The Real Us

Becoming More of Who We Are, Together

Creating Relationships Where Both Partners Continue Coming More Alive

Most of us enter our significant relationships wanting many of the same things: love, companionship, intimacy, security, understanding, and the experience of sharing our lives with someone we deeply care about. All of these are truly important. But there is another unique possibility available within relationship that is less often recognized—and worthy of harvest.

Our relationships can become one of the most powerful environments for transformation with each partner continually becoming more of who they are.

What Do I Mean by Transformation?

Transformation is different from change.

We change things all the time. We change our behavior, develop better habits, learn new communication skills, and make adjustments in response to the circumstances of our lives.

This process is captured beautifully by the familiar metamorphosis of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly. A butterfly is not simply an improved caterpillar. The caterpillar doesn’t learn to crawl faster, become more attractive, or develop better caterpillar skills. Its entire form reorganizes, and possibilities become available that could not have existed within its previous form.

Once transformed, it can actually fly.

 

Human transformation has something of this quality.

Psychologically, transformation involves fundamental changes in our consciousness—in our identity, our assumptions, our perceptions, and the patterns through which we experience ourselves and other people. We don’t simply learn to behave differently. Over time, we become capable of experiencing and responding to life from wildly new places within ourselves.

At an even deeper level, transformation can be understood as emergence.

Something that has existed within us as potential becomes increasingly conscious, embodied, and expressed. From this perspective, transformation is not primarily about fixing what is wrong with us or constructing a better version of ourselves. It is about becoming increasingly capable of accessing and living from who we most deeply are.

Relationship as a Catalyst for Transformation

This brings us to a very different understanding of intimate relationship.

Most approaches to relationship emphasize how to make relationships work: communicating effectively, resolving conflict, meeting one another’s needs, rebuilding trust, maintaining intimacy, and creating a satisfying life together.

A transformational relationship emerges when the partnership itself becomes a living entity for the continuing emergence of both partners—for opening to new levels of aliveness and fulfillment.

Love and intimacy become more than sources of comfort, security, and belonging. They also become catalysts through which we can become more self-aware, more authentic, more fully expressed, and ultimately more capable of sharing our love.

This happens partly because intimate relationship offers something quite unique: it brings us face-to-face with all aspects of ourselves. The person closest to us will inevitably touch places within us that no one else can reach quite as easily—including places within us that we ourselves have not been aware of. Our deepest hopes and longings come alive in relationship—but so do our fears, defenses, shame, wounds, expectations, and strategies for protecting ourselves.

In an ordinary understanding of relationship, these moments can appear to be evidence that something has gone wrong. Within a transformational relationship, they can become entryways to new levels of maturity and intimacy.

 

Here’s a personal example:

This past weekend Joy and I were cleaning and clearing out our garage, an annual fall tradition that includes putting into storage all our summer equipment and pulling out our winter gear. As we did, Joy found herself desiring to keep a large cardboard box for storing framed pictures that we used when we moved into our home 18 months ago.

As we both value simplicity and organization, and are planning to live in our new home for years to come without the need for moving supplies, I couldn’t comprehend why she wanted to keep and store this box. It struck me as irrational. We were clearly relating to this decision from very different perspectives, and I noticed myself beginning to get agitated. As our conversation continued, the tense energy between us began rising along with my impatience. I was struck by my emotional reaction to Joy, and thankfully in that moment I recalled some wise words from my spiritual teacher, “Would you rather be in the right—or be in the loving?”

I immediately saw that I was holding a position about the box,. I began softening and apologized to Joy for my impatience. In her response, she shared her inner experience, of wrestling with a painful memory of regret and loss. About 5 years prior, she had acquiesced to her partner’s pressure and mistakenly let go of quite a few possessions that, it turns out, she truly treasured and was still missing. She had not been true to herself and for her the cost was high.

I was touched by her tenderness and deeply painful memory, and we both continued softening with each other. Amazingly, I then found myself resolute in not wanting to let go of the box. Soon thereafter, I found a creative place to store it.

This was an ordinary, small moment in our lives, yet an undeniable opportunity to increase my awareness and make a wise choice towards love that brought forward a memorable, sweet memory between us (which I will reconnect with every time I’m in the garage and see that cardboard box).

We Are Not Here to Transform Each Other

I’ve learned that there is an important paradox at the heart of a transformational relationship. We do not transform our partners. In fact, attempting to change, fix, manage, or improve the other person can become one of the greatest obstacles to genuine transformation. Instead, two people learn to create the conditions in which transformation becomes possible.

Joy and I have discovered that it is essential in our relationship to carefully tend to the relational space between us—the space where BOTH of our realities can be honored and tended to as equally valuable.

For us, that means continually learning some fundamental relationship skills:

• how to hold acceptance without collusion

• honesty without attack

• vulnerability without loss of self

• challenge without control

• commitment without requiring either of us to stop evolving

This is a very different relational understanding and agreement to play by—beyond competition, control and a desire to be “right.” More importantly, when things go astray between us, this day-to-day practice consistently leads both of us back to the sacred presence of our love.

Here’s are examples of how you can approach your partner in a transformational relationship with thoughts and words like…

• “I can love and accept you as you are while also being honest about my experience with you. “

• “I can listen deeply to your experience without abandoning my own.”

• “I can become curious about what is being activated within me rather than automatically making you responsible for my emotional upset.”

 

From Trigger to Transformation

Over 40 years of facilitating couples therapy, I’ve discovered again and again that every enduring intimate relationship eventually encounters recurring unconscious patterns.

One partner withdraws while the other pursues. One becomes defensive while the other becomes increasingly critical. One fears abandonment; another fears being controlled. Old experiences of rejection, inadequacy, mistrust, scarcity, or not being heard can suddenly become intensely alive in the present moment with our partner.

When we are unconscious of these patterns, we tend to experience our partner as the cause of what we are feeling. But something different becomes possible when we learn to recognize that our partner may be triggering an experience without necessarily being its original source. The relationship then becomes a truly safe space where previously unconscious material becomes conscious and be acknowledged.

This dynamic process is actually an integral part of all successful relationships—IF both partners are sincerely committed to awareness and transformation.

This does not mean tolerating harmful behavior or explaining away genuine problems. Nor does it mean that every conflict is merely our own psychological material. It means that:

This essential distinction creates remarkable levels of freedom.

Instead of simply reenacting an old pattern together over and over, we can begin to relate consciously to the opportunity for inner healing and awakening that our relationship patterns are revealing.

 

The Emergence of the “We”

Over time, as a committed relationship traverses through terrain of surfacing and bringing healing to each partner’s unconscious material, there is an additional dimension of transformation that goes beyond this individual development.

Over years of conscious partnership, a healthy, mature relationship develops greater capacities for honesty, resilience, trust, intimacy, freedom, creativity, and love.

As this occurs, something quite profound begins to develop BETWEEN us. There is “me.” There is “you.” And there is also the “we” that we are creating together….a unique shared field of consciousness all its own.

This sacred relational field of “we” becomes something neither person could have created alone. This is one of the greatest blessings of committed partnership over time. We are not simply trying to preserve the relationship we originally created. We are allowing the relationship of “we”to evolve as both partners evolve.

The relationship we have today is not the one we had when we first met. Nor will our shared relational field be the same five or ten years from now.

A Different Purpose for Relationship

It is empowering to recognize that the liberating experience of transformation in relationships can extend far beyond romantic partnership. These higher principles and dynamics actually apply to our relationships with our children, friends, colleagues, communities, and even to the ways we lead and serve others. An applied transformational perspective affords greater depth and closeness.

Yet, it is a committed romantic relationship over time that offers an especially powerful laboratory of awareness because of its depth of intimacy, attachment, vulnerability, and time invested. Perhaps, then, the deepest distinction is this:

A healthy, mature relationship brings tenderness, pleasure, companionship, sexuality, laughter, communication, and the simple enjoyment of sharing a life together. Over the last 3 1/2 years of being blessed to be a part of my committed partnership with Joy, this transformational process has supported me in deepening into my roots—as a soul and as a man—in extraordinary ways that continue to astonish me.

Yet it is this distinctive dimension of engaged co-transformation that continues to reveals ever-new levels of our depth and aliveness to be celebrated…together.

 

With heartfelt blessings to you and all your relationships, Gavin