It can feel disorienting to bring up a relational injury to someone who has hurt you, and they shift the focus of the conversation to how you’ve hurt them.  When you find yourself in this disorienting tangle, your best move is to stop playing the drama triangle game rather than trying to unravel it, and instead, shift to the empowerment triangle.  My version of the empowerment triangle reimagines the victim as creator, the rescuer as liberator, and the persecutor as space holder. 

A boundary is something about you, about what you will or will not do to take care of yourself.  It is within your control.   A relationship request, by contrast, is a clear ask for the other person to do (or not do) something based on a desire of yours, while leaving them free to respond as they wish.  Both are about taking care of you; neither is about controlling your partner. Together, these are twin communication superpowers.

Future-proofing your relationship doesn’t mean preventing perceptual incongruence from ever happening; it means building the internal and relational capacity so that it happens less frequently and feels less threatening when it does because you’re able to navigate it with steadiness, curiosity, and flexibility.

When you notice perceptual incongruence occurring in your relationship, naming the problem is a great place to start. Read on to learn more about what each person can do, whether in the role of perceiver, perceived, or both.

Read on to learn what might be going on for both the perceiver and the perceived when perceptual incongruence is occurring.

In relationships, it can be comforting to know that there is a good-enough shared reality between partners, particularly about how each person is perceived.  Without this, we are left asking, whose reality is real?  Who am I? Who are you?  

Relationship therapy is a brave undertaking.  At least one of you is desperate for things to change.  You feel part hopeful and part scared as you invite a person outside your relationship into this private space where you’ve carried such a mix of feelings—love, fear, hope, grief.