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"your partner cannot succeed in making you feel good in a lasting way. For example, if you have had a hard life filled with rejection and loneliness, his love can only temporarily lift the cloud of worthlessness and self-loathing that will return whenever he is away"

The first, and most common, project involves directly trying to **force **our partner to change back. We get out the blunt saws, scalpels, or dynamite in an attempt to break through the crust surrounding her heart.

The second project is to use many of those same crude tools on ourselves

The final project kicks in once we give up on getting the love we crave from our partner. At that point, we begin to close our heart to him and: (1) search for a different partner, (2) numb or distract from the pain and emptiness enough to stay with the original one, or (3) numb

All of these are exiling projects. In the first, we try to get our partner to exile the parts of him that threaten us. In the second, we work to exile the parts of us **that we think he doesn’t like. In the third, we exile the parts of us that are attached to him.

"You can become your own healer—the special person your vulnerable parts have been waiting for. When that happens, your partner will be released from the redeemer trap and its accompanying projects, and true intimacy will be possible."

What we call happiness is often relief about not being in those states. Too often our partner becomes a life preserver, keeping our head above water in the dark sea of pain, shame, and fear in which we float.

it’s as though we’re stuck in a hole and the only tools our culture throws us are an assortment of shovels.

Since in their relationship they can’t rely on aggressiveness or rationality anymore, many men just give up and hide behind stony walls of indifference and passivity

I believe that because women’s focus is so much on caretaking others and on getting their exiles cared for by a relationship, they are no better at nurturing their own parts than are men.

Because they get so little from you, they will be obsessed with finding someone they imagine can rescue them and, out of their desperation, will blind you to that person’s faults.

Your partner will appreciate this arrangement because she won’t feel the weight of your emotional dependence or the sting of your rage when she is unintentionally neglectful

by acting as though you care less than your partner, you can constantly stir her anxiety and keep her in line. The downside to this strategy is that you wind up numb, cut off from your heart and from your partner’s love, so you’re constantly dissatisfied

Either way, life is predictable, and no one gets close enough to hurt them. The boredom and loneliness of either kind of controlled life seem like a small price to pay to minimize the threat of re-injury.

It seems that the key to helping a couple lies less in reducing the number or even intensity of their fights and more in improving the repair process after a fight.

since they both had been so vulnerable, their protectors were likely to return with a vengeance whenever the other made the slightest false move