Healing the Wound of Relationship

In our work helping couples awaken together and find deep intimacy and lasting love, there’s something at the very heart of relationship we find ourselves constantly returning to. We call it “the wound of relationship.” From our perspective, until the wound of relationship is fundamentally addressed and healed, nothing else can ultimately work to bring true intimacy and understanding at the core.

To understand what we mean by the wound of relationship, let’s start with the term “the core wound.” Core wound was one of Saniel’s first attempts to articulate the pinch of divinely human embodiment, especially as felt prior to the second birth. It’s the feeling of an apparently irresolvable paradox at the center of your existence; an endless searching to reconcile your knowledge or intuition of infinite immortal freedom with the extremely finite limits of your personal human life. When you realize that you can stop rejecting that feeling and simply relax into it, a profound shift occurs that we call the second birth. The second birth is the beginning of a life of fundamental self love.

Similarly, the wound of relationship is a paradoxical feeling of alien separateness along with intimate connectedness in relationship. But just as we are conditioned to believe that the core wound means something must be wrong, we tend to assume something is wrong when we feel the wound of relationship. Our relationship pains appear to be evidence that something is wrong at the core that needs to be worked on or avoided. Just as rejecting the core wound reinforces the perception of a split between spirit and matter, so rejecting the wound of relationship reinforces the perception of a split between self and other. This often leaves one or both partners wondering,"is this REALLY the right relationship for me? This person is so different from me, am I really making the right choice staying with him/her?” Perhaps you can begin to see that until the wound of relationship is embraced, all forms of union in the relationship are built on the foundation of this split. Most couples literally split. Most of the couples that remain together live in an unconscious truce, never feeling fully committed to each other.

Unfortunately, most of the activity of fixing and running that so many couples go through is the opposite of what the relationship really needs. Which is for both members to simply embrace the feeling of the wound itself and be present and feeling together. When that happens, mutual onlyness starts to blossom.

Mutual onlyness is analogous to the second birth, but it’s more like the second birth of the relationship. Like awakening prior to second birth, the relationship itself needs to go through rotting out of escape from the difficult parts of relating, and into a willingness to just be present with the truth of what is. In the willingness to do that, so much healing occurs, as well as a newfound ability to hear and feel the other deeply, and an ability to stand in the differences between you and your partner. Assuming real compatibility, this brings deeper trust. As the wound of relationship is embraced from both sides, there’s increasing openness, and the couple can relax into ever-deepening love and intimacy.