your relationship’s past with (positive) thoughts about your relationship’s present.
3. Replace “Emotion” With “Behavior”
Many of us falsely believe that in order to improve our relationships, we need to change the way we feel, rather than the way we behave.
For example, we think “I should stop feeling unhappy in my relationship”, “I should stop feeling like my partner neglects me”, or “I should stop feeling bitter over the fact that we don’t spend enough time together”.
The truth is, you don’t need to change the way you feel. You need to change the way you behave — if you keep doing the same thing you will keep feeling the same way.
Behavior is the key to creating change because, unlike emotions, it is the one aspect of ourselves that we can truly control.
If you feel like your partner neglects you, have a conversation with them about it. If you feel like you don’t spend enough time together, make time.
It’s not about the way you feel. It’s about what you do about your feelings.
4. Apologize for Your Mistakes
Once you take a deeper look into our relationship, chances are you’ll find out that you have made your fair share of mistakes (no matter how mature we are, we all make mistakes in a relationship, it’s something inevitable).
Admitting our mistakes can be difficult, but it is an essential step we must take if we want our relationships to grow.
There’s one simple word that can turn things upside down, change the climate of your relationship, and bring you and your partner much closer than you ever were: “sorry”.
Most of us struggle to apologize to our partners because we hate admitting that we’re wrong — we think it will make us look weak, or less clever than we actually are. However, as author Robert Taibbi explains in his article in Psychology Today:
“Apologies are not about right and wrong, an argument about which reality is right, but instead about something else: Taking responsibility for unintentionally (or yes, sometimes intentionally) hurting someone emotionally or physically. You apologize less because of you and your crime, but because of its effects on someone, usually someone you say you care about. Taking the step of apologizing is taking a step towards healing a wound, changing the climate of the relationship, getting the relationship back on track”.
It’s never too late to apologize for your mistakes. Even saying something along the lines of “Hey, remember the other day when I was rude to you for no reason? I’m sorry for that” could help get your relationship back on track.
Final Thoughts
If there’s one thing the concept of “rupture and repair” teaches us is that no relationship is perfect.
There are always gonna be ruptures. Whenever a rupture occurs, be thoughtful about its impact on your relationship. If you decide that it significantly affects the connection between you and your partner, come back, and try to repair it.
You can always restore the emotional connection between you and your partner — as long as you both have the courage to admit your mistakes and work together to repair them.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Matthew Henry on Unsplash