In your close relationships, urgency is your enemy, and breath is your friend.

There’s a spiritual principle at work here: to move beyond some part of you, you must first get to know it and ultimately befriend it.

Before words leave your mouth, you pause and ask yourself: “Does what I’m about to say fall below the level of basic respect?” If you judge what you’re about to say as disrespectful, I have great advice for you. Shut up. And pledge, sincerely, from this moment forward, to do your best to curb actions and words that shame another.

What stops offensive behavior is healthy guilt.

We position ourselves as apart and above in many relationships. We attempt to control our partners, our kids, our bodies, and even the way we think (“I will not be so negative”). Take a step back, and you’ll see that running your relationships from a place of power and control is lunacy. Even with that awareness, the minute the emotional

Before we can provide corrective emotional experiences for each other, we must learn how to tend to our own immature parts, to our own reactivity, to our avoidance, our long-suffering frustration. We must master the art of relational mindfulness and retake the reins.

The central question I ask myself during a therapy session is simply this one: Which part of you am I talking to? Am I talking to the mature part of you, the one who’s present in the here and now? This is the part I call the Wise Adult. That’s the part that cares about us. Or am I speaking to a triggered part of you, to your adversarial you and me

The key lies in the felt experience of safety, and safety, from my family therapy perspective, is a boundary issue—an issue of distance regulation. You will not wall off and abandon me; nor will you intrude and try to control me. The neuroscientist Stephen Porges posits that feeling safety in another person with whom we interact consists of two

They think they’re Wise Adults, but they’re not. The world has mostly rewarded them handsomely. Because the Adaptive Child reflects the cultural values at large, people who primarily live from their Adaptive Child parts are generally great successes in the world financially and professionally. Meanwhile they make a hash of their personal lives.