Relationship Expert: The SECRET to Healing Your Relationship After Conflict (Nobody Does This!)

The Three Phases of Relationships

Baya introduces a framework of three critical phases in intimate partnerships: merging, power struggle, and interdependence. Initially, couples often experience a stage of merging, characterized by idealization and feeling like soulmates with seemingly perfect harmony. However, inevitable differences arise as both individuals enter the power struggle phase, where their distinct needs, wounds, and nervous systems start clashing. This phase is marked by tension and friction as partners begin to individuate and assert their boundaries.

What makes this phase tricky is that many couples get stuck here indefinitely, either avoiding conflict or getting trapped in repetitive cycles of power dynamics. Emotional avoidance manifests as silent treatment or suppressed feelings, while others may express their frustrations indirectly, such as confiding grievances to friends rather than honestly communicating with their partner. Baya notes that these maladaptive survival strategies often stem from childhood experiences where expressing authentic emotions led to punishment or rejection. Healing in relationships requires developing courage to stay present with discomfort and learn healthier ways to regulate emotions rather than resorting to old patterns like appeasement or emotional shutdown.

Nervous System Health

One of the podcast's standout insights is Baya's articulation of how physical and physiological health directly influence emotional regulation and ultimately the capacity to repair relationships. Factors such as sleep quality, hormone balance, thyroid function, vitamin deficiencies, and cortisol levels all affect how individuals manage emotional triggers and stress responses. She shares personal examples—her own and her spouse's—where lab results revealed problems like thyroid imbalance or hormonal fluctuations that explained heightened emotional sensitivity.

This holistic view challenges the commonly narrow focus on trauma alone as the root cause of dysregulation. While past trauma is significant, physical health variables must also be considered and optimized to achieve steady emotional regulation. Practicing self-care through adequate rest, nutrition, sunlight exposure, and medical testing is presented as a crucial, often overlooked step toward relational healing.

Healthy Conflict and Repair

Conflict in relationships is unavoidable, but it need not be destructive. Baya stresses that healthy conflict requires courage, vulnerability, and the intentional development of skills to sit with discomfort without resorting to blame, withdrawal, or control games. Both partners need to cultivate emotional self-awareness that helps them recognize how their nervous system reacts under stress—whether becoming louder, quieter, or shutting down—and take responsibility for self-soothing.

Partners then co-regulate by meeting each other in more regulated states, gradually building what Baya terms "interdependence," where there is gentleness, empathy, and more effective navigation of wounds without repeating harmful cycles. Importantly, she differentiates between conflict without repair, which breeds ongoing pain and disconnection, and conflict with repair, which fosters healing and deeper intimacy.

The Art of Repair

A significant paradigm shift offered by Baya is the idea that the goal after conflict is not necessarily agreement but attunement and empathy. She introduces the concept that fighting for "truth" or trying to get the other person to agree leads nowhere productive. Instead, the healing comes when each person genuinely hears, sees, and validates the other's experience, even without changing their own perspective.

The process requires structured communication where each person speaks without interruption, embracing both emotional empathy—feeling what the other feels—and cognitive empathy—intellectually understanding the partner's point of view despite not necessarily sharing it. She advocates for the "70% rule" in attunement, acknowledging that complete perfection is unrealistic and that partners who reach a significant level of mutual understanding are enough, with any remaining gaps being individual healing work. Repair conversations are best had after both parties have downregulated from heightened states, ensuring productive, calm dialogue rather than reactive escalation.

The Relationship Grid

Baya further explains relationship dynamics through a model she calls the "relationship grid," illustrating how individuals oscillate between four modes under emotional distress: grandiosity (blaming outward), boundaryless behavior (yelling, emotional overwhelm), walled-off (shutdown and distance), and shame-based appeasement (pleasing and people-pleasing to avoid conflict). People often get stuck in these patterns unconsciously as survival mechanisms learned in childhood.

Her own candid reflections reveal how she inhabited the boundaryless and shame-based quadrants, manifesting as covert appeasement and emotional flooding to get reassurance. Recognition of these patterns enables individuals to compassionately own their behavior as adaptive but now maladaptive responses, inviting the important work of rewiring neural and emotional habits through therapy, self-reflection, and skill-building.

The Role of Therapy

Healing deep relational wounds is neither simple nor quick. Baya compares it to physical fitness, requiring consistent "emotional workouts" and repeated practice over years. While therapy is invaluable, it's often underutilized or only sought late in the relationship, limiting its effectiveness. Further, she highlights the enormous challenge therapists face in working simultaneously with two individuals' histories, nervous systems, and the relationship dynamics within typical session lengths.

Nonetheless, early engagement with therapy, coaching, or workshops can make a profound difference, providing tools for self-regulation, perspective-taking, and communication before destructive cycles become entrenched. The key is persistent commitment by both partners to evolve both individually and as a couple.

Opportunities for Growth

Baya's spiritual framing of relationships is profound: she believes people enter partnerships primarily to heal parts of themselves that no one else could heal before. This healing is hardly effortless but is a sacred commitment partners make to support one another's growth and transformation, knowing wounds will inevitably surface.

The ideal is not seeking perfection or "soulmate bliss" but cultivating interdependence in which both partners maintain individual wholeness and come together to create greater harmony. This requires accepting imperfection, offering grace for past and current wounds, and holding space for one another's vulnerable parts without judgment.

The Biggest Relationship Pitfalls

Trust is fundamental, and one of the greatest threats to trust Baya identifies is repeatedly threatening to leave the relationship without follow-through. This behavior corrodes safety and openness, causing partners to withhold important topics due to fear of relationship loss. Authenticity coupled with reliability is essential, and if there are dealbreakers such as active addiction or manipulative behaviors — where repair is not realistic — those boundaries must be acknowledged.

Moreover, Baya emphasizes that secrets and shame create energetic incongruence within relationships that partners intuitively sense, often triggering defensive responses and misunderstanding. Transparency and willingness to do deep healing work individually allow for alignment of values, integrity, and authentic connection.

Complexity and Flexibility in Relationships

As cultural narratives increasingly champion authenticity, Baya warns of a counterintuitive rise in rigidity and black-and-white thinking around "speaking your truth." Healthy relationships require the capacity to hold complexity and paradox without defaulting to polarization or power struggles. Partners must balance the need for aligned values with flexibility and humbleness to evolve together.

She highlights the importance of wrestling with internal paradoxes personally rather than pushing the tension onto the other person. The capacity to do this nuanced inner work allows couples to creatively negotiate differences in lifestyle, parenting, or values without fracturing connection.