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why healing relationships is a spiritual assignment

All relationships are spiritual assignments for our optimal growth, learning and healing. I deeply believe that. 

Each relationship we cultivate plays a pivotal role in that journey of self-growth, reflecting our personal strengths and weaknesses like a mirror. It is through these reflections that we’re able to identify the areas within us that still need healing. 

I said it was an assignment—I didn’t say it was an easy one! But it is well worth taking on. 

In this episode of Dear Gabby, I break down the root cause of relationship disturbances and explain what healing relationships really takes—in other words, what we need to look at the most. 

I also get into how to integrate what we learn going forward so that we can attract and sustain healthier relationships. 

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the role of attachment in healing relationships

A secure internal environment is pivotal for healthy relationships. However, according to renowned psychiatrist Dr. Dan Siegel (one of my go-to sources for understanding these complex interpersonal issues), the security we seek in relationships—particularly during our formative childhood years—comes from feeling safe, being seen and being soothed. Those three things (or the absence of them) determine our attachment wounds, which can interfere with our ability to build healthy relationships. 

the first step in healing relationships 

Given that, it’s not surprising that healing relationships first requires understanding our past experiences and working toward resolving the emotional and energetic disturbances they have created. 

It’s less about experiencing a breakthrough moment in a therapy session and more about engaging in a continuous spiritual inquiry of our past experiences. As Dr. Siegel puts it, we must get intimately acquainted with our personal evolutionary history of attachment—that is the first step in healing relationships.

the mother of all healing methods 

We know that unresolved trauma and wounds can lead to self-sabotage, where fear of re-experiencing past hurt leads us to inadvertently (or unconsciously) damage our relationships.

acknowledging and addressing our wounds is an essential part of building healthy and fulfilling relationships 

One of the best ways I have found to do this work is through Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, a method that was developed by Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, in the 1980s that views the mind as a collection of parts, each with its own characteristics and perceptions. The ultimate objective is to foster harmony among these parts in the pursuit of self-growth. 

in this episode, you’ll learn:

I have experienced the life-changing impact of IFS and uncovering my attachment style—and now I’m committed to sharing all I’ve learned with you, so you can end the cycle of unhappy, unsatisfying relationships and form deeper connections. 

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free meditation for healing relationships

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disclaimer

This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

dear gabby #166 Sep 29, 2023 relationships

why you have relationship issues

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The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

GABBY: Hi there, Gabby here. This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I'm not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from a psychological or medical condition, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

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You can have me on speed dial. You've got all these beautiful meditations, hundreds of meditations, workshops, coaching every single week. It is, it's pretty epic. I use it. I'm getting text messages from my friends, my husband, my team members are like, this is the best thing ever.

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Hey there, welcome to Dear Gabby. I'm your host Gabby Bernstein, and if you landed here it is absolutely no accident. It means that you're ready to feel good and manifest a life beyond your wildest dreams. Let's get started.

GABBY: Whether it be romantic relationships or if it's relationships that are family or relationships to children. It's a huge, huge topic that we have to keep coming back to. Just to give you a little backstory. I was just in the middle of interviewing a man called Richard Schwartz, Dick Schwartz, who invented IFS therapy, which is called internal family systems.

And in the midst of interviewing Richard, I lost him because of the internet. But I had really good makeup on and I had my whole audio set up and I said, you know what, let's just see what happens if I jump in and riff and start leading this workshop on relationships. Much like I would if I were giving a talk, I have a little outline in my head of where I wanted to go with this and I would get on stage normally and just riff and let it come. And then I would take questions.

What I'm going to do today, I'm going to riff for as long as I need to about relationships and what it means to be resilient in relationships. And I'm riffing with an outline in my head right now. So I hope that that is exciting for you because it's exciting for me. Then we will break down the steps of what it is that we discussed today so that you can really feel the support and take the actions to really stay consistent with your resilience in relationships.

So, let's start by just acknowledging that all relationships are spiritual assignments for optimal growth, learning, and healing. Every relationship that we establish in our life has a deeper meaning, has a greater opportunity for us to look at that universal mirror and allow whatever is up for us in those relationships to be reflected back to us so that we can recognize and identify what it is that we may still need to address and heal relationships are also a great source of joy and security and safety and love.

But in many cases that security that we long for most in our relationships is what we feel the most distant from because of our unresolved attachment wounds, because of the stories and the experiences from our childhood that made us develop in a way where we don't feel a safe, secure attachment to others.

According to Dr. Dan Siegel, the security that we long for in relationships, particularly as children and and and in that young, young stage of life really requires safety being seen and being soothed is what creates a secure internal environment for a person in relationships. But many of us listening and watching can maybe recognize that that security wasn't something that was established when you were young.

You may have not had the level of safety that you felt you needed, or maybe you didn't have the level of being seen that was necessary to feel like you were good enough to feel like you were worthy. And maybe you didn't have a caregiver a primary caregiver or two primary caregivers that soothed you, that were able to soothe you.

Therefore security was breached. Often we can have insecure attachments to others as adults or we can have disorganized attachments which is even more severe. And a disorganized attachment occurs when we as children don't have the safety and security, and when the primary caregiver, the parent, or whoever the primary caregiver may be, is indeed the source of fear. So if a child was abused by a parent, or if a parent was an alcoholic and made you feel unsafe, that can create what's called disorganized attachment.

And there's avoidant attachment, ambivalent attachment, which is sort of that parent that goes in and out. Sometimes they're safe, sometimes they're not. And so when we have these different attachment styles, we bring those attachment styles that we experienced from our childhood and developed as children in our child brain.

Those attachment styles become the way that we show up in relationships as adults. They become the way that we parent unconsciously as adults. And so our relationships, all of the problems that are established in our relationships are merely our attachment wounds meeting someone else's attachment wounds and together trying to complete themselves, each other by having my wounds meet your wounds so that we can feel complete.

It's only when we start to heal our own attachment wounds and develop a greater sense of resilience in our own inner being that we are able to, one, attract different types of partners because then we are no longer a match for that certain type of energy. But also to, two grow enough to give the other person the opportunity to grow with us.

So as many people have come to me with questions about relationships, they're always like, how do I get my partner to be like this? Or how do I get my kids to be like this? Or how do I get my friends to respect me more? And really what it's about is how do you develop that resilience within yourself so that your relationships can really rise to the occasion.

Other people are not the source of our relationship problems. Our relationship problems stem from our childhood attachment breaches, our childhood experiences of not having enough security, not having enough safety, not having enough soothing or not being seen.

So the first step today is just to without blowing your mind and just freaking out about what could have been all the ways that you were not seen soothed or secure or safe. Just gently and compassionately and lovingly write down in what ways was I seen and what ways was I not seen? In what ways was I soothed in what ways was I not soothed? In what ways was I safe in what ways was I not safe? And did I feel secure?

By asking yourself these questions you can start to get a sense of maybe the ways that your attachment experience as a child may have affected who you are today. For instance, let me give an example. I grew up with a disorganized attachment, which is the experience of having childhood trauma and PTSD. And I also think I grew up with ambivalent attachment as well. Not going to get too into the details of my parents or my mom or how she and I interacted, but that care being sort of sporadic in their security can create that ambivalence as well.

So in that case, with that disorganized attachment, it's commonly known that if you were brought up with that experience of disorganized attachment and now you're an adult reenacting that same attachment style. Your partners can often say things like, I feel alone in this relationship because a person with a disorganized attachment actually is really dissociated.

You check out, you can leave your body, you can focus on something else very quickly. And this is how I lived for many, many years. And thankfully, we have the ability to undo those patterns. So that was a common theme in a lot of my relationships. People would say that they felt alone. Not seen, not connected to.

And how could they, because I was so disorganized and dissociated. So when we start to understand the ways that we didn't receive the security from childhood that we deserved and needed, we can begin to recognize that we have an attachment style that may be affecting the way that we are in relationships now.

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[END AD BREAK]

GABBY: So let's talk about the different attachment styles and the ways that they can affect us in relationships. So optimal attachment, which I believe the studies have shown that a little more than 50 percent of the people have optimal attachment. Like, and this is U. S. studies. I have to triple check, but let's just guess and estimate that half the people in the country, and I'm just talking about the United States alone, have optimal attachment.

So most of us have some kind of insecure or disorganized attachment experience. That's real. That's why we're here. But optimal attachment is when the parent creates that security or the caregiver, the primary caregiver. It could be a grandparent. It could be even just one caregiver, not necessarily both.

If there's this security established with safety, soothing, being seen, that creates a secure attachment. And it's really maintaining healthy and supportive boundaries with the child and really allowing the parents to notice when the parent is acting out, which all parents will. And so this is a little mention to all the parents out there.

We will have moments when we fall off our rails and just start to lose our mind and freak out or whatever it is. But if you can quickly repair that. That moment of repair is actually what restores and establishes and creates that resilience within the relationship of the parent and the child and keeps that optimal attachment connection going because the child can see, Oh, my parents human and they can make me feel safe even when they've had a moment of acting out.

So that's optimal attachment. Likely, if you grew up with optimal attachment, what it often shows is that you will have an easier time organizing your thoughts. Often it, it is easier for a person to be in relationship with others. It's easier even when it comes to learning styles and behaviors because your brain had the ability to develop without traumatic disorganization.

So relationships with others will likely be easier, more likely that you attract positive relationships into your life and life might just be easier in general. Doesn't mean that we, those of us who have disorganized attachment and experiences that might've been insecure attachments can't be awesome as well.

And most importantly, have the neuroplasticity and resilience to change our brain in a way where we can actually become new, get back to a place of center, safety and security through our own therapeutic practices, through a spiritual life.

So don't get disturbed or upset if you notice that these attachment styles were yours. And if that is alarming to you, just breathe into that right now and recognize that the purpose of this was to really just awaken to the awareness of attachment styles and how they might be affecting your relationships.

Then there is ambivalent attachment, which I spoke about, and this is when the parent has unresolved anxiety, very emotional. As a child, we're like sponges. We talk about mirror neurons. We're like sponges. Dan Siegel calls it like sponge neurons. So we pick up all of that inconsistency. So if there is that ambivalence of a parent that's very anxious and sometimes centered.

God bless my mom. This is how she was. My mother was sometimes in high states of anxiety and then sometimes super connected. And so, that ambivalent attachment can inevitably have the child feeling very confused. And so you're sometimes safe, you're sometimes not safe. And that's a real, again, insecure attachment style.

Then we talked about disorganized attachment, which really is the space where we can feel that PTSD experience made us traumatized in relationships, but also dissociate in relationships, unable to be present, unable to connect.

So the child's mirror neurons are actually harmed by the exact person who is supposed to protect them. So this creates a fragmented dissociation, which I've completely lived through. And I'm a survivor of, and I'm so proud to say that I've come out of.

So Dan Siegel actually says this, he says, totally incompatible with my whole evolutionary history as a mammal of attachment. Where my attachment figure is supposed to protect me, to want good things for me, to provide safety, security for me, all these experiences that I'm evolutionary engineered to have, you are now violating.

That's what happens when there is a PTSD or trauma in that relationship. I also wanted to mention the other attachment style, which is avoidant attachment. And this is in the case of the parent who's unable to be present in their own world. So if a parent grew up with their own disorganized attachment wounds or their own insecure attachment wounds, they can be very avoidant.

And that can create a sense of emptiness for the child. So this may be something that you experienced as a child in your own life, an avoidant attachment figure. This is where they become unable to relate to the inner child landscape. This is what happens. And the child starts to believe that the world is only the physical aspects that you can measure and that you're not able to see reality anywhere other than the physical plane.

So you don't have a nurturing of your inner landscape. That's when a parent brought you up with avoidant attachment. And so an adult is only able to focus on the physical aspects of life. They cut off from their own dreams, desires, intuition, impulses, and their caregivers inevitably were unable really to see their inner feelings.

Remember part of security is being seen. So if you had a parent that didn't see your inner feelings, then that part of you was not nurtured, that security breach would occur. And you grew up with a sense of avoidant attachment and now as an adult, you too suffer from the experience of not acknowledging an inner landscape.

You may even recognize that you could be in relationship with someone who has an avoidant attachment. So if you say like, Oh, my partner is so hard to read or they're not good with emotions and feelings or they can't express their feelings. That’s an avoidant attached child who grew up to be an adult.

So once again, we have avoidant attachment, ambivalent attachment. That's when the anxious parent comes in and out of security. And then we have the optimal attachment, which would be the parent is very conscious of the secure attachment bond and then there was disorganized attachment where the PTSD occurred because of the primary caregiver or the caregivers were neglectful or the child had a traumatic experience that wasn't tended to by those caregivers and therefore, experienced dissociation, fragmentation.

And the brain is actually really conflicted because in an experience of a disorganized attached relationship, what happens, it's so fascinating is that the same mammalian neurobiological need to run to a parent or a caregiver and say, make me feel safe is in direct conflict with the fight flight response of the amygdala that's constantly on the lookout for that parent to do something that feels unsafe.

So when a disorganized attached child shows up and their parent walks in the room, the kid can run towards them and then collapse on the floor. Or run and then run away. So because there is literally these two things happening simultaneously in their brain, such that the brain is saying, go for the safety and security from that person because that's my primary caregiver and no, no, they are the person that's not safe. I have to run.

So it's really conflicting. It creates a lot of fragmentation. It creates a sense of dissociation and that's when a person as an adult can grow up feeling disconnected from their body, disconnected in relationships, very ADD, which is often what we would diagnose with an ADD. Really it's actually dissociation and trauma.

And that also can greatly affect the way that the child grows up as an adult in their learning style. And they're relating to others. Their, obviously, their confidence levels, their ability to connect. I want you to go back and I want you to do the exercise that I already mentioned, which is: In what ways did I feel seen and what ways did I not feel seen? In what ways did I feel safe and what ways did I not feel safe? In what ways did I feel soothed and what ways did I not feel soothed and did I feel secure?

By asking yourself those questions, you can start to begin to uncover what type of attachment you may have grown up with. I want to pause for a moment and just acknowledge that this could be extremely triggering, that it can bring up a lot of stuff, that when I started looking at my attachment styles, I woke up one morning and felt so depressed and down.

And as we start to understand our attachment wounds, the goal here is not to trigger ourselves or re-traumatize ourselves or make ourselves feel bad for the way that we grew up, but instead to identify the ways that we may be showing up in relationships now as adults as a result of our childhood experiences.

So, you answer those four questions. Keep it simple. Don't get too deep. And if you want to take this further with a therapist or a coach, absolutely. I would recommend it. Definitely. But in this moment, just take a look and then look at these different attachment styles and say, Oh yeah, I can see how my mom might've been very ambivalent in her attachment and how I could have had an avoidant attachment or no, I had a really secure attachment, whatever it was that you experienced.

And then start to notice how that might be affecting your existing relationships now in romance, being a parent, bringing up a child, and also your relationship to yourself. Are you dissociated or are you able to be present? Are you disconnected from others? Are you unwilling to let your emotions be seen because you were brought up with avoidant attachment?

Are you unable to trust people because you were brought up with an ambivalent attachment and you're so confused in relationships? Are you unable to connect at all because things were so disorganized? So just this is about just taking a look so that you can start to have language around why you may act in certain ways.

So much of what we do here isn't about being in a therapy session or having a breakthrough moment where you're like, oh, it's all gone. It's really about being in the spiritual inquiry of our past experiences so that we can be in the pursuit of undoing the disturbances and energetic disturbances from our past so that we can be free and present in this moment.

That's what the whole thing is about. Getting back to resilience and presence in this moment so that we can thrive in our relationships, so that we can be a magnet for what we desire, so that we can do the great work that we want to do in the world so that we can be the parents that we want to be.

And our pursuit and our bravery and our willingness to look at the energetic disturbances from our childhood are what offer us the magnitude of greatness and change that we are capable of.

So I want you to, before you even do any of this, I want you to take a deep breath and recognize and acknowledge how brave you are for the willingness to look at, acknowledge, and recognize the ways that you did not receive secure attachment potentially as a child and how that is affecting your relationships today.

And this is just about taking an inventory because with this inventory, you can start to pay attention to a greater awareness and understanding of why you act certain ways in relationships.

And I don't want you necessarily to be taking an inventory of your partners, but maybe silently you can take a look at them and say, Oh, I can be more compassionate towards my partner because they aren't really just acting like an a-hole all the time. They had an ambivalent attachment style when they were brought up and so they don't trust completely.

So just really having the awareness of these different childhood experiences can give us a massive awakening to why we are the way we are, why we act the way we act, and why our partners act the way they act, and how that misalignment has caused so much friction in these adult relationships, and even as parents, how we relate to our children.

And how we relate to our family members, of course, because all those childhood things are triggered in those family relationships. So the goal for this is to look at the attachment styles I've outlined, answer those four questions, and then the next and final step, because I want to keep this simple, is to just take note of the moments, maybe you do a daily inventory at night before you go to bed, or maybe you just do it once a week, whatever feels safe and comfortable.

And just take an inventory of how you were relating to others that week, that day, however much you want to look at this. And notice how your identified attachment wounds may have shown up in those moments. That's it. That's all I'm asking for you.

The final, final, final step really is to be in prayer. I want us to pray and to set an intention with the universe to hear this prayer.

And the prayer is:

Thank you, universe. Thank you, God. Thank you to a higher power of your own understanding. Speak to whoever you want. Thank you for guiding me to be brave enough to look at my past so that I can undo the burdens and become free in the present. That prayer alone has the ability to help support you through this journey of just looking, just looking at the patterns.

Looking at the experiences, witnessing how you act out as an adult and the ways that you've attracted partners that may reflect the ones that you had as parents, and to start to just be more conscious of how your past experiences have played a role in this present relationship, whatever that may be.

If you made it to the end of this episode, that means you're truly committed to miracles. I'm really proud of you. If you wanna get more Gabby, tune in every Monday for a new episode.

Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any of the guidance or special bonus episodes. Your experience at this show means a lot to me, so I really wanna welcome you to leave an honest review and you can follow me on social media at @GabbyBernstein.

And if you wanna get in on the action, sign up for a chance to be Dear Gabby’d live at deargabby.com. See you next week.

Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.