Let me tell you something that took me years to fully understand, and that I now see confirmed in the faces of nearly every couple that walks through my door.
You did not fall in love in a vacuum. You fell in love carrying everything that ever happened to you before that person existed in your life.
When you were small, you developed what I call survival strategies. Not flaws. Not character defects. Strategies. Intelligent, creative ways your nervous system learned to protect you from unbearable feelings. The problem is, those same strategies follow you straight into your adult relationship, and they tend to collide with your partner’s strategies in the most predictable and painful ways.
Underneath most conflict in relationships, there are two fundamental shame stories that get activated. The first is what I call the “too much” story. This tends to live in the person who, as a child, learned that their need for connection was overwhelming to the people around them. As an adult, that person becomes what I call a pursuer. They protest distance. They chase connection. And deep underneath that chasing is a terrified voice saying “I am unlovable because of how much I need.”
The second is the “not enough” story. This lives in the person who learned that no matter what they did, they disappointed the people they loved. As an adult, that person tends to withdraw. They go quiet. They shut down. And underneath that silence is a voice saying “please do not expose how inadequate I am.”
When these two people find each other, which they almost always do, they create what I call the Waltz of Pain. The pursuer, terrified of abandonment, pushes harder for connection. That very pushing lands on the withdrawer as confirmation of their deepest wound, that they are failing, that they are not enough. So the withdrawer pulls back further. Which confirms the pursuer’s fear that they are being abandoned. Round and round they go.
Neither person is the villain here. Both are running the emotional software installed in them in childhood, before they had words for any of it.
What looks like anger is almost never just anger. What looks like withdrawal is almost never just withdrawal. My wife would slam cabinet doors when she was hurting. Underneath that noise was something much more tender. Loneliness. A longing to be close. I, on the other hand, would intellectualize. I would get distant and analytical. Underneath that was an agonizing need to be seen as good and acceptable.
When we speak from the armor, from the anger, from the righteousness, from the cold distance, our partner’s nervous system only hears a threat. The walls go up. The defenses engage. Nothing gets through.
But when we can drop below the armor to the raw, honest longing underneath, something shifts. The other person’s nervous system softens. They can finally hear us. They can meet us.
That is the work. Not fixing your childhood. Not pretending it did not happen. But learning to recognize, in real time, when the wounded younger part of you has taken the wheel, and gently, honestly, bringing what is actually true to the surface.
Your childhood shaped the emotional architecture of how you love. But it does not have to write the ending.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Attachment Styles in Relationships: How Your Love Pattern Shapes Your Bond
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