In every Couples Counseling Intensive I offer, I begin with a belief I hold deep in my bones: there are no bad guys here. What I see are two people who love each other deeply, and even through the pain and conflict, are trying – often clumsily – to be part of each other’s healing and growth. You see, love doesn’t protect us from struggle. In fact, it often brings our oldest wounds to the surface.
I think it’s inevitable at some point that both partners will start to feel like they’ve been identified as the “bad guy.” It’s usually a sign that a protector part has stepped in. For those unfamiliar with Internal Family Systems (IFS), protector parts are internal roles we all carry that step in to keep us from feeling pain, shame, or vulnerability. They often developed early, and they work tirelessly to keep us from accessing the raw, tender parts of our inner world, especially the parts of us that were harmed and hold unhealed wounds, what IFS calls exiles.
These protector parts might look like anger, defensiveness, blame, or withdrawal. They’re not trying to ruin the relationship, they’re trying to keep us safe. But in trying to avoid suffering, they often cause more of it. That’s what makes working with protectors so challenging: if we don’t pause and tend to them, we end up pushing away the connection we so deeply long for. There’s a German word for this – verschlimmbesserung – which describes an attempt to improve something that unintentionally makes it worse. That’s what our protectors do. They mean well, but they often create the pain they’re trying to avoid.
So in the room with a couple, when I see protectors take over, I slow things way down. I invite each partner to get curious about their own internal world and offer their protectors a message of reassurance: You don’t need to take over. I’ve got this now. This step – creating space between the part and the person – is what allows love and compassion, our innate Self energy, to come back online. From there the couple can do the deep work that creates lasting transformations.
The protectors are not the only destructive forces at play. I also help couples recognize how the brain itself can keep them stuck in pain. When a relationship starts to feel hard – when slights, disconnects, and ruptures become more frequent (and the longer we’re in relationship, the more inevitable it is that we’ll experience these) we’re likely to be flooded by thoughts like They don’t care about me, They never listen, or Nothing I do is good enough. As it happens, these thoughts are automatic – they just think themselves. That’s the negativity bias at work. It’s actually an ancient, hardwired survival strategy. If we didn’t fixate on the dangers around us – poisonous berries, saber-toothed tigers – we wouldn’t have survived long enough to evolve into the complex, feeling beings we are today. But what were once very real threats aren’t around anymore and that wiring doesn’t serve us in the same way it once did.
Even worse, once we believe something painful about our partner, confirmation bias kicks in. We’re constantly scanning for evidence to support those negative thoughts. We find the sigh, the distracted tone, the forgotten reply – and completely overlook the soft gesture, the effort to reconnect, the many signs that they still care. That’s why one of the most healing practices I offer is this: Train yourself to look for the ways you are loved. It may not always look exactly how you want in the moment, but it’s likely still there.
And if you’ve ever wondered why you were drawn to your partner in the first place, especially when the relationship mirrors past pain, you’re not alone. I often reflect on what Alain de Botton calls “the familiar suffering” – that unconscious pull toward someone who stirs our old wounds because we truly want to finally heal. When we were young, we didn’t have the ability to name our needs or trust they’d be met. But now we can. Now we can turn to our beloved and say:
Will you help me heal this? Will you show up in a way that helps me feel truly loved and valued? Will you choose me, with all my imperfections, and even fight for me?
If you want to do this incredibly brave, beautiful, and difficult work, I’d be honored to show you how.
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