The Big Upgrade

About a year ago, my marriage faced an existential crisis. My dynamic with my husband had degraded to the point that it no longer worked for me. I had promised him during another low point in 2019 that we wouldn’t make a decision to separate without doing certain work on our relationship. I wanted to confront our challenges as an embodied, best version of us rather than from a reactive nadir. It was also important to me to be able to tell our three kids that we really did everything we could before making a decision with such significant consequences for their lives.

The work, as I saw it, entailed a few distinct things. The first was addressing our respective pasts — our childhoods, our prior relationships, our own 17 year history — in order to understand their impact on our relationship. The second encompassed learning best practices and upgrading our relational skills, which we had been doing cursorily but never comprehensively. The third involved putting into place good relational hygiene: rituals and practices on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis that would maintain the health of our relationship.

I put the Denizen podcast on hold and stopped working entirely for a quarter to give my full attention to my partnership. I devoured over a dozen books. We started working with multiple therapists. What I uncovered was eye opening and humbling. There were many things we were doing completely wrong, classic patterns that lead to a relationship’s eventual demise. Behaviors we thought were entirely reasonable, normal, just the way one behaves in the world. Since I emerged from that period, I’ve had so many conversations about what I’ve learned. It was clear a series of blog posts were in order.

This first post summarizes the books I read and other content I found valuable. I outline key points, major takeaways, and what resources I’d recommend for anyone looking to have an enduring, thriving partnership. Subsequent posts will dive deeper into critical insights I gleaned along the way. All links are to Bookshop.org, my preferred source for physical books as it supports small bookshops rather than large conglomerates.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John Gottman and Nan Silver and Fight Right, by John and Julie Gottman

If you familiarize yourself with nothing else, you should understand the work of John Gottman. For nearly thirty years, the Gottman Institute has been leading the field in research on love and relationships. In a 1992 study of 52 married couples, Gottman predicted with 94% accuracy whether they would be married three years later, based on interviews and observing them in a challenging conversation for fifteen minutes.

Published in 1999 The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is really a must read, and if I’m forced to recommend a single book, this one is it. It comprehensively covers the Gottman Institute’s findings, distilling them into best practices for romantic partnerships. The punchline is straightforward: two things are essential. The first is maintaining a strong friendship and alongside it day to day behaviors that keep the relationship in a good place. That sets you up for the second: addressing conflict in a way that creates connection and upgrades the relationship, rather than disconnection and degradation. The latter is truly do or die when it comes to partnership. It turns out if you don’t have the competence to repair when one of you gets upset, you’re setting yourself up for a slow and steady demise. This dynamic and its impact on our nervous systems is what Gottman’s research picks up on in those fateful fifteen minutes.

Fight Right is a very recent publication (January 2024) that Gottman wrote with his wife Julie. It regurgitates much of the core content in Seven Principles, but through the frame of improving how couples resolve conflict. Given how essential this particular skill is, this book yields a lot of bang for the buck. It may be a better call than Seven Principles if you are time constrained and conflict resolution is a clear issue to address. Notably, this is a valuable read not just for couples who find themselves in a perpetual state of strife, but also for those who avoid conflict. Conflict avoidance is a particularly pernicious habit because unaddressed hurt can lead to unfavorable narratives that distort how we perceive our partners.

The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need To Know To Make Love Work and Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship by Terrance Real

Though Gottman is essential and what I recommend first and foremost, Terrance Real’s The New Rules of Marriage was the most impactful of all of the books I read. If you are already familiar with The Gottman Institute’s findings, this is hands down my top recommendation.

In The New Rules, Real diagnoses the issue as a mismatch of expectations and strategies. He argues the expectations of marriage have shifted in the 21st century: from companionship to deeper levels of emotional intimacy, support, and romance. Alongside this we employ relationship strategies that do not give us the love we want and deserve: either disempowered 20th century strategies of compliance or liberated 21st century strategies that over-emphasize individual over collective needs.

In his practice over nearly three decades, Real observed five losing strategies that caused the demise of marriage: needing to be right, controlling your partner, unbridled self-expression, retaliation, and withdrawal. “Would you rather be right, or would you rather be married?” is a quote of Real’s I reference all the time. “There is no place for objective reality in personal relationships,” is another great one. Real goes on to say “in intimate relationships, it’s never a matter of landing on the one true reality, but rather of negotiating differing subjective realities.”

For what it’s worth, this was the part of the book that was most transformative for me: I suddenly understood that behaviors we had been doing reflexively for years were actually incredibly corrosive. It explained why our attempts to repair had so often resulted in disconnection despite what we thought were exceptional communication skills. It helped shine a light on why our open marriage was wreaking so much havoc on our connection.

Real then outlines the new rules, delineating five winning strategies for modern marriage: shifting from complaint to request, speaking out with love and savvy, responding with generosity, empowering each other, and cherishing.

There’s a lot there but two big ah-has for me worth noting. First, with respect to the shift from complaint to request, Real talks about being positive, forward thinking vs. negative, backward thinking. Rather than complaining about the past with a negative frame, focus on what you want in the future with a positive one. Moreover, make the request specific and tangible, rather than abstract, so your partner knows exactly what you want them to do.

Real also outlines a feedback wheel, which supports couples in resolving conflict. There’s a lot here that parallels non-violent communication, but with an addition that I found particularly illuminating. In NVC we learn to state the observable facts “you said / did this,” your feelings “I felt this,” the universal human need from which the feeling sprung, and a request. By removing one’s interpretation of the event (which inevitably carries bias and judgment) and simply stating the facts, we stay in a safe zone that induces empathy and avoids defensiveness. Real’s feedback wheel adds a valuable step between the action and the feeling. You don’t avoid your interpretation, but you preface it with “What I made up about that was…” Doing so makes it clear that that story is biased and distorted, but enables your partner to better understand why that behavior led to that feeling. I found this to be a potent addition to NVC.

Like the second Gottman book, Us regurgitates a lot of the main concepts of The New Rules of Marriage. It’s a quick and worthwhile read if you have time for both. In it, Real focuses on the need to shift from a paradigm of me to we (or us), something that’s come up a lot in the Denizen inquiry. He touches on the emphasis on individualism that arose from the Enlightenment, principally concerned with rights and freedom over the health of the whole. This he feels sets up couples for escalating conflicts, which we know from Gottman spell doom for relationships. “Fairness is a trap,” Real writes, “Stop being centrally concerned with your rights… remember the wisdom of ecology, remember your biosphere.” “Relational consciousness is synonymous with ecological consciousness. It corrects the delusion of dominion and replaces it with the knowledge that we are not outside or above nature but rather live within its parts.” Alternatively put: harmony within our most intimate relationships is the air that we breathe, the water we swim in. If we don’t attend to our partner’s needs on par with our own, we both lose because the cost is disconnection. If I had to make a list of my top five biggest learnings, this one would be one of them.

Us also integrates some nuance around how our unresolved trauma shows up in our relationships, distinguishing between the adaptive child and the wise adult. He gives many examples of his work with clients to heal the adaptive child and relate from the seat of the wise adult. Those familiar with internal family systems (IFS, described below) will recognize these concepts.

Hold Me Tight, by Sue Johnson

Sue Johnson’s Hold Me Tight emphasizes the role of attachment and emotional bonding in romantic love. Years as a couples therapist revealed that key negative and positive emotional moments defined relationships, leading her to develop Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) based on those critical interactions.

In short, she says “forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached and dependent on your partner in much the same way a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Adult attachments may be more reciprocal and less centered on physical contact, but the nature of the emotional bond is the same.”

EFT therefore focuses on establishing and maintaining this bond. The book is organized around seven conversations which allow couples to be attuned and responsive to each other’s emotional needs, which in turn creates a secure and lasting bond.

Johnson’s ideas are especially important for couples wading into the waters of consensual non-monogamy (CNM). One of the things I touched on in my initial CNM episode with Jessica Fern is the distinction between security that stems from structure (i.e. the fact you’re married, the ring, the shared life) and actual secure attachment. Secure attachment stems from your partner consistently meeting your attachment needs, which are primarily emotional. It’s a matter of lived experience creating trust, not promises to be together, till death do you part.

The reason Johnson’s ideas are so important for couples considering opening relationships is that it’s a highly emotionally sensitive space, meaning it’s very easy to compromise your partner’s emotional needs. If you couple the mindsets of individualism that Real discusses in Us with the distortions that occur with the neurochemistry of a new relationship, attachment ruptures can easily happen. This undermines the trust and security that are central to secure attachment and vital for CNM to work. Understanding Johnson’s ideas can support couples in maintaining the security of their bond while experimenting with non-monogamy.

No Bad Parts and You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For, by Richard Schwartz

Both No Bad Parts and You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For focus on Internal Family Systems (IFS), an increasingly popular psychotherapy modality I think it’s valuable to be familiar with.

Contrary to the dominant paradigm that there is just one you with a monomind, IFS views the individual as a system of parts that live alongside our core, capital S Self. Parts fall into three categories: exiles, protectors, and firefighters. Exiles are wounded parts which originated in traumatic events in our lives; many from early childhood in interactions with our parents. Schwartz calls them exiles because they are typically buried deep in our psyche, holding emotions that we never felt, expressed and processed. Protectors and firefighters are the parts of us that spring up alongside exiles in those traumatic moments. Protectors operate in the day to day, attempting to avoid feeling the original type of pain again (e.g. the inner critic, the people pleaser, the martyr). Firefighters show up in acute moments where exiles are triggered to ease the pain (the part of you that lashes out, or numbs out, or shuts down). The issue is the parts are stuck in time — the behaviors that the protectors and firefighters employ, which once served a valuable purpose, are now maladaptive. They are all trying to help us, they just don’t realize they’re hurting us instead.

Schwartz found in his practice that trying to suppress any of these parts of ourselves only results in an amplification of our maladaptive behaviors. Instead, through the IFS practices, we heal ourselves through honoring their desire to help us (hence the title, No Bad Parts). We do this though sitting in the seat of our higher Self, which is essentially our spiritual self or authentic self. It’s the part of us that remains calm, curious, compassionate, creative, connected, confident, clear, and courageous. In Real’s lingo, it is our Wise Self.

From the position of Self, we engage in a discourse with our parts. We explain to our protectors and exiles that we, Self, are the ones responsible for our behaviors. That we are competent and capable, and that their services are no longer needed. The real healing happens though, when we confront our exiles. They tell us the things we need to know about our traumatic experiences, expressing and releasing the emotions they’ve been holding for so long. They give us as Self an opportunity to witness their pain and offer them the unconditional love that they (we) did not receive from their parents. We assure them that we are here for them, that we will care for them, and that they are safe. Through IFS, then, we effectively learn to re-parent ourselves, heal our wounds, and release the trauma we’ve been carrying throughout our lives.

This framework then sets up Schwartz’s follow up book, You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For, which applies IFS to intimate relationships. He discusses how popular culture represents an unhealthy narrative where love saves us, where our partners provide the unconditional love we never received from our parents. This only sets us up for failure when inevitably, our partners disappoint us. When they let us down, we either try to change ourselves, try to change them, or withdraw.

Schwartz suggests instead that the only person who can provide us with the unconditional love we desire is ourselves (hence the title of the book). When we make that shift, we are able to love courageously from a more grounded, less codependent stance. Our partners become our tor-mentors, the mirror that reveals the parts of us needing to be healed.

Countless friends have used IFS to transform both themselves and their relationships. It’s very powerful to speak of a part of you instead of all of you, it helps your partner respond from a compassionate awareness of your wounds, rather than react when a part of them gets unwittingly triggered. Conflict, it turns out in Schwartz’s eyes, is often two people’s protectors going at each other.

IFS is a tremendously powerful modality, but it really requires working with a therapist which limits the standalone value of Schwartz’s books.

Wired for Love, Stan Tatkin

Wired for Love feels a little traditional relative to the rest, but so many friends swear by it I knew I had to familiarize myself with Tatkin’s work. The primary frame of Wired For Love is attachment theory, which is of course an essential concept to understand.

The idea is that our primary caregiver’s behavior towards us in our childhood imprinted a default in our attachment system, which affects our romantic relationships as adults. If our caretakers were consistently attentive and responsive, we formed a secure attachment. We felt safe to explore the world and return to our home base. If they were inattentive or inconsistent, we did one of two things. We either up-regulated our attachment system, needing more attention to feel safe, imprinting an anxious attachment style. Or, we down-regulated our attachment style, preferring to keep to ourselves, imprinting an avoidant attachment style. There is also a fourth, less common attachment style called disorganized, where people display both anxious and avoidant behaviors.

More than anything else, Wired for Love helps couples understand their attachment style and how it affects their relationships. For me the big takeaway from Wired For Love is that you really need to put your partner’s needs on par with your own, which is what Tatkin is getting at with his “couple bubble” concept. It resonates a lot with Real’s Us, and the need for an ecosystem orientation for best relational practices.

Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment, by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks

It took me a second try to get through this one, but I’m glad that I did. It starts out a bit out there, but gets more practical as it goes on. In it, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks articulate the distinction between co-dependence and co-commitment. To them co-dependence is an “agreement between two people to stay locked in unconscious patterns.”

They define a co-committed relationship as “one in which two or more people support each other in being whole, complete individuals. The commitment is to going all the way, to letting the relationship be the catalyst for the individual to express their full potential and creativity.”

Critically, according to them “a co-committed relationship can only exist between two whole people. One hallmark of wholeness is the ability to love yourself. In the realm of love, a paradox exists: you can effectively love others only when you can love yourself. If you cannot love yourself, you will try to fill the void of your own lack of self-love with the love of others. You will tend to demand from others what you cannot give yourself. It makes you a bottomless pit; no matter how much love they give, it is never enough. … We must all learn to give ourselves the love we want. Then other people can love us and it will feel satisfying because we are not filling a void. It becomes love dancing with itself.”

Two things struck me most from this book. Co-commitment 5: “I commit to acting from the awareness that I am 100 percent the source of my reality,” was truly life changing. The point here is that we can always spin a story that blames others and paints us as the victim, but that frame is completely counterproductive in our intimate relationships. Instead, we take full responsibility for our experience and examine our role in the outcomes that frustrate us. This shifts us from a stance of disempowerment to one of empowerment, we take accountability for our role in situations that do not serve us.

The second that has been enduring is the importance of telling the microscopic truth. That is, the objective facts and the things that you feel (not your stories, which are colored by your personal history and biases). Sharing yourself in this way fosters deep intimacy, which is a path to enduring love. It also avoids withholding, which leads to disconnection and the creation of a distorted view of your partner.

How To Do The Work and How To Be The Love You Seek by Nicole LaPera

Nicole LaPera has gained a massive following on Instagram (@holisticpsychologist), where I first discovered her work. I appreciate her holistic orientation, which integrates practices such as exercise, meditation, and healthy eating habits in her clinical approach.

How To Do The Work is her treatise on healing trauma. How To Be The Love You Seek reiterates many of the same points, illustrating how not doing the work adversely impacts our romantic lives. To be honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of Nicole’s writing style. I get a lot more out of her Instagram posts than I did out of these books.

There was one thing though, that really struck me, something I find myself repeating all the time. We’ve all heard the saying “you can only connect with someone to the extent you can connect with yourself.” Which always mostly landed with me. But in How To Be The Love You Seek, LaPera explained that if you don’t connect to yourself — i.e. you live disconnected from your feelings and your intuition, as many of us do — then there is no you to intimately reveal to your partner. Only you can experience yourself, from there you share your experiences and wisdom with the world. If you are disconnected from those things, it’s not possible to have true intimacy and deeply connect. That made the popular saying so much more potent for me.

All About Love by bell hooks

All About Love is one of my favorite books of all time, I’ve given it as a gift more than any other. After all the reading I’d done earlier in the year, I felt it was time to revisit this classic.

What is love, anyway? For all the energy we devote to it, for all the songs written and movies made about it, we don’t actually have a clear consensus on what it is. If anything, popular culture leads us astray, romanticizing love with its focus on the elation of the honeymoon period or the couple whose love overcomes all odds, only to ride off happily into the sunset.

In All About Love, hooks chooses a definition from M. Scott Peck’s classic self-help book The Road Less Traveled: love is “the will to extend oneself to nurture another’s spiritual growth.” Later she writes, “Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice.”

The book explores love from numerous angles: what we learn about it in our childhoods, the role of honesty, self-love, and the role of love in community, to name a few.

This one is really a must read, the chapter on self-love is perhaps the most essential. Echoing Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks, she writes, “Self-love is the foundation of our loving practice. Without it our other efforts to love fail. Giving ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from someone else. Whenever we interact with others, the love we give and receive is always necessarily conditional. Although it is not impossible, it is very difficult and rare for us to be able to extend unconditional love to others, largely because we cannot exercise control over the behavior of someone else and we cannot predict or utterly control our responses to their actions. We can give ourselves the unconditional ove that is the grounding for sustained acceptance and affirmation. When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack.”

Another of my favorite passages bears sharing here: “When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation for our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we chose to love. While we will necessarily behave differently depending on the nature of the relationship, or have varying degrees of commitment, the values that inform our behavior, when rooted in a love ethic, are always the same for any interaction.”

The Way Forward, Yung Pueblo

Yung Pueblo’s work is always a nice salve for the soul, chocked full of pearls of wisdom for intimate relationships. Pueblo’s work takes a spiritual angle which I deeply appreciate. I love that this one can just sit at one’s bedsite, to be opened to a random page and enjoyed.

Two other resources I would be remiss to exclude:

Jillian Turecki

Jillian Turekci is a therapist and Internet sensation, whose work carries one simple punchline: “transform your relationships by transforming your relationship with yourself.” I cannot recommend her and her work highly enough, whether you’re single or in a relationship.

Her podcasts on self-love are particularly notable. They illuminated the work I had to do on that front, and supported me in ending a relationship that was not meeting my needs. I really love Jillian’s no nonsense approach. She implores her audience to look at themselves in the mirror and take accountability for all the ways they aren’t showing up well in their relationships, including their relationship with themselves. Her podcast episode on conscious relationships is particularly notable on that front.

Just last month she published her first book It Begins With You: Nine Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life which became an instant New York Time bestseller.

• Truth 1: It begins with you.
• Truth 2: The mind is a battlefield.
• Truth 3: Lust is not the same thing as love.
• Truth 4: You have to love yourself.
• Truth 5: You must speak up and tell the truth.
• Truth 6: You need to be your best self (even after the honeymoon).
• Truth 7: You cannot convince someone to love you.
• Truth 8: No one is coming to save you.
• Truth 9: You must make peace with your parents.

I think it’s a worthwhile read because it’s quick and I love Jillian’s work, but prefer her short form and audio content over her writing style. You can find her on Instagram (@jillianturecki), listen to her popular podcast Jillian on Love, sign up for her newsletter, follow her on Substack or join her conscious woman online community.

David Cooley

David Cooley is a relationship coach with a background in restorative justice, and he is absolutely brilliant. He takes conflict resolution to the next level, teaching his clients how to welcome conflict as an opportunity for deeper connection, rather than avoid it.

David believes that there are two paradigms available to us when it comes to conflict resolution: adversarial and restorative. The adversarial one dominates and is insidious, leading us to come to conflict resolution with a confrontational, me vs. you mentality. Someone wins, someone loses. Someone’s guilty. He believes this paradigm stems from popular culture and the criminal justice system, which focuses on a punitive orientation. He delineates the long list of ways an adversarial point of view shows up in how we relate, and why that leads to the slow and steady degradation we see some up again and again in the books outlined above.

The restorative paradigm, by contrast, sees conflict as opportunity. It fully reorients us to care for our partner’s emotional state, focusing on the hurt rather than focusing on the story behind the hurt. He intelligently interweaves the nervous system into his work with his clients; self awareness when triggered and the ability to self regulate are essential skills for productive conflict resolution. He’s thought deeply about what is required to truly repair, and I learned a tremendous amount working with him last year.

Given how essential conflict resolution is for a thriving relationship, I really cannot recommend David’s work enough. I recently did a podcast episode with David, summarizing his views in an hour and twenty minute conversation. He has also graciously allowed me to share his amazing handouts with the Denizen audience and community, you can find them here.

That’s it! I hope this helps some of you on your journey to greater self-love and thriving relationships with those closest to you.

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One final note: though I stopped producing podcast episodes and hosting events while I focused on upgrading my marriage, I very much consider all of this part of my work as the Steward of Denizen. I endeavor to not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk. This means continually doing the work on myself to become more and more aligned with our shared vision of humanity flourishing in harmony with life on Earth. Denizen’s tagline is change from within: our intimate relationships are very much training grounds for how we show up everywhere else. I emerged from my time away and promptly released three episodes sharing what I’d learned. The conversation with David Cooley is a particularly potent one, outlining how we can shift from a paradigm of me vs. you to us in all of our relationships.

Also, importantly, by taking a couple months to prioritize my marriage and pause my “work” I’m modeling a world where leaders place equal value on the health of their family alongside ambitious work in the world. This underscores my belief it’s not just what I do, but also how I do it that matters when it comes to fostering systemic change.