There Is One Domino, Most People Never Touch It
Written by Jessica Gutierrez Gaytan, learn more at https://restoringharborcounseling.com
Unpopular Opinion: Your Relationship Is the Strategy
Think about the last time you really wanted to feel like yourself again. Maybe you signed up for the gym, started waking up earlier, threw yourself deeper into your work and told yourself that when you got there, when things slowed down, when you had more to show for it, you would finally feel better. Or maybe you started individual therapy and things are going really well but you still feel like something is missing.
I am here to tell you something that goes against what most people believe. Your relationship is one of the biggest investments you can make into actually discovering yourself. I say this for a couple of reasons, and before you jet, hear me out.
Let me take you back a few decades to when codependency emerged in the eighties, which was rooted in the experience of people enabling addiction and unhealthy relational patterns. Since then, culture has slowly moved away from any version of dependency at all. We have externalized everything instead. Self-help books, individual therapy, specialists, careers, achievements, the next promotion, the next thing. Even now the word codependency is trending on TikTok, and it is framed as something to avoid entirely.
But what we have lost in moving away from unhealthy dependency is the possibility of healthy interdependence. The understanding that we actually need each other. That needing someone is not a flaw or a weakness, it is how we are built, and let me show you just how.
We Were Never Meant to Do This Alone
From birth, we seek connection. Dan Siegel, in The Whole-Brain Child, shows us how connection is a core part of our wiring as human beings from the moment we come home from the hospital. What is most rooted in us is physical and emotional connection to our primary attachments, and this does not stop after infancy. It carries through our entire life, and yet as a society we have placed such a high value on self sufficiency and independence that we have slowly stopped counting relationships as part of the equation at all, or how they could count toward our healing. Here is what is interesting about that; when we look at how we actually heal, we heal alongside others. We can see this in the Harvard Grant Study, one of the longest running studies on human happiness spanning over eight decades, which found that the number one predictor of life satisfaction and happiness is not wealth, career success, or achievement. It is the quality of our relationships. And yet we keep believing that careers, materialistic things, achievement, and success will prove our worth or better yet heal those wounds that have been there since long before any of it. Here are two examples of individuals who had it all, who went in search of individual healing, and who ended up on very different paths.
When Everything Works and Something Still Feels Empty
Chris Bumstead, six consecutive time winner of Mr. Olympia, is one of the most decorated classic physique bodybuilders in the world. By every external measure, he had arrived. And yet he has spoken openly about the anxiety, the emptiness, the feeling that even at the top something was still missing. Being fully seen and fully heard. So he began to work on his relationship.
Matthew Perry, most commonly known as Chandler from Friends, spent ten years as one of the most recognized faces on the planet. He was beloved by hundreds of millions of people who felt like they knew him. He spent much of that same season of his life in profound loneliness, addiction, and depression, as he wrote about in his book Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. He had the career, the fame, and the money, and yet one of his biggest desires he speaks on is turning back time to do relationships differently.
I share these because I think most of us recognize something in them even if our version is quieter and lives in smaller, more private moments. The Sunday evening feeling that something is off and you cannot quite name it. The achievement that finally arrived and still did not deliver the feeling you were working toward. The sense that you are building a life that looks right but does not quite feel like yours yet. Or everything looks great on the outside and your relationship is on the brink of divorce. You have achieved so much and you and your partner feel like roommates. Or you and your spouse are great but you do not feel fully seen or fully heard. That feeling is not a flaw in you. It is information that is pointing somewhere most of us are not looking.
The Voice That Fills the Space
When we do not have a secure relational home, a place where we are genuinely known and chosen without having to earn it, a small voice moves in. It is not always loud but it is relentless. And it sounds like: you have to work for this. You are too much. You are not enough. Keep shrinking, keep performing, keep proving, and maybe then you will deserve to be loved.
Here is what most people do not realize: that voice did not start in your relationship. It started long before that. We all grew up with a version of what love looked and felt like, and those early experiences quietly morphed into stories we carried into adulthood and eventually into our relationships. Stories that sound like I am not enough, I am too much, or if I just do this one more thing maybe then I will finally feel satisfied. And we do not always notice them running in the background, until something triggers them. Think about your triggered moments. What is the story that comes up when your partner gives you feedback, when someone rejects you, when something goes wrong at work. That story did not come from nowhere.
Brené Brown does a phenomenal job of showing how naturally and quickly these stories take over even when we know better. In Rising Strong she shares a story about a lake vacation with her husband Steve where he goes quiet and she immediately starts spinning a narrative in her head about what his distance means, what it says about her, what it confirms about the relationship. And she is Brené Brown. It still happened to her. Because this is not a personal failure or a sign that something is uniquely broken in you. It is just what the brain does. The brain would rather be right than happy. It will search out confirmation of its existing story about who you are even when that story is causing you harm.
And when your relationship is not one of the places we are being intentional, where we do not have the skills to better understand the story, or we do not even know what story is being confirmed, this relationship also cannot be the safe launching place. It cannot be the place that heals what was once broken. And we end up more stable than secure.
This relationship is the opportunity to be fully known, fully seen, and fully supported. If are not experiencing that right now, there is absolutely no shame. You just did not have this information. What you now know is that the number one predictor of life happiness is the quality of our relationships, shown across eight decades by the Harvard Grant Study.
Relationships are risky, because it feels uncomfortable to be fully known for all of these stories and to share them out loud. I had a client sit across my couch one time, very embarrassed to share the story that was coming up for him. I encouraged him to share and when he finally did he said "it is that I am not likable." He was brave, oh so brave. His partner was able to truly and deeply understand that he had always felt lovable but not likable, and that is one of the most vulnerable things I have ever witnessed, because it was raw and it was a wound created in childhood. His partner met him there and was able to speak directly into that story. So many of us know it is not really about the dishes or the laundry, it is about being fully seen and heard.
The Domino
Here is the unpopular opinion that begins to question the way culture shifted in the eighties. It is one of the biggest dominos that can diminish self-worth, careers, success, and happiness is your relationship. Hear me out before you begin throwing tomatoes, I am not saying it is the only thing. Think about it this way, isn’t it helpful when a doctor goes beyond your symptoms and connects the dots, showing you how everything is related? That is what we are doing here. Individual work, personal growth, your own deep healing, all of that matters enormously and I will never suggest otherwise. What I am saying is that relationships are part of the equation just as much as the self work.
Brené Brown writes in Daring Greatly that the willingness to show up changes us, that it makes us a little braver each time. She talks about going into the arena, being willing to be uncomfortable, to be seen, to risk failing in the open. What I want to add to that is this: it is so much easier to keep going back into the arena when you have a secure place to land on the other side. Better yet, it is healing to have someone in the arena with you that continues to help you up and bandage the wounds that happened long ago. Together you heal your current self as well as the little version of you running around with twenty year old wounds.
What is broken in a relationship is repaired in a relationship. When that repair starts to happen, when real safety gets built between two people, the other things begin to move in ways they could not before. Not because the relationship solved everything but because our nervous system finally had somewhere safe to land.
One Last Thing
Before you go, I want you to write a couple of things down. I want you to write down what emotions come up for you as I ask you the following, and maybe even the thoughts that come with them.
What would be possible in your life if the story that you are not enough could change?
How would it feel to actually be known, to be seen, to be heard by the person you have the most to lose with?
What is something you have always dreamed of for yourself that would completely shift if your partner or someone important in your life was right there with you supporting it?
Does all of this feel risky? Does it feel scary?
Good. You matter and your story matters.
We know that the Harvard researchers who spent eight decades studying what makes a life feel full found the same thing over and over. People do not wish they had achieved more. They wish they had let the people they loved actually know them. They wish they had done this work sooner. Ultimately this is the relationship you spend thousands of hours of your life in. You are reading this now. That means you still have time to push that domino.
Resources
Blue, J. V. (2024). Relationship Theory Model.
Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Gotham Books.
Brown, B. (2015). Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. Spiegel & Grau.
Levine, A., & Heller, R. (2010). Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find and Keep Love. Tarcher/Penguin.
Perry, M. (2022). Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir. Flatiron Books.
Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind. Delacorte Press.
Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Harvard University Press.
Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. Simon & Schuster.