We Hold Ourselves the Way We Were Held. And We Hold Our Partners That Way Too
There’s a phrase I come back to often in my work, with individuals and with couples. I’ve said it in sessions, written it in notes, returned to it more times than I can count:
We hold ourselves the way we were held. And we hold our partners that way too.
It tends to land quietly. Sometimes people write it down. Sometimes they just go still for a moment.
Because when you sit with it, really sit with it, it starts to explain a lot.
The way you speak to yourself when you make a mistake. The amount of tenderness you’re able to offer your partner when they’re struggling. The way you respond to someone needing more closeness than you know how to give. The ease or difficulty you have with being truly known by another person.
None of this came from nowhere. It came from somewhere. And that somewhere was a long time ago.
The Template
Long before we had language for it, we were learning what relationships were. Not from books or therapy or conscious reflection. From experience. From the way the people who were supposed to love us actually did.
Were they warm and consistent? Did they show up when you needed them? Was your distress met with comfort, or with irritation, or with absence? Were you celebrated as you were, or were you valuable mostly when you performed, achieved, didn’t need too much, stayed out of the way?
The answers to these questions became your template. The implicit rules about what love looks like, what you can expect from people who are close to you, how much of yourself it’s safe to show, what happens when you need something.
Attachment researchers call this an internal working model. Terry Real, in the Relational Life Therapy framework, would locate it in what we’ve been calling the adaptive child. That part of us shaped by early experience, running the old strategies, working from the old rules.
Either way, the point is the same: the relational patterns we carry into adulthood were learned. They’re not hardwired. They’re not who we are. They’re what we were taught, implicitly and over time, about how relationships work.
And because they’re learned, they can change.
How We Hold Ourselves
The first place the template shows up is in the relationship we have with ourselves.
If you were raised with warmth and reasonable consistency, if your needs were generally met, your mistakes were corrected without cruelty, your feelings were acknowledged even when inconvenient — you likely developed a baseline sense of your own okayness. Not perfect, not grandiose, just grounded. You can tolerate discomfort without it becoming a crisis. You can make a mistake without it confirming something terrible about your worth.
If you were raised with criticism, emotional unavailability, inconsistency, or conditional love, if your needs were too much, your feelings were a problem, your value was tied to your performance you likely internalized a harsher internal voice. One that doesn’t offer much comfort when things go wrong. One that confirms inadequacy faster than it offers compassion.
Most of us are somewhere in the middle. We had caregivers who were doing their best with what they had, who got some things right and some things wrong, who loved us and also left marks.
The inner voice we carry, the way we hold ourselves, reflects all of it.
This matters for relationships because the way you hold yourself is the floor for how you hold your partner. You cannot consistently offer another person more tenderness, more patience, more genuine presence than you’re able to offer yourself. Not sustainably. The well you draw from is the same one.
How We Hold Our Partners
And then there’s the second part of the phrase. The part that tends to land a little harder.
We hold our partners the way we were held.
Not always. Not identically. But the template is there, running underneath, shaping what feels normal, what feels like too much, what feels like abandonment.
The person who was parented with a lot of emotional distance may find genuine intimacy uncomfortable; not because they don’t want it, but because it doesn’t feel like the ground they know. They may unconsciously create distance in their relationship through overwork, emotional unavailability, or a kind of efficiency that keeps things moving but never quite settles.
The person who grew up with unpredictable emotional swings may find themselves hypervigilant in their relationship: reading every shift in their partner’s mood, bracing for the sudden change in atmosphere, managing and accommodating as a way of keeping the environment as stable as possible.
The person who was criticized harshly may become the critic. Or they may become exquisitely sensitive to even gentle feedback, interpreting it through the lens of the old wound. Or both, depending on the day, the activation level, who’s in the room.
None of this is conscious. None of it is chosen. And none of it is a verdict on the person doing it.
It’s the template running. The adaptive child following the only rules it was ever given.
This Is Not Blame
I want to be careful here, because this framework can easily slide into something it’s not meant to be.
Understanding that your patterns come from early experience is not an invitation to spend the rest of your life blaming your parents. It’s not an excuse for continuing to harm your partner with behavior that has an origin story. And it’s not a reason to resign yourself to the idea that nothing can change because the roots go too deep.
It’s an explanation. And explanations are useful because they make patterns visible. And visible patterns can be worked with.
Terry Real is direct about this: understanding where something came from does not release you from responsibility for what you do with it now. The adaptive child has an origin. The wise adult has a choice. Both things are true.
The point of looking at the early template isn’t to get stuck there. It’s to understand why the current pattern is so persistent, why knowing what to do and doing it are so often different things, and to approach that gap with curiosity rather than shame.
What Changes When You See It
Something shifts when you start to understand the template you’re working from.
You start to hear the inner critic differently. Not as truth, but as a voice that was installed early and has been running on autopilot ever since. That voice may never fully go quiet. But you don’t have to keep mistaking it for reality.
You start to recognize your partner’s patterns differently too. The withdrawal that feels like rejection may be a template running. The demand for closeness that feels suffocating may be a template running. This doesn’t make the behavior okay, but it makes it less about you than it may have seemed.
And crucially, you start to see where relational mindfulness actually does its work. That pause between stimulus and response, the space we’ve been talking about all through this series, is the space where the template can be interrupted. Not erased. Not bypassed. But seen. And in being seen, loosened just enough to allow for something different.
That is the work. It is slow and it is nonlinear and it is worth doing.
Holding Differently
Here’s what I want to leave you with as we close out this first phase of the series.
You can learn to hold yourself differently. With more patience when you’re struggling. With more generosity when you fall short. With the kind of steady, non-catastrophizing presence that the wise adult offers. The holding that says: this is hard, and you’re okay, and we’ll figure this out.
And as you learn to hold yourself that way, something opens in how you hold your partner. Not because you’ve solved everything or healed completely, but because the template is no longer the only thing running. Because the wise adult is increasingly in the room. Because the space between your early relational experience and your current relationship is, incrementally, becoming a space you can actually choose in.
We hold ourselves the way we were held. And we hold our partners that way too.
And with awareness, with practice, with some real and honest work, we can learn to hold both ourselves and our partners better than we were held.
That possibility is what this series is about. And it’s what I do with clients every week, individuals and couples who are tired of the old patterns and ready to build access to something different.
If that’s where you are, I’d love to talk. Reach out at connect@audreylmft.com or learn more at audreylmft.com.
Audrey Schoen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Roseville, CA, specializing in couples, individuals, and entrepreneurs. She practices Relational Life Therapy, Brainspotting, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy, and offers in-person sessions in the Sacramento area and online throughout California and Texas.
Primary source: Terry Real, The New Rules of Marriage (2007). Attachment theory referenced generally; foundational sources include Bowlby and Ainsworth.
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