The Stages of Building a Healthy Relationship
BY ESIN PINARLI, LCSW, MCAP
In school, you learned home economics, algebra, and biology, but you likely were never taught how to build healthy relationships. Although relationships are the one thing that will be a constant in your life from birth to death, no one truly ever learns what it takes to be in a healthy one.
We are wired for connection and therefore relationships are essential to survive in the world. The skill of relationship building (interpersonal effectiveness) can be developed by learning how to actively listen, mirror, validate and empathize as a friend, partner, colleague or family member.
Let’s dive deeper into where we learn about relationships, how our childhoods affect our relationships today, and how we can cultivate relationships that will withstand the test of time (and conflict).
How do we learn to build a healthy relationship?
Because there’s no class for this, we pick up cues from the people around us about what constitutes a healthy relationship. Your very first relationship was with your parents (or primary caregivers). In this relationship, you build your attachment, your understanding of how to relate to another person, your boundaries, and so much more.
You also had a front-row seat to the very first romantic relationship in your life. In a perfect world, viewing this relationship from a distance would have prepared you to have your very own romantic relationships in the future. When you’re the product of a healthy relationship, you get to witness a romantic model of love, reciprocation, communication, and intimacy.
Unfortunately, for most of us, these first relationships didn’t build the healthy foundation that we needed. Before we get much further, I want to remind you that this is not a place to blame or shame your parents or caregivers. They were likely doing the best they could with what they had and how they were parented. Looking through the lens of these first relationships, with their flaws and mistakes, we can begin to understand how we view relationships as a whole and understand what changes need to occur to move towards a secure base.
Even if our parents had a wonderful relationship - or if we saw a wonderful relationship modeled elsewhere - there’s still a lot we can’t know, because our perceptions might not be accurate and we may still lack the skills to develop and emulate a secure relationship. How does something like this get built?
How does our childhood affect our adult relationships?
Let’s start with your relationship with your parents or primary caregivers. This one relationship will determine so much in how you relate to others, yourself, and the world around you. What was your connection and attunement to your primary caregivers like? Did Mom and Dad (or whoever raised you) hold your internal world and allow you to explore it safely? Were they curious about it and able to help you cultivate or nurture what you were interested in or excited about? Attachment theory informs how we connect with our primary caregivers, which is a deeply impactful and profound emotional and psychological experience. It shapes what you think love is and how you give and receive it.
If there wasn’t enough connection and attunement with Mom and Dad, or if it was inconsistent (they were there for us at certain times but checked out at others), we form an insecure attachment that shows up in our romantic relationships. Realizing that these connections are tied leads to a world of self-understanding.
We see ourselves through our parents’ eyes when we’re young, and then as we get a bit older, we start to individuate, meaning recognize that we’re separate entities. During that time, though, we engage in magical thinking. This means that when our parents are not giving us attention or love, or we don’t feel safe because they’re neglecting, abusing, or ignoring us, we become confused and internalize that it must mean something about us. We assume we’re bad or unlovable. We even egocentrically tend to blame ourselves for our parents’ fights that have nothing to do with us. It’s chaotic to our nervous system, and we tell ourselves a story to make sense of it since we don’t quite yet have the capacity to cognitively understand what is happening.
It’s good to get an understanding of our own fear stories and core wounds, considering how our primary attachments play into them. We all have an unconscious image of love that we’ve witnessed and assumed is correct. Disconfirming these beliefs takes work with corrective new experiences, but they have to occur in a safe and compassionate place.
When we become more curious about ourselves by going inward, we can start to explore where our ideas and assumptions are rooted. The goal isn’t to live in the past, but it’s to have a clear narrative that helps us understand why we’re acting a certain way by making the subconscious conscious. This opens us up to more corrective experiences with safe, consistent, and available people. When we’re safe in our own bodies, we can be less reactive in our relationships.
The four stages of all relationships
Most relationships begin with a Honeymoon Phase in which our partner can do no wrong. We idealize them because there are so many chemicals being released in our body, and this cocktail including dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin can last anywhere from one month to three years. When you’re in this bubble, you see your partner through rose-colored glasses and even the wrongs they commit might feel cute to you or are more tolerable - because you love them so much. This phase is marked by infatuation that clouds us. It’s intoxicating. It’s wonderful. It's idealistic. But we must understand that this is not where a relationship will live for the length of it.
When this cocktail wears off, you start to see things you may not have noticed before. You realize that your partner is a real human being with flaws. This is when the power struggle phase begins. Your partner starts getting on your nerves or not doing what you want them to do, or not loving you in the way you need to be loved. This phase makes it feel like you’re incompatible, and the relationship is going downhill. This stage of conflict, though, is happening to create growth to bring you to the next stage. We must understand that conflict is there to create the ability to repair. In this stage, notice how you fight. Are you fighting dirty? Criticizing? Putting them down? Getting defensive? Stonewalling? Giving the silent treatment and walking away? Our efforts should be pointed at staying present and trying to work through the conflict to reach a proper resolution in which our partner feels validated, seen and understood.
Most people jump ship in the power struggle phase. Oftentimes, the conflict is an indication that the relationship isn’t working anymore and simply won’t go the distance. A lack of ease and harmony indicates something is wrong with the relationship. The truth is that love is work, and love is a choice. If you choose to work through it with that person, you’re more likely to get to the other stage, the best stage… but before many people get there, they find a new partner to begin the cycle with, only to find themselves here again.
If you choose to stay in the relationship, even through those hardest moments, you begin to move into the third stage or the intentional recommitment stage. In this relationship phase, you’re taking time to become more aware of yourself and your partner, recommit to one another and the relationship you’re building, and begin doing the work. What’s the work? The power struggle phase kicks up a lot of the dust that hasn’t been resolved from our past childhood experiences that shape us. Between our attachment style, fear story, embedded trauma, and implicit memories, a lot comes to the surface that we can either choose to begin healing or try to shove back down again. Doing the work is taking the time and space, often with the support of a therapist, to process the past. When that happens, we stop letting the past affect our present and are more capable to move on to the next stage.
Our aim should be to reach a secure, calm love where we see our partner as a unique individual that we’re able to feel safe with. This is the fourth and final stage, the conscious relationship stage. Here, we have a secure and romantic love where we’re partners in life. We can be honest and feel comfortable. Conflict is still inevitable, but you’re confident you can work through it. You find yourself accepting that a relationship isn’t 24/7 euphoria and that life comes with drudgery and responsibilities, but you still make the time to continue to grow together. In this stage, you’re deeply confident in your partner. The power struggle phase made you stronger. The conflict helped you grow. You put in the work to build a sustainable relationship with stability.
What makes up a healthy relationship?
A healthy relationship is marked by the ability to have conflict and resolution. If there’s a rupture (like an argument), you should be able to talk it through without hitting below the belt, name-calling, criticizing, or getting defensive. Repair, though, is what creates intimacy. When you can work through something even though you disagree (since you’re two different people - which is called individuation), you grant your partner the respect of seeing them as existing apart from you. You’re not going to be twins and agree on everything. Disagreement is not a sign of incompatibility.
It’s extremely difficult to keep yourself from being activated in heated moments. This is why it’s important to cultivate a healthy dialogue that doesn’t create more damage to the foundation of the relationship or builds more resentment.
Another marker of a healthy relationship is the ability to be honest with each other and express your needs. When you’re transparent with your partner, it’s easier to help them understand what you really need. People aren’t mind readers. They may think they’re doing a great job in the relationship while you silently build a case that says otherwise. If you’re honest as things come up in the relationship, you have a better chance of repairing ruptures. Your partner needs to hold space for your vulnerability in order to create that safety. Relationships with more connection have more intimacy and end up being the types of relationships that people long for.
Why do relationships fail?
There are a couple of indicators that signal that changes are needed in the partnership. Being hyper-focused and preoccupied with your partner and making them your whole world is never a great recipe for success. It’s important to have other hobbies and interests, or you begin to let go of all the characteristics about yourself that made your partner attracted to you in the beginning.
Additionally, the inability to push through conflict (which I wrote about in detail above) and see it for what it is, prevents partners from forming long lasting, secure relationships. The core of the message is this: people come into relationships with baggage. It’s our own stories and core beliefs that we all have. Oftentimes in conflict, our partner isn’t intentionally trying to hurt us. They’re just communicating in a way that triggers us because it might remind us of how our dad yelled at us or our mom criticized us, or any other familiar chaos in our family dynamic. Our nervous system goes into a defensive mode, and we may unconsciously lash out in anger. The way we communicate with each other is what creates disconnection, not the conflict itself.
Ways to help your relationship become healthier!
Working on having a healthy relationship with someone else is rooted in having a healthy relationship with yourself - and therapy is a wonderful gateway to deepen your self-understanding. Another suggestion is to lean into healthy conflict. I see many couples who are experiencing disconnection but haven’t really fought, so it doesn’t seem like there’s actual conflict until you look beneath the surface. If you’re a human being, you have a vast array of emotions and a rich internal world. If you’re not engaging in the relationship, it means you’re sweeping things under the rug, ignoring them, or pretending everything is fine. Meanwhile, you’re creating disconnection, and there’s no communication about what might be bothering you and what you may need. This creates a lack of intimacy and fulfillment.
Don’t be afraid to say what you think and feel. Humans don’t do well with repression or compartmentalization. Dissociating from your feelings doesn’t mean you’re not feeling them. A lack of conflict can actually be troublesome in a relationship because it doesn’t allow any further growth or an expression of your authentic self. Healing ruptures create intimacy and closeness. Don’t be afraid of it, and be confident that your relationship will still be okay.
My last tip is to learn emotional self-regulation. Self-soothing allows you not to be reactive and chaotic but instead calm yourself down. You may have witnessed caretakers who didn’t know how to self-soothe or emotionally self-regulate, which meant they likely couldn’t hold your internal world, either. How can you expect not to be a reactive person in an emotionally charged situation when you don’t have the tools to know anything different? Knowing how to soothe yourself begins by remembering moments when someone else (even a pet) helped to coregulate your nervous system with you. Feel into those glimmers of safe connection. With time, you’ll start to feel more comfortable in your own skin and safer in your own body (creating a felt sense of internal safety).
Healthy relationships do not come with a guidebook. They take work, commitment, and dedication - but they are the vehicles through which we can heal a world of wounding and come to know ourselves to find fulfillment. If there’s one key point to take away, it’s that we should embrace our individuality and bring our full selves to the table - including our childhoods, our wounds, and our fears - as honestly and authentically as possible. It is only in doing so that we will discover the power of a relationship to show us lasting and true love and acceptance.