Every relationship problem is a self-knowledge problem

What years of running from conflict taught me about being seen, and how I finally learned to stay | GR No. 135

A note before reading:

This Gentle Reminder is not for everyone, and I mean that with utmost respect.

If you are in a relationship where you don’t feel safe, where conflict turns into harm of any kind, this isn’t the piece, and please don’t let anything here convince you the work is yours to fix alone. Getting to safety comes first. Everything else can wait.

But if you keep finding yourself in the same argument wearing different clothes, the same shutdown, the same cold shoulders, and some part of you senses you’re somehow part of how it keeps going sideways, then this was written from my heart to yours.

It’s written for those who already know how to distinguish self-accountability from self-blame. For those capable of looking at themselves with vulnerable honesty without spiraling into guilt and shame over their own mistakes.

P.S. If you’re not there yet, if you still slide into self-blame when you look too closely at your mistakes, I feel you. Learning to hold ourselves compassionately in the flesh isn’t always easy. But it’s some of the most liberating work there is.

From love,
Jovanny

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Ghita and I are sitting on a bench just outside Pastelería Suiza, one of our favorite bakeries in Mexico City, our go-to spot when we’re craving European-influenced pastries, quality chocolate, and real Chantilly. It’s been such a lovely, sunny day as we’re preparing to get our fix of sweetness before enjoying a walk around Chapultepec (the largest public park in the city).

She’s watching me eat. But, particularly, watching how I’m not properly cleaning my spoon from the chocolate pastry before dipping it back into the strawberry roulade. I’m doing this unconsciously, of course, because I hadn’t even realized how I was leaving bits of chocolate inside the vanilla rolls (the horror!).

She says something about it. About how I’m doing it wrong and, more importantly, about how this bothers her.

It’s a small thing. Such a small thing. But if you’ve ever been in a relationship, you already know this wasn’t really about the pastry.

Often (read: always), external conflict in relationships reveals something much deeper happening inside of us.

Context: a moment earlier, as we were walking up to the bakery, I could tell something was “off”. That she was a little shut down, a little retreated into herself. I obviously notice right away; I know how absolutely enchanting, expressive and genuinely enamored by life she is on a regular basis. So this was not her usual demeanor.

But I also notice how it’s beginning to bother me a little bit, especially since we had agreed to go out to the park and have a beautiful day.

So as we’re about to enter the bakery, here is what I do with that information:

I say, “I think it’d be best if you figure out what’s off with you before we continue…,” and I almost immediately regretted it just as the words are leaving my mouth, but it was also too late to retract so I just complete the sentence, “…because otherwise we’re not going to have the great day we intended to.”

She immediately turns to me with a stern look in her face.

I look back, knowing I might have just said something very off without even thinking about how it sounded. And, without saying a word to each other, we go inside the bakery to pick out her favorite pastries.

I’m laughing now, even as I write this, in total embarrassment at how unconscious that was of me. Because what I was really doing was asking her to “fix” whatever was bothering her, on her own, quickly, so that the day could be good (my idea of good).

I wasn’t meeting her. I wasn’t staying with her, getting curious, making space for her to tell me what was actually going on. Instead, I proceeded to try to rush her through it so we could get to the version of the afternoon I had already decided we were going to have.

What I never imagined walking up to the Pastelería, was that this seemingly small incident was about to reveal to me something so profound that would transform the way I navigate conflict within my relationship. Something I had been circling for years but hadn’t been able to name just yet: that every relationship problem is a self-knowledge problem.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the scene:

We pick out the pastries as the air slowly got covered with thick layers of silence. I don’t yet know what’s living inside it. She’s processing. I’m still waiting for the day to start being good.

We pay. We walk out. We sit down. I begin double dipping.

And that’s when she finally says it.

“Regarding the comment you made earlier: I understand where you’re coming from, but I won’t tolerate it,” and my pupils dilate as the ground begins to tremble a little under my feet, “I don’t speak to myself in that way, so I will not tolerate anyone speaking to me like that either.”

I had just found myself on the receiving end of one of the most self-loving boundaries I have ever witnessed someone uphold. And the one upholding it was the love of my life. And she was upholding it with me.

The discomfort immediately began to swell up in my body. I could now palpably feel the emotional charge causing strong palpitations; a burning sensation rising from my chest, moving into my head and flooding my cheeks. And a tight constriction sitting at the mouth of my stomach that immediately made it feel harder to breathe comfortably.

And in that very moment, in just a matter of seconds, I witnessed two past versions of me flash before my eyes:

The first was that old, overly defensive version of me who always needed to defend his goodness. The version that was so absolutely certain of his goodness that, if you ever questioned his intentions, that was most certainly your own inability to see him clearly. Yes, he was self-righteous about it. He was that person who believes that if you don’t receive his words/actions with the good intentions that he unquestionably delivered them with, then that was a you problem.

Bless his heart: he was so fixated on being good that he could not hold both being good and making a hurtful mistake in the same body. So he was overly defensive. He would overexplain himself, trying desperately to protect himself from anyone doubting his good intentions. You see, he still carried the wound of always needing to be right in order to feel safe in his body.

The second version was the one who shuts down and abandons the scene at the first sign of trouble. The one who wouldn’t say anything at all. That’s the version that gives you the cold shoulder and simply decides this isn’t worth the argument. On the outside he looks like peace; calm and collected. But inside, there is a fire raging. He was the version of me who never learned how to effectively process conflict inside his own body, so he would avoid it altogether.

And both of them showed up, simultaneously, in that moment. I felt their pull of familiarity trying to grip on to me. Inviting me to collapse into either defensiveness or avoidance.

And here is the strange part: for the first time, I saw in real time how both of them were simply trying to protect me from the same thing. They were both trying to protect me from revealing something deeper; from being seen in the exact place where I missed the mark.

For the first time, I could palpably feel how neither of them belonged in this moment. How entering into defensiveness was not going to make me proud. How shutting down and being dismissive was certainly not make me proud either. I could now feel how this moment was asking me for something I had to move through this very discomfort to reach.

And when I finally reach it, it sounds almost way too simple to even say out loud:

Presence.

That this was the thing that was being asked of me the entire morning. Presence. The presence to actually be here, in this moment, with me and with her.

Because presence doesn’t happen in the mind. It happens in the body. And for someone like me, who has a history of social anxiety and the habit of dissociating and abandoning my body at the first signs of conflict, I know just how expensive avoidance is. I know how much it costs to dissociate and leave the other person hanging. I know how much it has taken me to learn how to stay in my body.

That small conflict was a moment of revelation for me: that only when I’m actually present, actually listening, actually being in my own body, do I actually get to move in ways that I don’t regret. And, more importantly, that only in presence can I acknowledge without collapse when I’ve made a mistake and fully own up to it.

That even this small bitter moment outside a bakery was really a self-knowledge problem. That the external conflict was but the symptom. Underneath it, at the root, the moment was asking me to understand myself better, so that I could show up fully in presence and truth for myself and for the wonderful woman sitting next to me. In a way that I am actually proud of.

But I want to be honest about how long it took me to get here, because I did not walk up to that bakery already knowing this about relationships.

You see, there was a younger version of me who believed that once you finally meet the love of your life, everything is beautiful and easy and you get to see and understand each other completely, always and forever. (How sweet & naive I was).

Spoiler alert: you don’t. There will still be moments where you may say the wrong thing, where your intention and your impact will not match, where you will hurt the person you love most if you’re not fully present with yourself.

It took me years (decades to be precise) and a lot of practice at knowing how to be wrong (lol), to even be able to stay present enough to recognize what my relationship problems were inviting me to learn about myself.

Today, I’m not only writing this Gentle Reminder for you. I’m also writing it so that it may travel through spacetime and reach those two past versions of me who showed up at that bench—the one bracing to defend his goodness and the one ready to shut down and mentally check out—trying to stake their claim onto my present moment.

I’m writing this to tell them that I don’t need them to protect me anymore. I’m writing this to tell them a memo they never got: that you can be a good person and still make mistakes. That you don’t have to choose between defending yourself and disappearing. That there was a third way available the whole time, and it was never about winning the moment.

And maybe, if you recognized a little of yourself in either of them, I’m writing this one for you too. May this illuminate a part of your path forward, the way it has illuminated mine.

Let’s dive in.

John William Waterhouse, Lamia, 1905

Every relationship problem is a self-knowledge problem.

I want to be precise about what I mean by this because I know how it might land at first.

If you felt something tighten when you read that sentence or an inner voice that sounded like “So you’re saying it’s all my fault?” or “This is just victim-blaming dressed up in pseudo-spiritual language,” I understand. Stay with me, because that reaction is exactly the thing I want us to look at a bit more compassionately.

Here is what that sentence does not mean:

It does not mean you caused everything that has happened to you. It does not mean that if someone mistreated you, you have to go find the part of yourself that deserved it. That is not self-knowledge. That is just blame pointed inward instead of outward, and it’s still blame.

And before we go any further, I need to draw one line clearly, because it would be irresponsible not to.

The relationship problems I’m talking about here are the ordinary ones. The conflicts that sprout inside every relationship. The moments of miscommunication, the missed opportunities to be more present, the thing you said when you weren’t really there with your partner (or vice versa), the friction two people generate when they’re both human and both carrying their own histories.

I am not talking about abuse. Verbal, emotional, psychological, physical—I am not talking about any of it.

Because that is not conflict. That is something else entirely, and we do not blur the line between the two. Conflict is two people missing each other and finding their way back. Abuse is the absence of the safety that makes a relationship a relationship in the first place. Where there is abuse, trust cannot grow, and without the foundation of trust, love quickly expires.

Recognizing that, and getting yourself to safety, is its own kind of self-knowledge. And it is not the kind this particular piece is about.

So if any part of you was bracing, wondering whether I was about to ask you to take responsibility for someone else’s cruelty, breathe. I am not. That was never the assignment.

Now, let’s get back to the ordinary kind of conflict. The kind every relationship is susceptible to.

Francis Bernard Dicksee, Chivalry, 1885

Notice how, when something goes wrong and conflict ensues, the kneejerk reaction is to immediately assign roles to the drama: we need someone to be the villain. We also need someone to be the one who got wronged. And, naturally, we will need a hero to do the rescuing. And once everybody has a role, the story basically writes itself and we never actually get to have to look at what is really happening because we’ve busy assigning and playing roles.

But what if, just for a moment, there is no villain, no victim, and no savior coming to fix it? What if nobody here is an angel and nobody here is a monster, and there are simply two people, each carrying what they carry, trying to build something together and missing each other sometimes?

That is a much more uncomfortable place to stand in than blame. Because blame is easy in how clean it is. It is so much easier to decide it was entirely their fault, or to turn around and decide it was entirely yours, than to stay in the messy, nuanced truth that a relationship is two people co-creating something, and both of them are always in it.

This is the space I’m inviting you into. Not the courtroom, with its verdicts and its sentences. The other room. The one where nobody is on trial and the only thing being asked of you is to look honestly at your own half of what happened.

There is only one relationship we ever truly have

John William Waterhouse, Mariana in the South, 1897

There’s only one relationship we ever truly have: the one with ourselves. Everything else is a mirror.

I don’t say that lightly, and it might be the first time you’ve heard it put exactly this way. But think about it. The people we let close, the ones we keep choosing to surround ourselves with, they reflect something back about how we relate to ourselves. How much regard we hold for ourselves. How much respect. How much love. All of that shows up in the company we keep.

And this is not me sliding blame back into the equation after I just spent all that time clearing the courtroom. Stay with the nuance a bit longer, because here is where it all connects.

If self-respect matters to you, then self-respect is the standard you hold for yourself. It becomes the minimum standard. And when you keep finding yourself in dynamics where you’re half-met, half-chosen, accepting less presence and less care than you’re ready to give, the question worth sitting with isn’t “What’s wrong with them?”

The real question lives underneath the relationship problem: “At what point did I stop considering how much this mattered to me?”

That question isn’t comfortable, I know. It isn’t meant to be. But notice how it’s really a question of self-knowledge:

What actually matters to me?
What are my core needs?
What are my core principles?
Do I value this enough to say something and hold a line when it gets crossed?

A lack of boundaries in a relationship, for example, is only a symptom. At the root is self-knowledge. Because if you don’t know what you need, you cannot uphold the boundaries that would safeguard what you care about.

If you have never let yourself fully accept what you truly need or what you truly want, then it becomes nearly impossible to set a boundary around it. And just as impossible for the world to make available for you something you have not yet admitted that you value.

We cannot receive what we have not admitted that we want.

When I was on the receiving end of that beautiful, self-loving boundary—”I understand it, but I won’t tolerate it”—I was presented with the opportunity to see my partner more clearly. Her needs. The way she respects and honors herself. And how I was failing to meet her with that same level of respect.

What I didn’t previously mention was that, besides the destabilizing feelings of discomfort that naturally rose within me, there was also an immense rush of awe, respect and love I felt for her in that moment. Not only for modeling self-respect in real time, but for doing it so gracefully.

Now, I already knew I had a loving & powerful woman by my side. But damn.

I want to bring something to the surface here before we go further

Everything I’ve said so far only matters in one specific place—and it’s certainly not when things are good and flowing.

When things are good between two people, you don’t have to consider any of this. You just enjoy the flow. You don’t analyze it, you don’t question it, you’re simply inhabiting the good vibes. These questions only ever show up when things are not fine. In those moments of turbulence. In the dense air of conflict.

Which means the moment you most need to be able to look at yourself clearly is the exact moment you least want to.

And if you’ve read this far already, I want to invite you into the most vulnerable layer of this piece, because I think it’s the root of almost everything that preceded this part.

When that boundary landed and I felt the heat rise in my chest and the constriction in my stomach, both old versions of me—the one ready to defend and the one ready to shut down—were trying to do the same thing:

They were trying to get me out of my body. Out of the discomfort. Anywhere but here, feeling this tension.

Briton Riviere, Daniel in the lion’s den, 1890

That’s what blame really is. An exit. So is collapse. So is the whole drama of finding a villain. We reach for them because staying present in a body that is flooded with discomfort is one of the hardest things a person can do, and almost anything feels easier than that.

So the real questions underneath relational conflict are not really about conflict at all. They are questions on capacity;

Can I stay present in my own body when a conversation gets uncomfortable?

And from there, questions of self-intimacy open up:

Who am I in conflict? Not who I wish I were, but who do I actually become when I feel that heat rising inside?

When the discomfort comes, do I respond, or do I react? Is there a pause in me, or only a reflex?

And the one underneath them all:

What am I afraid I’ll have to experience if I don’t immediately start defending, don’t immediately shut down either and just stay present a little longer?

That question is the door. And what follows is for those who are ready to walk through it.

How to begin building a safe space for conflict

The following section is for the Gentle Rebels, my paying subscribers, whose support is what keeps this whole ecosystem alive. It’s truly an honor to have you be a part of this community. Kudos to you for valuing depth over shortcuts!

Below are 4 orientations for becoming what most of us were never shown how to be: a safe space for conflict. Not only safe for your relationships but, first and foremost, safe for yourself.

Because conflict is not the thing to avoid (it’s unavoidable in any trustworthy relationship). The work is learning to stay in it without collapsing into avoidance, without shutting down, and without the one that took me the longest to even recognize as a real problem: people-pleasing.

I want to be honest about what it cost me to not know this, because awareness on its own changes nothing. For most of my life I did not have the capacity to be inside my body while in conflict. So I would mentally check out, shut down, avoid it at all costs and, when I couldn’t avoid it, I just defaulted into being overly agreeable and accommodating.

I want to mention that openly because people-pleasing behavior tends to be rewarded. But it comes at a cost. Back in my people-pleaser era, those around me would have described me as pleasantly “easygoing.” But what was actually happening in my body was the fawn response; another way of leaving my own body and checking out. It was collapse wearing a nicer face.

And it was catastrophic in a way I couldn’t see at the time.

Because the people closest to me never got to see me. The real me. They never got to see me uphold a boundary, afraid of the discomfort it would create in others. They never got to see me say what I really felt. As if I didn’t have needs.

So I kept ending up in relationships with people who didn’t really know me. But the heartbreak underneath it all, the one it took me years to feel, was this: who were they in a relationship with, if it wasn’t me?

It wasn’t them failing to see me. It was really me, unable to reveal myself to them.

And underneath even that, it was the inability to reveal myself to me; to be wholly okay being me. To be okay having needs at all.

That’s why today, it’s some of the most rewarding work I now get to do guide others through. Where my role is not to tell you what is true but to help you uncover what is true within you. With enough precision for you to recognize, perhaps for the very first time, what your core principles have been all along (which also reveal your core needs) and build the somatic capacity to uphold those principles in your everyday life, instead of collapsing into versions of you that rarely make you proud.

If something in this piece deeply resonated, a clarity call is where we’d feel out whether to take it deeper together through 1:1 work.

Please note that the 4 orientations I’m sharing below are not a chronological checklist. They’re invitations into a different way of relating to conflict, to yourself, and to the patterns you may have inherited from others who didn’t know how to move effectively through conflict themselves. So they are meant to be used as a compass, not a to-do list.

Orientation 1 of 4: Conflict Is The Birthplace Of Trust

We have it backwards. We treat conflict as the thing that threatens relationships, when it’s the place where real trust gets forged.

Think about the people you trust most in your life. Your closest friends, for example. Chances are you don’t trust them because they’re perfect humans who never make mistakes. You don’t trust them because they’ve never let you down or never said the wrong thing. No, you trust them because you know that when they miss, they can own it. You trust them because you know they’re capable of coming back, taking accountability and making amends to strengthen the relationship. That’s the whole foundation of trust. And it’s probably the reasons why they trust you, too.

Trust is always built in the aftermath of a mistake. In what happens next; in the restoration work.

The illusion underneath conflict avoidance is that if you can just be good enough, careful enough, perfect enough, you’ll never have to face the mess. But the mess is where the intimacy is. Conflict, met well, is how two people stop hiding behind their good intentions and let themselves actually be seen, mistakes and all.

There’s an old proverb that entered my field while I was writing this piece: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And I know why it entered: because this work is never about having the right intentions. It’s not really the thought that counts. It’s the impact. Nurturing a safe space for conflict is about being willing to align ourselves with our impact more than with our intentions. And respond accordingly.

Looking at our impact is not a one-time correction either. It’s a practice. Precisely because of this next orientation: