Rupture and Repair: A Core Process in Healthy Relationship Dynamics

Every relationship - romantic, familial, or otherwise - experiences moments of rupture. These are the inevitable points where something misfires: a comment lands badly, a boundary is crossed, a need isn’t met, or emotions swell beyond what either person can manage in the moment. Rupture isn’t the problem. The absence of repair is.

When repair is missing, relationships begin to erode. This can show up in subtle or overt ways: shifting blame, avoiding accountability, offering surface-level apologies such as “I’m sorry you feel that way”, rushing to smooth things over to escape discomfort, insisting “Let’s not dwell on it,” performing niceness instead of engaging honestly, or even pretending nothing happened at all. These strategies might protect someone from vulnerability in the short term, but they leave the hurt person holding their pain alone.

Conflict, misunderstanding, and hurt are unavoidable because relationships are made of people — and people are imperfect. What follows the rupture is what determines whether a relationship grows stronger or grows brittle. Genuine repair involves acknowledging the harm, taking ownership for the part we played, and making meaningful efforts to put things right. These gestures act like a balm, helping to soothe what was wounded and rebuild trust.

When repair doesn’t happen, an emotional betrayal is felt. The injured party is left without validation or support, and over time this chips away at the felt sense of safety between two people. Intimacy becomes limited or impossible, needs go unmet, and the relationship can start to feel transactional, superficial, resentful, or ultimately unsustainable.

Relationship researcher John Gottman’s work has repeatedly demonstrated this pattern. In his decades-long studies of couples, he identified behaviours such as defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt as some of the strongest predictors of relationship breakdown. These patterns frequently show up when couples struggle to engage in effective repair after conflict (Gottman & Silver, 1999).

Healthy, intimate connection can’t thrive in a climate where conflict is avoided or mishandled. Therapy can help explore how someone learned to navigate conflict in the first place: the beliefs they absorbed, the strategies they had to adopt, the fears that get stirred up when something feels tense or uncertain. Do you shut down? Become defensive? Want to flee the situation altogether? Understanding these responses opens the door to doing things differently.

Rupture and repair is a rhythm rather than a one-time skill. When two people can move through this cycle together — acknowledging hurt, taking responsibility, reaching toward each other — the relationship gains resilience. Instead of fractures that never heal, you get a bond that becomes stronger at the broken places.

Written by Layla Eissa MBACP, Relational counselling & Psychotherapy

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Crown Publishers.