Dealing with emotionally immature parents and partners can feel like you're fighting for your life. You desire close and meaningful connection, but it feels like it's just a matter of time where the other shoe is going drop and you'll be the one blamed. It can feel like you're constantly in fight-or-flight mode and don't know how to break through the walls of constant emotional explosion or emotional stonewalling. We see all the ways they're hurting us, and they don't seem to see any of it. It's frustrating and invalidating and it can feel impossible to know what the right thing to do is. This episode and graphic series explores the themes of emotional immaturity in our relationships and how they are often mirrors for us to explore where we still need to grow and evolve in our emotional maturity. Very often what we see being mirrored to us is what we often engage in. How we judge our parents is very often what we are presenting and we often find ourselves in the same dynamics our parents modeled with our partners. While it may seem them changing is your best bet at resolution - the control really lies in you controlling yourself and using these conflicts as an opportunity to become more emotionally mature yourself. Only by owning your own ways can you hope to see any positive changes, regardless if they ever meet you halfway. We think it's about them, but it's really about us.

Following my breakup, I really wanted to make sure I was learning all the lessons I needed to learn to not only pick a better partner in the future but also be a better partner in the future. I started to realize that the majority of my part in our issues were around communication and understanding where I faltered not just in what I said, but the larger picture of my attachment wounds being activated. In an effort to learn how to manage my fears and maintaining bonding connection, I wanted to explore the best practices for resolving conflict with your partner with respect to their attachment style and gender. I also wanted to understand how to unlock vasopressin bonding to ensure communication wasn't just effective in resolving conflict but also deeply bonding in the long run. I wanted to use my communication errors as a template to figure out where and went wrong and how I could have improved. This episode highlights my key takeaways from my research and offers reframe to how I would have handled each situation differently now that I have the tools.