How to Embrace the Repair Process in Your Relationships (Before It's Too Late)

A simple approach to repairing the damage in your relationships

Image/Brighton Panel Works

My son’s first day of his high school sophomore year is tomorrow.

He likes school less than I did. He’s less excited about seeing the kids he hasn’t seen for months and welcoming the new freshman class than I was at the same age. So, of course, on my default, emotionally unintelligent setting, my gut reaction was that he wasn’t looking at the situation the right way.

If he approaches it the same way that I did, he’ll be more excited about going back to school and everything will be better for him!

Even after all of the personal-growth work that I’ve done over the past 10 years, I’m still a huge threat to fall into this thinking (or maybe we should say non-thinking) trap which results in me saying and doing things that communicate to others: If you don’t think and feel the exact same way that I do, you’re doing it wrong!

It might be the nicest version of being an asshole, but rest assured this hyper-invalidating way of existing in the world is totally asshole-ish and will NOT improve any of your relationships. If you haven’t heard the story yet, it’s—literally and quite specifically, I believe—the reason I’m no longer married. She could only tolerate about 13-ish years of my incessant invalidation, because she has a healthy sense of self-respect.

My son was sitting across from me in our favorite booth at our favorite breakfast diner this morning. That’s when he shared with me that his first-ever best friend—a kid he used to spend a ton of time with and attended grade school with—was transferring to his high school this year, reuniting them after a year in different schools and some type of social fallout.

Me being me, I encouraged him to mend whatever fences need mending and welcome him as the new kid into his school. And my son being my son, replied that he would treat him just as well as he does every other classmate in school, but that he wasn’t going to treat him like one of the inner-circle boys he’s grown tight with over the past couple of years.

Then I saw him go quiet for a moment, considering. Then he told me a short story.

This kid transferring in had invited my son to his house at some point a couple of years ago—a place he had been dozens of times. They were messing around on their Nintendo Switches. Then, according to my son, the other kid said something like: “You can go home now if you want. I just needed your Switch for something.” Then, that kid went to his bedroom and played an online video game remotely with some other kid in his class.

Regardless of how factual and contextual this story actually is (I don’t always trust everything 15-year-olds tell me), I do believe that my son’s lived experience was that he was invited to his oldest friend’s house, only to feel used for one of his toys, and then ditched for some other kid (which ironically, is one of the boys in my son’s inner circle).

I thought about all of that for a moment silently. I had a pretty charmed social upbringing. I got along with pretty much everyone and don’t remember experiencing many socially painful situations.

And I responded: “If that’s legit how it went down, I totally understand why you wouldn’t think of him or treat him the same as you used to. If that had happened to me, that would have been the last time I ever visited his house.”

And my son just nodded.

“It was the last time I ever went to his house,” he said.

A Plea to Embrace the Repair Process in Your Relationships

There are many ideas on the subject of healthy relationships that are key to having them. Near the very top of that list is the concept of Repair.

Most of us in most of our relationships are not mindfully aware and are certainly not intentionally doing and saying things that inflict some measure of pain or harm on other people. But it is precisely the little bits of pain and harm we unknowingly deliver to the people we spend the most time with, and often whom we love the most, which results in the breakdown of trust and intimacy in our most important relationships.

I have no idea what repair might look like for my son and his former best friend. Maybe it will happen this year.

But I think I have a decent sense of what it looks like in our marriages or long-term romantic partnerships because it’s pretty much always what I’m discussing with any coaching clients that I meet with several times.

I think about Repair in two ways:

1.       The “little things” and the invalidation cycle.

There are the minor infractions that we don’t notice or intend. In my coaching work, we would categorize these as a failure to Consider the other person. Either we intentionally didn’t consider their wants and needs, or more likely, we simply forgot to, or maybe it never occurred to us to consider our partner at all. This happens all of the time in the majority of human relationships on Earth. We can chalk it up to the human condition. But what happens after is what determines whether people have healthy relationships that last, or whether their relationships slowly die on the vine and they end up broken up or divorced. Often, the injured party will speak up and tell the other that something happened that was bad for them. A relationship partner skilled at empathy and validation will listen to what happened to the other person, and then speak and act in a manner which repairs the unintended wound to their partner. And if that same relationship partner is skilled at practicing mindful consideration of others’ needs, they will take measures to avoid delivering the same experience to their partner in the future. This is how trust is formed, and trust is the single-most important ingredient in relationships. People who will not do the work of repair are often deemed non-trustworthy by the injured person. “Either they’re hurting me on purpose, or they’re hurting me by accident, but either way they’re hurting me, and even when I speak up about it, nothing ever changes.”

2.       Reparation and healing of old wounds, large and small.

A lot of the people I speak with (usually men, if we’re being all-the-way honest about it) are extremely frustrated, angry, sad, and confused by their relationship partner’s tendency to rattle off the list of all of the incidents in which they’ve felt wronged in recent memory. One of my guys called it “The Shame Roll,” which made me laugh.

I was just like these guys. Still am, when I’m not careful. The thinking goes: I cannot believe she sits around with this laundry list of things she’s upset about. I don’t even know what it’s like to be that petty or to hold a grudge for so long. I can hardly remember all of the things she’s done or said over the years that sucked for me. I’m not like that. I let things go. I wish she had the decency to treat me the same. It’s so unfair.

Of course, there’s the other perspective. The one I’ve come to embrace in my years post-divorce and encourage you to do as well.

I’m not making these things up. I was actually, legitimately hurt by those things that happened in the past. And he STILL does things that feel a lot like that. Any time I try to speak up for myself, he acts confused how I could feel the way that I do. Either, he’s gaslighting me to be manipulative and hurt me even more, OR he honestly doesn’t understand—but after all of these years together it’s getting harder and harder to believe that he just doesn’t get it. When I’m hurt by something, I let him know—I’m not sure how else he’s supposed to know if he honestly doesn’t realize it. But instead of him being grateful that I’m telling him something important that he might not be aware of, he responds as if I’M the bad guy. As if I’m doing something wrong. I’m just asking him to help me not hurt anymore. And if he doesn’t think I should believe or feel the things that I do, he’s always implying that I’m wrong, stupid, crazy, weak, hypersensitive, overreacting, or otherwise tells me to stop blaming him for my hurt feelings since he didn’t do anything wrong. Nothing ever gets repaired. Nothing ever gets better. How many more years should I live like this?

The Art of Repair

Repair begins first and foremost with validation. People in pain don’t require our agreement to feel whatever pain they feel. Our first mistake often begins with us believing that the other person shouldn’t think or feel the way that they do about something, and then we speak and behave accordingly.

There’s nothing inherently bad or evil about that. It’s just a surefire way to never repair the accidental damage that accrues in relationships, which will doom two people to breaking apart slowly.

Becoming skilled at relationship repair must start with that mindset shift.

I believe the simplest way to think about it is this: In relationships, one partner MUST be able to go to the other and tell them that something is wrong. That they’re having a problem. And then, for trust and intimacy to remain in the relationship, the other partner must respond in a way that indicates they listened, that they care, that they’re trying to understand the problem the other partner is having, and that they’re committed to helping their partner not continue to have that same problem moving forward.

That’s not usually what happens. Usually, it’s another shit-show argument in the kitchen.

The entry-level relational and repair skill is Validation. And what that can help a person do is repair the accidental wounds that pop up here and there in our busy, distracted lives in which we are not always perfect at anticipating other people’s wants and needs in relationships.

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But the most important repair work lives in The Shame Roll. The really critical repair work will always be in that inconvenient list of past transgressions—regardless of whether we agree with the other person that we did anything wrong.

The list of past wrongs is the list of wounds most need of repair.

If there’s enough pain and betrayal trauma that’s built up over the years, repair can sometimes prove impossible. The hurt person will simply never trust the most vulnerable parts of themselves to someone who has hurt them repeatedly for many years with seemingly no interest in repairing whatever damage was done. (Which is exactly what my ex-wife concluded about me before ending our marriage and driving away more than 10 years ago.)

If I had to summarize what’s changed most about me from when I was unintentionally napalming my marriage in my twenties to the marginally wiser and more mature person I am now (at age 44), it would be my ability to consider how someone who is not me might have experienced or interpreted some random life event, or perhaps specifically something that they witnessed me do or say.

I don’t think there’s a better way to say it than this: People’s experiences will vary.

Penicillin has been saving lives for decades. But it nearly killed me the only time I’ve had it, so now doctors won’t give it to me anymore.

Some people eat pimento cheese sandwiches. On purpose because they believe they’re delicious. Then there’s the rest of us.

There are endless examples (food allergies are among my favorite ones) demonstrating how the same set of circumstances can produce radically different results for different people. Keeping this top of mind, and not judging other people’s experiences as “wrong” simply because they’re different than our own (as I implied with the pimento cheese sandwich example) is the basis on which meaningful validation, consideration, and repair work can be done in healthy relationships.

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Final thought: For most of my life, I believed that conflict in relationships was always bad. That pain was always bad. But I was mistaken. Pain typically makes us more resilient and less fragile. But even more importantly per today’s topic, the repair process in relationships results in making them more resilient.

I used to run away from fights with my wife, because I was tired of having so many uncomfortable conversations I didn’t want to have and never felt able to navigate. But today, I understand the value of repair.

Today, I want to lean into the temporary discomfort to repair any accidental damage that may have been caused, knowing that in doing so, I am strengthening the relationship instead of further eroding trust by running away or avoiding the problem.

I made a short video about it a while ago, which you’re invited to check out here:

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Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.