288: Relationship Repair with Shane Birkel

Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch! This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

In this solo episode, Shane talks relationship repair. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots, and watch it on YouTube – follow and leave a 5-star review.

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• Show Notes
• The Couples Therapist Couch Summary
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The Couples Therapist Couch 288: Relationship Repair with Shane Birkel

This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit https://helloalma.com/dg/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=privatepractice to learn more

Sign up for the June 2026 Cohort of Shane’s Certified Couples Intensive Training (CIT): https://cit.shanebirkel.com/

Get the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/

Join the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new 

In this solo episode, Shane talks relationship repair. Hear why repair is one of the most underrated skills in a relationship, the research experiments behind relationship repair, why the rupture is inevitable, why repair is so hard for so many couples, and how to help your clients build their capacity for repair. Here's a small sample of what you'll hear in this episode:

• The difference between shame and healthy guilt
• The receiving partner's role, repair is relational and requires both people to turn toward each other
• Four things therapists can do: slow down and make repair visible, coaching it in real time in the room
• Repair is a practice, not something you get right the first time
  
• How trust in repair snowballs positively, giving each other the benefit of the doubt

Show Notes

• 288: Relationship Repair with Shane Birkel
• This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit https://helloalma.com/dg/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=privatepractice to learn more
• [0:27] Repair is one of the most underrated skills in therapy
• [1:25] Couples stuck in the same fight, not lacking motivation but lacking the ability to come back to each other
• [2:38] The four-part relationship cycle: harmony, rupture, repair, reconnection
• [3:07] How rupture and repair begin in infancy and shape attachment for life
• [5:05] What happens when repair doesn't come, how early experiences of disconnection shape personality and attachment style
• [6:53] Rupture is inevitable, the goal is not to avoid it but to develop the capacity for repair
• [7:49] What separates healthy relationships from distressed ones
• [8:46] The human truth underneath repair: mistakes don't make you a bad person, but shame distorts that message
• [9:44] Shane's personal example of pushing a kid at recess, a teacher who didn't shame him, and what a healthy repair felt like
• [10:41] Being grabbed and told "you're a bad kid" and the belief that follows into adulthood
• [11:35] What healthy repair modeled in childhood actually gives a person
• [12:04] Part of what couples therapy does is give people that experience for the first time
• [12:31] This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit https://helloalma.com/dg/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=privatepractice to learn more
• [13:27] Why repair is so hard, shame collapses people inward and leaves no room for the other person
  [14:24] The two shame responses that block repair: doubling down and defending, or collapsing into self-criticism
  [15:23] The difference between shame and healthy guilt 
  [16:20] What real repair actually looks like is not a forced apology or a rushed resolution
  [16:48] The first ingredient of repair: acknowledgment, reflecting back the other person's experience before saying sorry
  [17:17] The second ingredient: accountability without defensiveness, no "but," no explaining it away
  [17:46] The third ingredient: "I'm sorry I hurt you" vs. "I'm sorry you feel that way" 
  [18:19] The fourth ingredient: a commitment to do better, not an ultimatum promise it will never happen again
  [18:45] The receiving partner's role, repair is relational and requires both people to turn toward each other
  [19:47] Why safety is the foundation of repair 
  [20:43] When both partners hold that commitment, rupture stops being terrifying
  [21:31] Four things therapists can do: slow down and make repair visible, coaching it in real time in the room
  [22:29] Addressing the shame underneath when repair attempts fall flat 
  [23:26] Helping both partners develop compassion for each other's difficulty with repair
  [23:55] Repair is a practice, not something you get right the first time
  [24:48] When couples learn to repair well, rupture stops being evidence that the relationship is broken
  [25:41] How trust in repair snowballs positively, giving each other the benefit of the doubt
  [26:05] Join he first cohort of the Couples Intensive Therapy Training, June 23–27 in Denver
• This episode is brought to you by Alma. Visit https://helloalma.com/dg/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=paid&utm_campaign=privatepractice to learn more

What is The Couples Therapist Couch?

This podcast is about the practice of Couples Therapy. Many of the episodes are interviews with leaders in the field of Relationships. The show is meant to help Therapists and Coaches learn how to help people to deepen their connection, but in the process it explores what is most needed for each of us to love, heal, and grow. Each week, Shane Birkel interviews an expert in the field of Couples Therapy to explore all about the world of relationships and how to be an amazing therapist.

Learn more about the Couples Therapy 101 course: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/

Find out more about the Couples Therapist Inner Circle: https://www.couplestherapistcouch.com/inner-circle-new

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:00
Repair only works when both people trust that the other person is fundamentally committed to not being emotionally harmful.

00:11
Welcome to The Couples Therapist Couch, the podcast for couples therapists, marriage counselors, and relationship coaches to explore the practice of couples therapy. And now, your host, Shane Birkel.

00:27
Hey everybody. Welcome back to The Couples Therapist Couch. This is Shane Birkel, and this is the podcast that's all about the practice of couples therapy. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and the goal of this podcast is to help you learn how to more effectively work with couples and possibly even learn how to have a better relationship. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates.

00:56
Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks. Visit HelloAlma.com or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. All right, I'm going to dive right in today. I want to talk about something that I think is one of the most important and uh most underrated skills in couples therapy. I mean, it is something that I think therapists think about a lot and talk about a lot, but I think we could talk about it even more, and that is repair.

01:25
If you've been doing couples work for any length of time, know what I'm talking about. You know this kind of scenario where a couple comes in, they've had the same fight again. Maybe it's about the dishes or the kids or money or who said what last Tuesday. They're both frustrated, not just about the fight itself, but about the fact that they keep having it. They keep feeling stuck in the cycle. Like they're stuck in a loop they can't get out of.

01:54
And a lot of the time what's missing isn't communication skills. It is an insight. It is an even motivation. A lot of times they really want to change, but what's missing is the ability to come back to each other after something goes wrong. And over weeks and months and years, this can really lead to a lot of feeling of disconnection in their relationship where they start feeling like they can't open up to each other.

02:25
And that's why repair is so important. Today I'm going to talk about what it actually is, why it's so hard for so many couples, and what we can do as therapists to help.

02:38
I think about repair as part of a larger cycle that every relationship moves through. And I'll describe it like this. There's harmony and good feelings, a period of feeling connected and safe and good with each other. And then something happens. A fight, a misunderstanding, a moment where someone feels hurt or unseen or dismissed. And so that's the rupture. And then hopefully.

03:07
There's repair, the process of coming back to each other after something has gone wrong. And then reconnection. And then the cycle starts again. So harmony, rupture, repair, reconnection. And this starts from infancy. There's a researcher named Ed Tronic who did uh something called the still face experiment where he had infants. You could find these videos on YouTube. I think they're really interesting.

03:37
He had infants and their mothers come in to do the research experiment. And I think the infants would be like 12 months old, 18 months, somewhere around there. And they'd be sitting in their chair and the mother would be interacting with them in a really healthy way as mothers do. And it was cute. And then the researcher would say, okay, now I just want you to make a still face.

04:07
as you look at the baby, don't react to what it's doing. The baby's trying to talk to the mother, trying to keep doing the play that they were doing before. And the mother is just sitting there with a still face, not reacting, not connecting. And you can see the stress in the baby uh after a very short period of time, maybe 10, 20 seconds. The baby is trying to make a bid for connection to talk, to do the

04:37
playful uh interaction and the mom is just, you know, and there was this one baby who was pointing to the other side of the room and the mother was no longer following what the baby was doing. Right? So this is like a rupture. And, you know, in that scenario, after, I don't know, less than a minute, it seems like forever when you're watching it, but it's probably 30 seconds to a minute or something like that. The mother,

05:05
reconnects and says, Oh, I'm here. know, and a lot of times by that time in under a minute, the baby was already crying and starting to get really upset and really dysregulated. The important thing to remember, if you imagine the children, let's say there's a baby like that in a crib and it's the middle of the night and they're calling out or they're crying and the parents are sleeping through it. Now,

05:34
No parents are perfect and all of us make mistakes, but that child is having an experience that's going to influence how they see the world and how they're going to deal with emotions for the rest of their life. And so in a healthy family, let's say the parent finds them the next day uh when they go to get the baby up from the crib and hopefully there's some sort of

06:01
uh loving experience that the child has with the parent, which is sort of like a repair. Even if the parent doesn't really know it's a repair in that case, because they didn't even know something was wrong, but the baby cries, the parent comes to them, and they can go back to feeling safe and secure in their attachment with the parent. Now, it's really bad when

06:25
Babies don't have that kind of repair opportunity or the reconnection opportunity. When they grow up in really emotionally abusive families or even physically abusive, when the parents um are either criticizing the child or just really avoidant of the child and the child tries to do these things for some period of time but then ends up giving up. And again, these are part of the way in which we learn

06:53
our attachment styles and become who we are in our personalities. And there's some, there's one thing that I think is really important for couples to understand and for us as therapists to be able to communicate clearly. The goal is not to avoid the rupture, right? I mean, when I was talking about children, it could be that your child wants another cookie and you might say no, because that is the healthiest thing for the child at that point. And they're going to be really upset.

07:23
So there's going to be rupture in every relationship. The key is that you can show up in a healthy way. Rupture is inevitable. The most loving, conscious, committed couples on the planet are still going to have moments where something goes wrong between them. Or one person wants something different than the other person. So another person feels hurt.

07:49
or one person misreads a situation or just has a hard day and sometimes that comes across toward the partner. What separates healthy relationships from distressed ones is not the absence of that rupture. It's the capacity for repair. And there's something I find really beautiful about this when couples learn to repair well, when they develop the trust and the skills to come back to each other after things go wrong, the connection actually deepens every time they go through the cycle.

08:18
because now they have the evidence and the experience, right? We can go through these hard things together and then we can repair. And that builds real trust over time, not the absence of conflict because a lot of times when there's no conflict at all, people aren't really speaking their truth. But the consistent experience of finding their way back to each other is what really builds that trust.

08:46
So before I talk about why repair is so hard, I want to start with something more fundamental. It's part of being human to be imperfect. We all make mistakes. We all say things we wish we hadn't. We all have moments where we show up worse than how we really want to. It's not in a way that's maybe not in alignment with our values even. And that's not a character flaw. That's just part of being human. But when we grow up,

09:14
in families or societies where mistakes aren't allowed, where mistakes means you're in trouble or you're going to be shamed. And, um, you know, there's a lot of punishment and shaming rather than warmth. Something gets distorted. The message that gets absorbed is not just that I did something wrong. It's that I am something wrong. There's something wrong with me inherently. And let me give you a quick example from my own childhood.

09:44
I remember we were playing soccer at recess. I was really young and I was getting angry at this other kid during the game and I ended up pushing him and the teacher saw it happen and pulled me aside and she didn't. Thankfully she was uh really good with kids. She didn't yell at me or tell me I was a bad kid. She had a conversation with me about what to do when I was feeling angry and then she asked me to write an apology note to the other kid.

10:13
When I gave it to him, we ended up having a really good conversation. We both said we were sorry. I actually think we gave each other a hug and then it was over and we moved on and we ended up being really good friends after that. And that's a healthy repair. The teacher addressed what happened without shaming me as a person. And she gave me a way to make it right. And the repair that followed was genuine. It wasn't forced. It wasn't one sided.

10:41
and it actually brought us closer rather than leaving a residue of resentment or humiliation. Now imagine a different version of that same moment. Imagine an adult who grabs a kid by the arms, by the arm and says, what's wrong with you? You're a bad kid. Go sit on the bench. Right? Same behavior, completely different response.

11:07
The child who experienced that second version walks away with something different, not a lesson about how to handle anger or how to repair a relationship, but a belief. I am bad. Something is wrong with me. That belief follows people into adulthood, into their marriages and into the couple's therapy room. Healthy repair is something that should be modeled in the family of origin. A parent who can say to a child, you made a mistake.

11:35
You're still a good person. Everybody makes mistakes. And here's how we take responsibility for it. That gives a child an incredible gift. You're showing them that the accountability and worthiness can coexist, right? That you don't have to choose between being honest about what you did and feeling okay about yourself. You can make mistakes and still be a good person. Most of the couples who come into your office never receive that.

12:04
So part of what we're doing in couples therapy is giving people that experience for the first time in the room together. Building a private practice can be challenging. Filing all of the right paperwork is time consuming and tedious. And even after you're done, it can take months to get credentialed and start seeing clients. That's why Alma makes it easy and financially rewarding to accept insurance. When you join Alma, you can get credentialed within 45 days.

12:31
and access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers. They also handle all of the paperwork from eligibility checks to claim submissions and guarantee payment within two weeks of each appointment. Plus, when you join ALMA, you'll get access to time-saving tools for intakes, scheduling, treatment plans, progress notes, and more in their included platform. ALMA helps you spend less time on administrative work and more time offering great care to your clients.

12:59
visit helloalma.com or click the link in the show notes to learn more. So if repair is so important, why is it so hard for so many people? And the answer is almost always that it comes back to shame. I've talked a lot about shame recently. If you listen to the 4C series, it's part of that. But in the context of repair, shame does something really specific and really destructive.

13:27
It makes the person who did something wrong or who perceives them as having done something wrong, collapse inward. The focus goes entirely towards themselves. I feel horrible. I'm the worst. Something is wrong with me. And as a defense to that, sometimes people move up into blame and sort of think, who can I find a blame for this situation? Because then it's pointing that shame toward

13:56
outward because it feels so uncomfortable for them to feel inward. But when they're pointing it at themselves, there's no room left for the other person. Real repair requires turning toward your partner. It requires staying present with their pain and their experience, even when that's uncomfortable. It requires being willing to say, can see that I hurt you and I'm sorry, and that matters to me. Not as a performance, not to make

14:24
the discomfort go away, but as a genuine expression of care. Shame makes that almost impossible because the focus is entirely on self going inward. The person who has collapsed into shame isn't thinking about their partner's experience. They're trying to survive their own. And what often happens instead of repair is one of two things. The person doubles down, they defend themselves, they explain it, try to explain it away.

14:53
or try to explain why what they did was justified. They find a way to make it their partner's fault. And, you know, they become shaming toward the other person oftentimes. Or they collapse. They say, I'm the worst. I ruined everything. I don't know why you put up with me. Or they just refuse to have the conversation with the other person. They just disappear. And that might look like accountability, but it's actually still about them.

15:23
They're still preoccupied with themselves rather than moving into compassion for the other person. There's no real turning toward the other person in that. So healthy guilt is something different. It's similar to shame, but it's the healthy form of what makes real repair possible. And this is a distinction I talked about during the episode about compassion. Shame says I'm bad.

15:52
Healthy guilt says, did something that hurt someone I care about and I feel bad because I care about them. Healthy guilt keeps the focus on the other person. It's the feeling that actually motivates you to repair, not because you want to stop feeling bad about yourself, but because you genuinely care about the person you hurt. And that's the internal shift that has to happen for repair to be real.

16:20
So what does a real repair actually look like in practice? The first thing I want to say is that repair is not a forced apology. It's not a rushed resolution where both people agree just to move on because the discomfort is too much to sit with. And it's not one person collapsing into self-criticism while the other person has to manage their feelings. Real repair has a few essential ingredients. The first is acknowledgement.

16:48
making the other person feel like their experience actually matters. Not jumping straight to I'm sorry and then moving on, but actually taking a moment to reflect back what they experienced. I can see that what I said was really hurtful. I understand why you feel dismissed in that moment. That matters to me. And when people start to do this, the other person is already building back the trust. They can sort of see my partner gets it.

17:17
which makes me feel like it's less likely to happen again in the future. The second is accountability without defensiveness. This is one of the hardest things for most people owning up to what happened without immediately adding a but without explaining the reasons why it makes sense that you acted the way you did. You can share your perspective, but that comes later when you get your turn. First, the other person needs to feel heard and understood. So,

17:46
You have to set aside your own experience and focus in on the experience of your partner. If you're willing to be a listener in that moment. The third is a genuine expression of care. Not, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm sorry I hurt you. That distinction matters a lot. You know, one is an apology for the other person's feelings. The other is an apology for your impact on them.

18:15
And people can feel the difference immediately.

18:19
The fourth is a commitment to do better, not a promise that this will never happen again, because sometimes we can't predict the future. And I don't want people to make an ultimatum promise of this will never happen again. But a genuine expression of, don't want to show up the way that way with you. I want to do better. The commitment is what starts to rebuild trust over time. And it's like,

18:45
It's like, again, we all make mistakes, but we want to have a sense that this is what I'm shooting for. My goal is to show up in this way. I don't want to make it sound like I'm feel justified in my behavior. There's something else worth naming. The other partner has a role in the repair too. Repair is not just something one person does to the other. Both people have to be willing to come back toward each other.

19:11
The partner who was hurt has to be willing at some point to let the repair land to receive it. And maybe that's not going to happen in the moment. They don't have to pretend like nothing happened, but at some point they have to be able to say, I hear you, I feel that, and I'm willing to move toward you again. And again, they can take their time with that, but um that's where it starts to become relational. And when both people can do that, when both people can turn toward each other after something has gone wrong,

19:41
then there's uh a possibility for real connection.

19:47
There's one more thing I want to say about what makes repair possible and it has to do with safety. Repair only works when both people trust that the other person is fundamentally committed to not being emotionally harmful. If I'm not sure whether my partner is going to treat me with respect when things get hard, I can't be vulnerable enough to repair. And I don't think people should open up if someone's not a safe person. I can't open up and say, here's what I experienced and here's what I need because

20:16
I don't know whether that vulnerability is going to be met with care or used against me. And I talk a lot about something, you know, one phrase for it is commitment to no harm. It's a decision to never be emotionally harmful to another person. Even when you're hurt, even when you're angry, even when you feel completely justified, even if your partner said something hurtful, that doesn't give you the right to be hurtful back.

20:43
Whatever needs to be said can be said with honesty and firmness and still with respect. And when both partners have made that commitment, not just as a concept, but as a way of operating in their relationship, the safety that creates is very, very meaningful because now rupture isn't terrifying. Now when something goes wrong, both people know that the other person is going to stay in the conversation with them. And again, that doesn't have to happen right away.

21:13
You can take some time, take like a time out to regroup, but there's that commitment that they're not going to be attacked or abandoned or humiliated. And that safety is what makes repair become more and more just a part of what happens in the relationship.

21:31
And that builds a lot of trust and confidence for people. So what can we do as therapists to help couples build this capacity? The first thing is to slow down and make it visible. A lot of couples have never actually seen a healthy repair happen. They don't have a template for what it looks like. So one of the most powerful things we can do is coach them through a repair in the room in real time. This might mean pausing in the middle of a session when something has gone wrong between them and saying, okay, oh let's slow this down. Let's work with this right here.

22:02
This is an opportunity to practice repair. Let's see what it looks like when you actually try to come back to each other. And we can gather a lot of information when couples try to do this. And then coaching them through it step by step, helping the person who did something hurtful, stay present with their partner's experience rather than defending themselves, helping the person who was hurt stay open enough to receive the repair when it's offered.

22:29
and then reflecting back to both of them what just happened. Did you feel that? That's what repair can feel like, trying to help them become conscious of what's happening. The second thing to address is the shame that gets in the way. When a repair attempt falls flat, when someone collapses into self-criticism or doubles down on defensiveness, that's almost always the protection around shame. And the intervention isn't to just push harder into the repair,

22:58
You know, we have to sort of slow down as a therapist, kind of start to gently try to uncover what's underneath the behavior and address what's happening for that person. You know, what just got activated for you? What does this moment remind you of? And often that opens up a family of origin piece, you know, and they can begin to have that consciousness and curiosity about the story of where they learned.

23:26
that mistakes mean something about who they are as a person. The third thing is to help both partners develop compassion for each other's difficulty with repair. The person who struggles to apologize without defending themselves isn't doing it to be difficult. They're protecting themselves from a level of shame that feels unbearable. The person who struggles to receive their repair isn't being stubborn. They're protecting themselves from being hurt again.

23:55
And when both partners can understand that about each other, the repair process becomes less adversarial and much more collaborative. And the fourth thing, and I think this is the most important, is to help couples understand that repair is a practice. It's not something you get right the first time. It's something you build over time. Every time they move through the cycle, rupture, repair, reconnection,

24:21
they can get a little bit better and better at it. They're building evidence that they can do it, and that evidence is what transforms the relationship over time. I wanna close with something I find really meaningful about this work. When couples learn to repair well, something shifts in the whole texture of their relationship. Rupture stops being something to avoid at all costs. It stops being evidence that their relationship is broken.

24:48
And it starts being something as hard as it is, they know they can get through. And this is, you know, goes back to meaning making or beliefs. You know, when people think that the rupture means we don't have a good relationship, it starts to feel much, much more heavy. I've worked with couples who have been through huge ruptures, betrayals, years of disconnection, things that seemed almost impossible to come back from.

25:15
And what I've seen over and over is that when both people are willing to do the work of repair, to really do it, not just go through the motions, the connection that comes out of the other side is often deeper than anything they had before. Because now they know something about themselves and about each other that they didn't know before. They know they can stay. They know they can come back. They know that their relationship is big enough to hold what's real.

25:41
And that's what makes repair possible. Not a perfect relationship, but a real one. And, you know, I often see how this can snowball in a really positive direction. Just like things snowball in a negative direction sometimes. When people start having trust in the process, they start giving each other the benefit of the doubt.

26:05
So that's it for today. I hope this has been useful for you thinking about how you work with couples in your practice. If you've been following along with the 4C series that I put out a few weeks ago, and you want to go deeper into this kind of work, I want to let you know that I'm running the first cohort of the couples intensive therapy training this June in Denver. It's actually a one year experience, but it begins with five days together.

26:33
June 23rd through 27th, as I said, in Denver. So there are still uh a few spots available. You can find all the details in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. This is Shane Birkel, and this is The Couples Therapist Couch. Take good care, and I'll see you next time. The episode this week is brought to you by Alma. They make it easy to get credentialed with major insurance plans at enhanced reimbursement rates. Alma handles all of the paperwork and guarantees payment within two weeks.

27:02
visit HelloAlma.com or click on the link in the show notes to learn more. Thank you again, everybody. This is Shane Birkel and this is The Couples Therapist Couch podcast. It's all about the practice of couples therapy. I hope you have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye, everybody!