Hey, babes, today I'm going to be doing a long-awaited podcast episode on something I promised you a long time ago— and to be quite honest, I forgot… because I'm human.
Thankfully one of you amazing humans out there sent me a message saying, “Hey, where can I find this episode?”
And I was like, shit. I totally forgot to do that. So this episode is going to be about the tool that Justin and I used to help rebuild the trust in our relationship when we got back together.
When Justin and I got back together, that was a fucking messy mess. It was really, really dark. It was a dark time, and I don't think that we would have come out on the other side had we not rebuilt our trust in this way.
I want to share that tool with you guys because I know there are a lot of us out there who are literally trying to make things work with either people that we've been in relationships with before and there were ruptures, or maybe there was an actual betrayal. Every situation is so unique, so you'll have to discern for yourself. However, this was something that was extremely supportive for Justin and I.
In last week’s podcast episode I shared about how this tool actually came up in a current conflict that we had, and how it's supporting us even today.
The tool we are going to get into is: The Safe Word.
I've shared this with I don't know how many clients, but everyone who has taken this tool and implemented it in their relationship has seen so much growth in their trust and their intimacy with their partner.
And I’m not necessarily talking about sexual intimacy, although that can be the case, I mean intimacy like depth, connection, conversation.
A lot of times when we're learning new ways of relating, that's emotional intimacy, and the way that we connect with each other through these conversations that we have.
So to give you an idea of the type of situation Justin and I were in when we implemented this “safe word tool”:
We had just gotten back together and this was after seven months of being apart. If you’re new here and you haven’t listened to the breakup episode, we had no intention of getting back together when we broke up.
There wasn't like a, “you work on you, and I'm going to work on me, and then we'll see if this works out.”
We wanted different things, so we decided to walk away from our relationship. It was respectful and amicable.
So even though we had the same friend group, we didn't really see each other all that much. I was in this situationship that basically absorbed me and I went into this deep, dark abyss and Justin was very much the opposite of that and was going out with friends….
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And so in that seven months apart, like I said, Justin was very out there and going out a lot, being fun and flirty (ha, my perception of his experience, of course!) Where as I was immersed in a situationship with someone who was also a part of our friend group, so it was a little personal in that way and a little close to home probably, as well.
With that being said, when we got back together, there was like all of these fears coming up for both of us that were just basically playing off of each other. And so when I say it was really, really dark when Justin and I got back together, I mean the shadowiest of shadows.
We were literally throwing our wounded selves onto each other, unconsciously. He would say something like, “This girl texted me” and then I would say something like, “Oh, so and so (situationship guys name) would never have said that to me.”
We were basically just creating the most insecure relationship with one another by pulling at each other's insecurities. I knew exactly what I could say to make him feel some type of way and he knew exactly what to say to make me feel some type of way, and for whatever reason when we first got back together it was weeks of doing that.
Finally, after having a really extreme blowout fight with each other one night, we sat down together the next morning and we're like, “Yeah, this won't work. This won't work at all.”
We have so much love for each other as friends, first and foremost, and I think we both had this realization that we never want the other person to feel as badly as what we're doing to that person.
But because I saw him going out and living his best life and hooking up with girls, and he saw me basically like really emotionally invested in someone who he also knows, we both just felt really insecure in our relationship and we didn't know how to soften.
We kept our relationship in this really intense conflict as a way to protect ourselves. It was like, “If I can just keep you at arm's distance and constantly be in this fight with you, then maybe I won't be so vulnerable and get hurt, because I expect and anticipate it.” (ahem… self-sabotage, anyone?)
It was like literally being at war with someone, and we were at war with someone who we ultimately love with our whole heart. It was this one morning, we were like, “OK, this is not going to work.”
We either need to decide that we want this to work and we need to talk about what the fuck is happening, or we just call it a wash and continue to go on our merry ways… and we both really did want to try again because we realized how much fun we do have together, and how much love we do have for each other.
If we could just get through some of our bullshit that was coming up, and that required us talking about what the bullshit was. And both of us didn't really know what it was. We didn't know that our wounded selves were being triggered. We didn't know that our fear of abandonment or our fear of betrayal were being triggered when we were doing those things.
It took that conscious conversation at a neutral time to be like, “what's really going on here?”
It was really pattern tracking together. I had to ask myself, and he had to ask himself, “When are we triggered? When are these fights happening? When are we being nasty to each other?”
After we identified these things we came up with a safe word, to help each other recognize or share that we were dysregulated, and if either of us used that word we had agreements for how the other person could show up and support them. This is co-regulation, and this can be a huge trust builder in a relationship because that person shows up for you, instead of abandoning you or making you wrong.
This is what ultimately helped Justin and I both soften, and after only a few weeks of practicing this, we had noticed a huge shift in how we were communicating and how we felt in our relationship.
Definitely listen or watch the full episode to hear more about how the safe word looked and sounded like for us, and please leave any questions or reflections you have on this in the comments!
ILYSM 🤟🏾
Alyssa
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How we rebuilt trust in our relationship