What It Takes to Grow Strong Relationships
Strong relationships don’t grow by accident.
They don’t grow from more empathy, better conflict strategies, or even better communication skills. Some people assume strong relationships are built on a sense of safety and security.
They aren’t.
Strong relationships grow from something deeper…a solid sense of Self.
Without it, people become reactive. Disappointment sparks defensiveness. Disagreement leads to shutdown. Distance creates panic. Instead of staying steady, we try to control the tension, and over time the relationship becomes more about keeping things calm than growing strong.
In my work as a couples, family, and sex therapist, I see again and again that struggles with intimacy, conflict, and desire are less about communication and more about an underdeveloped sense of Self.
Many adults are navigating intimate relationships using strategies that worked in childhood but do not help adult intimacy. And here’s the part most people don’t realize: intimate relationships provide the very pressure that has the potential to prompt this kind of development.
If you want to grow a strong relationship, you don’t start by fixing the other person.
You start by growing yourself up.
What We Mean by a “Self”
When we talk about a Self, we’re not talking about confidence, self-esteem, or a strong personality.
We’re talking about something sturdier.
A solid sense of Self in relationships means we know what we think and feel…and we can hold onto that when someone we love is upset, disappointed, or wants us to be different. It looks like:
- feeling strong emotions without being taken over by them
- disagreeing without falling apart
- connecting with others deeply without losing ourselves
- being able to stay with something challenging because it matters
Here’s the paradox: the more solid we are, the more flexible we can be.
When we’re unclear about who we are, we either give in or fight back. We cave to keep the peace, or we become rigid to protect ourselves. But when we’re grounded, we can bend without breaking. We can adjust without losing our shape.
We are like a tree planted beside another tree, one that matters deeply to us. Ideally, each tree grows straight up, supported by its own root system. It can hold its own weight when storms come and bend with the wind without snapping.
Unfortunately, this is not how many relationships actually function.
Instead of standing upright, we grow dependent on the person next to us to hold us up and make us feel steady or valued. We borrow our sense of Self from the relationship. Our steadiness becomes dependent on validation from the other person.
This creates emotional fusion and dependence. Emotional fusion often shows up as emotional over-connection:
- absorbing your partner’s emotions as your own (he’s angry, so now she’s angry)
- needing or demanding reassurance or apologies
- lashing out when the other person is not meeting your needs
In fusion, both people feel intensely connected AND intensely reactive. The bond is strong, but it is not stable. Over time, the relationship becomes heavy. Neither person feels like they can breathe. It’s a bit like being a conjoint twin.
How Togetherness Pressure Pulls Us Apart
As humans, we live between two natural forces: the desire to be our own person and the desire to belong. This tension is by design…it’s part of being human.
But the pull toward connection is powerful, often much stronger than the pull toward individuality. This creates what we call togetherness pressure.
When someone we love pulls away or is disappointed in us, anxiety rises. If our sense of Self is shaped primarily by others’ approval, that pressure pushes us toward fusion. We accommodate, withdraw, or organize ourselves around keeping the relationship calm.
Over time, the relationship becomes more about managing anxiety than fostering growth. Couples get stuck in familiar loops which can look like arguing repeatedly or maintaining surface harmony while feeling alone.
In Crucible therapy, we call this the comfort and safety cycle.
“When people sacrifice individuality for togetherness, they don’t get lasting closeness. They end up with less individuality and less intimacy.”
Dr. David Schnarch, Passionate Marriage
The Challenge of Change vs. Stability in Relationships
When reducing anxiety becomes the priority, couples settle into what feels like safety. It resembles stability, but it prevents growth. Stability is not the same as strength.
The comfort cycle hinges on avoidance. We smooth over differences, sidestep difficult conversations, and preserve harmony at the surface. Underneath, resentment accumulates. Vitality fades. Sex becomes dull or routine. Partners may appear distant yet remain intensely reactive…a fused detachment where each person is deeply affected but unable to tolerate the impact.
The comfort cycle often really isn’t comfortable at all and may not actually feel safe…it’s just all you know.
Some couples live this way for years.
Why Growth for Strong Relationships Requires Risk
Moving beyond this cycle requires risk and the initial reward for that risk is anxiety.
When one person stops organizing around comfort and begins organizing around growth, the system reacts. Old patterns pull hard, and the temptation to restore calm is strong.
So what does it look like to grow yourself up?
What Growing a “Self” Involves
Growth requires developing differentiation. Dr. Schnarch operationalized this as the four points of balance:
- A Solid Flexible Self
- Calm Heart and Quiet Mind
- Grounded Responding
- Meaningful Endurance
In practice, this means knowing who you are without demanding your partner regulate your worth. It means settling your own anxiety instead of spreading it into the relationship. It means addressing what is off directly without appeasing, attacking, or withdrawing. Finally, it’s tolerating discomfort long enough for something new to develop.
When even one person begins strengthening these capacities, the emotional field shifts. The pressure doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It becomes the pressure of development rather than fusion.
And that is where things often get harder.
Why Growing Strong Relationships is so Hard
These four capacities are simple, and they are anything but easy.
Most couples function at a similar level of differentiation (or 4 points of balance). We are often drawn to partners whose developmental level matches our own. So when one person grows by holding steadier boundaries, tolerating anxiety without accommodating, or speaking more directly — the entire system feels it.
To a partner, that shift can feel like distance, rejection, or loss. Systems prefer stability. Growth disrupts stability.
Sometimes the partner rises to meet the change. Other times they push back, escalate, or attempt to restore the old balance, reacting to the pressure they feel to keep things the same.
How Early Experiences Shape the Self
We don’t begin life with a solid Self.
We develop through reflected experience, a reflected sense of self, where older people tell us who we are and how we should be. This works well when it’s done from the best in others. But often what we are told isn’t kind or loving and becomes internalized as who we are…even if it’s not true.
Not all of this is verbal. We map what is “safe” to say, feel, and want by watching and observing others in high-intensity moments, especially when fear, reactivity, or shutdown enters the room.
For example, when a parent tells a child to stop crying, the child learns to push their feelings down. When a parent or teacher reacts negatively to a child’s bid for connection, the child learns it’s safer to withdraw.
These adaptations are intelligent responses to relational systems. They are not pathological.
But what protected connection in childhood can limit intimacy in adulthood. After a while, what was a survival strategy begins to feel like personality. One formed to preserve belonging, not to sustain adult intimacy.
In adulthood, this can show up as:
- not knowing what you want
- difficulty saying no
- avoiding conflict
- feeling overwhelmed with guilt
These patterns are wired in from early experiences designed to preserve connection. This is why growth can feel so threatening.
Why Developing a sense of Self Is Difficult—and Necessary
These ways of being are hardwired in our brains and nervous system, so growing beyond them is not easy and it’s the best chance for changing your relationships. Here are a few ways it’s hard to grow yourself:
- you’ll see things about yourself (and your partner) you don’t like
- your nervous system will beg you to go back to old patterns
- you’ll feel pulled to focus on your partner instead of yourself
- your partner will not thank you — at least not at first
When you begin holding steadier boundaries or tolerating disappointment without rushing to fix it, anxiety rises.
Developing a stronger Self means staying in that anxious space long enough for a new balance to emerge where one can self-soothing without avoiding and self-confront without despair.
For this to work, one has to continue working on themselves over and over and over without guarantee that your partner will match your efforts. You have to do it consistently enough that your partner maps you are not going back to the old ways of being that were easier and more avoidant or reactive.
And the hardest part is making these changes with kindness and compassion for yourself and those you love. For some reason, these kind of changes are easier to exact from fear or anger, but that’s often just more of the same.
Over time and with consistency, this builds internal structure. And that structure is what allows intimacy to deepen rather than stagnate.
The discomfort is not a sign that growth is wrong.
It is a sign that something meaningful is shifting.
“We all want to be wanted, and none of us want to want. Wanting makes us vulnerable. It puts us in the position of needing something from someone who is free not to give it.”
Dr. David Schnarch, Intimacy and Desire
Why a Solid Sense of Self Is Essential for Eroticism
Eroticism involves risk — the risk of being known and possibly unwanted.
As Schnarch writes, “We all want to be wanted and none of us want to want.”
To want someone is to risk not being chosen. It requires tolerating uncertainty without collapsing into reassurance-seeking or control.
That kind of risk requires a Self.
When the Self is underdeveloped, desire organizes around safety. We monitor instead of express. We pursue reassurance instead of risk. Sexuality becomes cautious, routine, dutiful or quietly resentful. Intimacy begins carrying too much weight and regulates worth, security, or emotional balance.
Eroticism is an adult capacity. It depends on two differentiated people who can tolerate being known without demanding that the other stabilize them.
Intimate relationships are what expose whether we can.
How solid is your Self?
Here are some questions for reflection:
- What are you avoiding that you know needs to be addressed?
- When you find yourself frustrated in a relationship, do you focus on the other person or yourself first?
- How do you let the way you see your partner keep you from growing?
- When is the last time you took a risk because something mattered to you?
- Are you someone who soothes yourself or do you rely on other others to help you settle down?
- How have you given up parts of yourself to please someone else? Are you willing to keep doing it or are you willing to take a risk? Neither option is guaranteed to go well. You get to decide.
Becoming Your Best Self
Strong relationships do not simply provide comfort. They generate the very pressure that develops us.
Conflict, disappointment, sexual tension, and emotional distance are not signs that something is broken. They are often the conditions that reveal where we still organize around anxiety rather than growth.
Growing a solid, flexible Self is not about independence or detachment. It is about becoming sturdy enough to stay connected without losing yourself.
This kind of development rarely happens accidentally. It requires intention. Structure. Practice. It requires choosing growth over comfort, again and again.
That is the heart behind our Year of Self-Development. Each month, we focus on a specific theme of self-growth that strengthens a solid sense of Self, the building blocks of strong relationships.
This is a structured invitation to develop the internal capacities strong relationships require: the ability to tolerate conflict, desire, and difference without collapsing, accommodating, or trying to control the relationship.
Because strong relationships grow when people grow.
And intimate relationships are the crucible that makes that growth possible.
If this resonates, we invite you to stay connected with us. Follow Fuller Life via our newsletter, Facebook, Instagram, linked in or You Tube for ongoing reflections, resources, and conversations about developing a solid Self over time.
Real intimacy doesn’t come easily. It is the reward of sustained, often uncomfortable work, developing clarity, emotional steadiness, and integrity.
This is how you become someone who can love well — and receive love well.
This perspective is rooted in the differentiation-based work of Dr. David Schnarch and the Crucible Approach to relationships.
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