The Mirror We Call Love

Looking back, I sometimes wonder if I unconsciously found my way into the field of marriage and family therapy.

I've always been fascinated by relationships and the way humans love one another. We write songs about it. We tell stories about it. Entire mythologies have been built around it. Across cultures and throughout history, love has remained one of the most universal and also mysterious parts of being human.

Long before I understood the psychology, I found myself asking the same questions:

Why do we choose the people we choose? Why can love feel so expansive one moment and so terrifying the next? Why do the people closest to us have the power to awaken emotions that seem far bigger than the moment itself?

Maybe it's the therapist in me. Or maybe it's the Libra Sun in my tenth house—a placement often associated with making relationships a central part of one's life's work. Whatever the reason, I've spent years trying to understand what draws two people together. And yet, no textbook or theory has taught me as much as being in love has.

My greatest teachers have been my own relationships.

They've introduced me to parts of myself I didn't know were still carrying grief. Parts that longed to be chosen. Parts that feared closeness as much as they craved it. Parts that learned, very early on, what love was supposed to feel like—and then spent years searching for that feeling again without ever realizing it.

I’ve come to believe that the intensity of our attraction often has less to do with another person...

...and more to do with what they awaken within us.

Reflections of the Past

Before we experienced romantic love, we experienced our first loves.

Our primary caregivers were our first experience of connection. Through them, we learned what it meant to be comforted, understood, celebrated, soothed, corrected, disappointed, and loved. They became our first mirrors, reflecting back not only who we were, but what relationships felt like.

Whether those experiences were nurturing, inconsistent, emotionally distant, or deeply attuned, they became woven into our nervous system. Without realizing it, we developed an internal template for love—one that would shape the way we experienced intimacy for years to come.

As children, we don’t question the love we’re given—we simply adapt to it. Whatever is modeled for us becomes our definition of closeness. We learn how conflict is handled. Whether emotions are welcomed or dismissed. Whether love feels steady or unpredictable. Whether our needs can be expressed openly or are better kept to ourselves.

Those experiences become more than memories… they become expectations.

Not because we consciously decide that's what love should be, but because those first relationships are the only language of love we know.

And lately I've been thinking about how many of us spend our adult lives trying to recreate a feeling we first experienced decades earlier. Not necessarily because it was healthy, but because it was familiar. There is something so tenderly human about returning to what our hearts first learned, even when part of us knows it no longer serves us.

Maybe that's why romantic relationships can feel so deeply affecting. They don't just bring another person into our lives—they bring us back into relationship with younger parts of ourselves. The parts that first learned what it meant to feel safe, chosen, rejected, unseen, or held.

And sometimes we’re not just falling in love with another person.

We’re meeting the parts of ourselves that have been waiting for love to feel different.

The Invisible Blueprint

One of the theories that has shaped the way I understand relationships most is Imago Therapy. At its core is a simple idea: the people we're drawn to are often shaped by our earliest experiences of love.

As children, our caregivers become our first blueprint for relationships. We don't just internalize how they loved us—we internalize who they were. Their strengths and their limitations. The qualities that made us feel safe, and the qualities that left us longing for something more.

I invite you to pause here for a moment and bring to mind the people who first taught you what love felt like. What were the qualities they embodied? What did they consistently offer? And what was harder for them to give?

For example:

Gifts:

• Playful

• Dependable

• Affectionate

• Adventurous

Wounds:

• Emotionally unavailable

• Critical

• Controlling

• Inconsistent

None of us grows up with caregivers who are all one thing.

The people who raise us are beautifully complex. They have qualities that nourish us and qualities that challenge us. They might offer us incredible gifts while, often unintentionally, leaving behind places that ache.

We carry all of it.

Our earliest experiences of love become woven into us as an internal blueprint for what connection feels like. The psyche doesn’t separate these experiences into “good” and “bad.” It holds them together. The gifts alongside the wounds. The moments we felt cared for alongside the moments that left something unresolved.

To me, this is one of the psyche’s greatest expressions of wisdom. It remembers both what nurtured our growth and what interrupted it because it is always moving toward wholeness.

The stories that remain unfinished don’t stop asking for our attention.

They become part of an invisible blueprint.

And they also have a way of resurfacing through the people we love, and inviting us to write a different ending.

Love Is a Mirror Before It Is a Sanctuary

If our relationships carry the potential for a different ending, they must first reveal the story we’ve been living all along.

This is why I often think of love as a mirror before I think of it as a sanctuary.

The beginning of a relationship is often filled with dopamine, oxytocin, and the excitement of discovering someone new (often referred to as the “Honeymoon Phase”). But as the relationship progresses and the neurochemistry begins to stabilize, the mirror comes into focus. It starts reflecting parts of ourselves that have been there all along—parts we may never have noticed until someone stood close enough to illuminate them.

Our unmet needs.

Our deepest longings.

Our fears of rejection, abandonment, or not being enough.

Even the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to hide.

Psychology calls this projection. While we often think of projection as seeing our own flaws in someone else, I’ve found in my work and life that it’s so much more than that. We project our hopes, our expectations, our wounds, and our unlived potential. We unconsciously ask another person to carry pieces of ourselves that we've never fully understood.

Maybe that’s why relationships can feel so activating.

A delayed text isn’t always just a delayed text.

A disagreement isn’t always just a disagreement.

Sometimes what’s happening in the present is touching a story that began years ago.

I’ve noticed that our strongest emotional reactions often tell us less about the moment itself and more about the meaning we’ve attached to it. Beneath almost every trigger is an older experience, an ancient belief, or an unmet need that has shaped the way we move through love.

This is exactly why relationships can become such powerful vessels for healing.

They reveal what we may not have been able to access on our own.

They bring our unconscious right into the room between two people.

And once we can see it, we finally have the opportunity to meet it differently.

The Relational Alchemy

Take another look at the gifts and wounds exercise above.

You may begin to notice that the qualities you listed aren’t just descriptions of your caregivers. They may also describe qualities you’ve been drawn to in the people you’ve loved.

This is one of the ideas from Imago Therapy that has deeply resonated with me.

Our unconscious doesn’t only remember who loved us.

It remembers how love felt.

And because it’s always moving toward wholeness, it is often drawn toward people who carry both the gifts and the wounds of our earliest relationships—not because we’re looking to repeat the past, but because some part of us is still hoping for a different experience.

I've absolutely seen this unfold in my own life.

One of the wounds I carry from childhood is emotional absence.

My dad loved me in countless ways, but emotional presence wasn’t always something he knew how to offer. Somewhere along the way, parts of me learned that certain feelings were mine to carry alone. I became so good at tending to everyone else’s inner world that I slowly lost touch with my own.

Years later, I fell deeply in love with someone who carried remnants of that same quality.

Not because he was my father. Not because I was trying to recreate my childhood. But because something about the emotional experience felt familiar.

For a long time, I believed the healing would come if someone could finally love me in the way I’d always needed.

And now, after years of therapy and inner work, I see it much differently.

Instead of focusing on my partner’s emotional limitations and leading from my own ego, I had to get honest with myself. And once I did, I was able to see that the relationship had revealed the parts within me that had learned to disappear in order to stay connected.

So I turned inward.

I began sitting with the younger part of me who learned emotional closeness wasn’t always available. The part who stopped reaching. The part who believed she was too much, or not enough, to be fully met.

And as I learned to stay present with her, something unexpected happened.

The relationship itself became a sacred container. A beautiful sanctuary.

A place to practice saying what I would have once swallowed.

A place to let myself be seen instead of assuming I would be misunderstood or dismissed.

A place to discover that vulnerability didn’t always lead to disappointment—it could also lead to deeper intimacy.

Maybe this is the deeper purpose of love.

Not that another person heals our wounds for us.

But that they stand beside us as those wounds come into the light, giving us another opportunity to choose presence where there was once protection, openness where there was once fear, and connection where there was once longing.

To me, that is what it means for the psyche to move toward wholeness.

Not by finding the perfect partner.

But by allowing love to reveal every place within us that is still waiting to come home.

This is the relational alchemy I'm beginning to trust—the slow transformation of old survival strategies into new ways of loving.

Where the Mirror Leads

One of the things I love most about Imago Therapy is that it doesn’t see relationships as something we’re meant to simply have. It sees them as something we’re meant to grow through.

At its heart is a beautifully spiritual idea: that our primary relationship can become a catalyst for healing—not just individually, but together. Two people, each carrying their own unfinished stories, naturally finding one another and creating a space where those stories can finally be witnessed, understood, and transformed.

This kind of love asks something different of us. It asks us to loosen our grip on the ego’s need to be right, to stop seeing our partner as the problem to solve, and instead become curious about the inner world they carry. It asks us to listen beneath the words. To honor the reality of another person’s experience, even when it’s different from our own. To remember that the relationship itself is something living—something both people are responsible for tending to.

As much as I believe my partner came into my life to awaken something in me, I also believe I came into his life to awaken something in him.

Not to change him. Not to fix him.

But to reflect back the parts of himself that had been waiting to emerge.

My inner world has always been expansive.

I feel deeply. I ask difficult questions. I have a tendency to move toward emotion rather than away from it.

For a long time, I thought those parts of me were “too much” because they were the very parts that didn’t receive love growing up.

Now I wonder if they were also a gift.

Because I’ve watched my emotional openness become an invitation for someone I love to become more emotionally open, too.

I’ve watched conversations become deeper.

Silence become safer.

Feelings become more welcome.

Not because I taught him how to feel, but because love created enough safety for something that was already within him to begin unfolding.

And in the same way, his steadiness has become medicine for me.

Where I once rushed toward certainty, he has taught me patience.

Where I once feared emotional distance, he has shown me that presence isn’t always loud.

We have both become mirrors.

We have both become students.

We have both become teachers.

Maybe this is the sacred contract hidden inside every relationship.

Not that we arrive to complete one another, but that we arrive carrying the exact lessons the other’s soul has been waiting to encounter.

If we’re willing, love slowly begins transforming what was once unconscious into something conscious.

Fear into trust.

Protection into intimacy.

Old stories into new possibilities.

Today, when my partner and I inevitably bump into each other’s wounds, I no longer see it as evidence that something is wrong with us.

I see it as an invitation.

An invitation to slow down.

To become curious instead of defensive.

To remember that beneath every trigger is a younger version of each of us, still hoping to be met with a little more love than we knew before.

To love someone is to hold a light to the places they’ve forgotten how to see in themselves, while allowing them to do the same for you.

And maybe that’s what has always fascinated me about relationships.

Beneath the chemistry, the attraction, and even the conflict, there is something much deeper unfolding.

Two people gradually guiding one another back toward inner wholeness.

Back toward the parts of themselves that were never broken, only buried beneath old stories.

And maybe that is where the mirror has been leading us all along.

Not only toward each other.

But back to ourselves.