I’m someone who likes executive summaries delivered to me about a subject, so here’s this one:

Needing to repair your relationship is more of an opportunity to demonstrate to each other trust, compassion, and security rather than an indicator failure. Consistent tender repair is both a better indicator of a secure relationship than to have never done the thing that prompted the need for repair. 

Now, I’m also someone who likes details, elaboration, and background, so here’s some of that too 😉

When people in relationship with one another engage in the act of repair after some kind of a mistake has been made, they demonstrate to each other many things, among which are trust, responsiveness, availability, and security (this choice of words is very deliberate, and you’ll soon understand why). When done right – with empathy and tenderness – consistent repair actually creates stronger relationships than those that don’t make mistakes in the first place (i.e, not needing repair). 

Background…let’s take a stroll through some psychology history.

In 1958, Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby delivered a theory that became a pretty big deal: Attachment Theory. (Usually Bowlby gets all the credit, shocker, but Mary played a big role). There have been some really interesting recent follow ups on their work that I’ll get to in a minute, but first, it’s important to have at least a big picture idea of the origins of this theory. Bowlby and Ainsworth studied attachment styles between children and their caregivers and followed them throughout their life into adulthood to see what styles of relationships they developed later on. In their theory, they describe attachments to be one of four styles: secure, ambivalent, avoidant, and disorganized. A secure attachment style is the most developmentally healthy form of attachment, and the whole point of this theory was that people develop this type of attachment style from a very early age based on the way their parents treated them. (By the way, if you’re curious…during my research for this post I came across this free attachment quiz you can take to see where you are in all this).The defining characteristics of parents who raised children with secure attachment styles are these: consistency, availability, and responsiveness.  Now, here’s the worrisome part of their theory; parents who weren’t displaying those qualities at least most of the time risked doing permanent damage to their childrens’ ability to form healthy relationships as adults. Damn, that’s a lot of pressure, isn’t it? It’s impossible to be emotionally present and available to your children or your partner 100% of the time. In fact, research done by the Gottman Institute shows people in relationship are only emotionally available about 10% of the time! According to Attachment Theory, this would indicate that relationships are basically set up for disaster….right? Not quite 😉

Moving on to more recent research…

Welcome to the stage, Ed Tronick, who has shown that secure attachments still exist despite inconsistencies in attentiveness, emotional availability, responsiveness, etc. How? Because they repetitively engage in repair. He defends the idea that successful repair actually turns feelings of despair into positive emotions. You can read more about his work on this here: Ed Tronick – American Journal of Psychiatry.

This is a big deal guys. It means that consistent compassionate authentic repair creates more secure relationships than simply being consistently attuned and responsive like Ainsworth and Bowlby suggested. 

This goes for any type of relationship. Friends, family, romantic partners, professional…

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So what does compassionate and authentic repair look like? Here are some of my thoughts 🙂

What if when you heard or said something along the lines of:

“Hey, I’d love to find an opportunity soon to acknowledge what happened and make amends.” 

or 

“Hey, we need to talk about last night”

or 

“I’m upset”

…what if the people involved understood everything I just wrote about repair above? What if those words or similar words were triggers to the thought “hey we have an opportunity to deepen the trust and security in our relationship together, absolutely, let’s talk about it”. Instead of having thoughts like “oh God, here we go again”, or “Damn, I keep screwing up”, or “Are we really going to get through this?”. 

Here’s a tip:

If you can’t talk about it right then, make a plan together on when you’ll have the time to compassionately repair together (which is a great option, by the way, if someone is currently experiencing emotional stress…I could and probably will wright a whole post on that). It’s essential to do what you need to do (meditate, eat, sleep, remove yourself, etc) to be able to engage with this person from your heart and from the part of your brain that allows you to engage compassionately rather than defensively. That’s truly where to start if repair is going to be anything more than just “I’m sorry” and instead be an opportunity to demonstrate trust and security to each other. 

Example: 

My partner and I, just yesterday, engaged in this very type of repair process when she brought up something that had happened several years ago at Burning Man that wasn’t repaired well. I had brushed up a little too close to what was then a blurry boundary we had around intimacy with others in the beginning of our polyamorous relationship ventures, which is pretty common when you’re flying by the seat of your pants like we were then. Needless to say, the context of what happened was pretty complicated, so I’ll spare you (or maybe write its own blog post haha). Anyway, given the skills and awareness and emotional intelligence we have now that we didn’t have then, I wasn’t very surprised. She realized it was still affecting her at times still today, but wasn’t sure what to do about it. For me, this was a full stop moment. As in, stop whatever we are doing to open and hold compassionate space to bring it all back into the present. To understand how we feel presently, in our bodies, about what happened 4 years ago. To hold each other as we recalled our experiences. To brainstorm things to do together to tenderly transmute the protective walls she built around a part of herself she never really realized she had started protecting. We both acknowledged that we needed to re-repair, and both had the perspective that this was actually a good thing, and that we were about to have the chance to demonstrate trust and security together. Without this perspective, it would have been very easy for me to slip into feelings like regret, shame, etc. It may sound weird, but because of this perspective, we were honestly stoked to open up an old wound that was still sore, because we knew we would handle it with tenderness and kindness. 

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If you know your relationships – either familial or with romantic partners or even with friends – but you’re stumped on where to begin?Please get in contact with me, relationship coaching is what I do for a passion and for a living 🙂

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Thanks for reading,

Kiley Hartigan

PS: I got a lot of inspiration to write about this after listening to this podcast by a fellow relationship coach who I’ve come to respect and admire – Libby Sinback. 

Here’s another reputable Relationship Coaching source on this topic. 

Gottman Institute – Repair is the Secret Weapon of Emotionally Connected Couples