We don’t relate to people as they are. We relate to them as they “should be.”

Those “shoulds” are a product of the dysfunction and trauma from our own childhood experiences, inherited family relating patterns, and cultural gender prescriptions.

It feels as if we know our long-term partner or our young adult child so well that we know what they think, what they feel, or how they will respond to our request.

We even have the audacity to think we know what they need better than they do.

We offer advice unsolicited, we nag about their habits, we spend days worrying about the choices they make for themselves, convinced that we know better.

The fact is, we don’t know anyone.

Many of us don’t even know ourselves.

If someone had told me back in 2010 who I am being in 2025, I’d have laughed (probably would have gotten really scared, too) and said: Never! That is SO NOT ME!

And yet, here I am in 2025, a version of me I never could imagine, feeling more aligned and at peace with myself than I ever have.

The identity I was attached to in 2010 could not possibly define all that I am.

Truly, my roles and identities today do not define all that I am either.

But because I thought the version of me in 2010 was my final version, I was closed to any possibility of change.

I was containing myself in a small cage.

The door of the cage was wide open.

But I didn’t know there was a door.

I didn’t know I had wings.

When we have a limited perception of ourselves, we’ll bring that same limiting perception into our relationships.

If we keep ourselves in a box, we’ll automatically stuff others into a box, too. And if they keep defying our stories about them, we’ll interpret it as betrayal.

When we think we know someone, we stop asking questions to learn about them.

If there is no new information allowed to flow, we cannot adjust our stories and actually see the person in front of us.

When we’ve stopped listening and being curious, and have become rigid in our assumptions, we are no longer relating with the other person. We relate to our own story about them.

And here’s what makes relating even more complex: when we relate to our partners from our story about them, they then unconsciously adapt to and respond to that story.

Our relationships become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As an example, when I related to my husband as my knight and protector, he showed up in a way that proved my assumptions. When I started perceiving him as “less than,” he again gave me plenty of evidence to confirm my projections.

Today, I make a conscious effort to focus on all the ways that my husband has been by my side through the ups and downs of over three decades we’ve been together.

There are plenty of things that irritate me, too. Living with a messy human will do that. But these days, I accept that I am a messy human, too. I also know that when I make a mistake, I’d like compassion and understanding from my partner, rather than judgment and shaming.

These days, I give myself a choice to focus on what actually serves me, while always checking with myself: Who do I want to be in this relationship? How do I want to feel in my life and my relationships?

Real relating is a moment-by-moment exchange of information picked up by our central nervous system.

Of course, when we are disconnected from our bodies, frozen in a post-trauma state, we do not always have access to that stream of information.

We end up relating from the mental projections instead.

We attach to specific images of what life should look like, and hold on to particular identities and prescribed behavioral codes, even if they haven’t served us for generations.

We relate by projecting, calculating, manipulating, and expecting, as we judge our relationship partners on the basis of the story we’ve created about them in our mind.

We’ve replaced desire, curiosity, listening, and seeing with repetition of old inherited stories of our own making.

That is why so many of us feel stuck in relationships: we are stuck in our own spin.

The biggest breakthroughs in my life and in my work with clients happen when we are willing to change the lens of perception from mental projections to actual listening by including our body in it.

Our experience happens in our body. Often we automatically attach a story about why we feel the way we feel by focusing on the person in whose presence we feel it.

This is actually how self-abandonment happens: I feel this big uncomfortable feeling in my body, but instead of learning how to be with it and let it speak to me of my unmet needs, my mind goes into a familiar spin about my husband or my parents or patriarchy. And there we go—leaving the present moment and being stuck in the past wounding, just like we did as children: blaming ourselves, punishing, hurting, judging.

The way to interrupt the automatic self-abandonment is to learn to stay with the actual sensations in our body.

Resist the temptation to spin the stories of the mind and actually try to locate where the sensation resides in your body.

Put your hand there. Send attention and loving thoughts. Become the doting, attentive, and attuned parent to your inner child that your parents couldn’t be for you.

When you learn to listen to what your feelings tell you about your needs, you can then step into agency to try to fill them. That means you’ll learn to feel your boundaries and become okay with asking for help. When you understand your needs, you can be specific in your requests, so that people who would love to help you can actually do that.

You can also start learning how to prepare your nervous system to hold more capacity. This will help you see how loved you already are and actually let the love in.

When you get to know yourself intimately, you will see how much there is still to know about you. You will then be able to see that about your partner—hopefully!

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