What Relationship Fights Teach us About the Missing Village
Why the Problem Was Never Our Relationship — It Was the Missing Village
Amy and I have the kind of connection people dream about—and the kind of triggers people divorce about. We share deep intimacy, emotional attunement, and a sense of home with each other that feels rare and sacred. Our parenting skills are phenomenal for all the same reasons. And yet, we have the biggest fights.
Not bickering. Not surface disagreements. But escalations that feel volcanic, sudden, and disorienting—the kind where we both walk away thinking, How did it get that big that fast… and what are we actually fighting about?
For a long time, we did what most couples do. We analyzed. We repaired. We studied communication, trauma, attachment styles, nervous systems, polarity, differentiation, self-referencing, and higher consciousness. We even wrote a book on rupture and repair. We gathered principles like two lovers walking an exotic shoreline, collecting treasures and seashells—things that felt intrinsically valuable, beautiful, and true.
We unpacked paradox after paradox, because paradise exists at the center of paradox.
Truth Is Revealed In Paradox.
What needs revealed is that which is hidden; hidden being the key word. Many of us can’t see truth because we get trapped in dualistic thinking: this is right and that is wrong; I am correct and you are not. Truth is revealed when we can hold the governing principle of paradox—that two seemingly opposing things can both be true at the same time.
My struggle has often been clinging to the rightness of my perspective, which automatically made the other perspective wrong. When I shift and truly see what the other person is seeing—and in marriage, that other person is your partner—something opens.
Paradox reveals a third way of seeing. A way that allows two opposing realities to coexist without judgment. Deepak Chopra calls this The Third Jesus. Developing the capacity to see paradox is one of the clearest paths to love, because it dissolves judgment.
One of my favorite paradoxes comes from Special Operations: slow is fast. Or as a Navy SEAL once told me, slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. This principle shows up at the highest levels of performance in every discipline. It also applies to relationships transitioning from what James Hollis calls the “Magical Other”—Disney’s version of happily ever after—to a sacred union rooted in sovereignty.
And yet, with all of our studying, therapy, white-boarding, and embodiment work, something still didn’t add up between Amy and me. Or as we say, the math ain’t mathing.
The deeper our intimacy grew, the stronger the bond became—and the bigger the fights got. When triggered, we rush. Rushed becomes frantic. Frantic is inefficient. When wounds are touched, communication heats up, accusations fly, and we defend wounded perceptions rather than stay connected.
Here’s the irony: the more bonded we are, the more dangerous disconnection feels. The more we love each other, the more terrifying it becomes when we can’t reach each other.
About a year ago, we stopped asking, “What’s wrong with us?” and started realizing that nothing was actually wrong with us at all.
Around the same time, I began following a deep intuition—what I call my internal radar—which led me into a year-long inquiry into the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” At the bottom of that rabbit hole, I received what I can only describe as a download—something I felt as words rather than heard as sound.
What came through was this:
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a village to heal the adult’s inner child.
The moment I felt it, the math finally mathed.
That shifted our question entirely. Instead of asking what was wrong with us, we began asking: What are we asking this relationship to carry?
Most people know the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child.” Almost no one talks about the second half of the truth: it takes a village to heal the inner child. When couples fight the way Amy and I fight, it’s rarely about the present moment. An old wound gets touched, the inner child feels unsafe, and the ego—the inner protector—rushes in to defend the wound.
The Ego
The ego isn’t the villain. It’s a pain-body bodyguard protecting subconscious wounded beliefs about ourselves. The problem is that when there is no village to distribute belonging, the relationship becomes the only place for safety, regulation, and repair. Amy ends up carrying my abandonment wounds. I end up carrying hers.
Humans were never meant to do this. No single relationship can. This is why we worship Disney love stories—relationships that magically never touch wounds and live happily ever after. It’s a lie.
Eckhart Tolle says it best: “Relationships are not here to make you happy. They are here to awaken you.” Awaken us to what? To the subconscious beliefs driving our protective patterns—patterns that sabotage our relationships, starting with our relationship to ourselves.
Beliefs don’t need truth to operate. They only need belief. And whatever is believed gets manifested. Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief explains this beautifully.
When Amy and I disconnect, it doesn’t feel uncomfortable—it feels dangerous. Voices rise. Certainty hardens. Perspective collapses. We lose access to the third way of seeing. Because every fight isn’t about what we’re fighting about; it’s about what we’re fighting for—to be seen, heard, and witnessed.
What’s being triggered is always a wounded perception: I am unlovable. I don’t matter. I’m not chosen. Every perception can be adjusted, but only when we wake up to the lie we’re unconsciously believing about ourselves.
Without a village, couples are forced to survive through compromise. Our culture praises compromise, but compromise is the near enemy of integrity. I’ve asked former Navy SEALs and Green Berets, “When an operation is compromised, is that good?” The answer is always the same: never.
When a marriage is compromising, it’s not because the relationship is broken. It’s because it’s carrying too much.
Here’s the part that surprised me most.
There are three systems we confuse with “having a village.”
Dysfunctional families—chaos without safety.
Functional families—structure without consciousness.
Higher-consciousness villages—structure and attunement.
Amy grew up in what anthropologists would call a functional family. Present parents. Good intentions. Care. Belonging. Parents in the bleachers. By Disney standards, it was wonderful. I grew up in the opposite—more Grimm’s fairy tale than Disney. Less rescue fantasy, more survival initiation.
I learned how to stay afloat like a piece of driftwood in a barren sea—reading the weather, adjusting my shape, surviving without a lighthouse. And yet, neither of us had a true village. We had village-shaped containers missing the soul of a village.
From this we all develop what psychologists call magical thinking: If I’m good enough, connection will stay. If I don’t upset anyone, I’ll be safe. If I lose connection, something is wrong with me. These beliefs don’t disappear in adulthood—they go underground.
When triggered, the body reacts long before the mind can intervene. The unconscious processes millions of bits of information per second while conscious awareness crawls. By the time you’re thinking, the nervous system has already decided.
This was the breakthrough: our relationship had become a single root system for safety, belonging, repair, and regulation. That’s not how biology works. Nothing thrives without an ecosystem.
Our fights weren’t proof of failure. They were signals of a missing village.
Here’s the reframe that changed everything:
the intensity of fights is not a sign of a bad relationship. It’s a sign of a relationship carrying the weight of a missing village. In a higher-consciousness village, the inner child wouldn’t panic at rupture, the ego wouldn’t need to attack, and disconnection wouldn’t feel like annihilation.
The village doesn’t threaten intimacy—it protects it. It removes impossible pressure so intimacy can steady instead of collapse.
Trauma doesn’t heal in isolation. As Jung said, we don’t get wounded alone and we don’t heal alone. Nervous systems heal through reliable, emotionally attuned environments. Environments always outperform intention.
When adults fight, it’s almost never because they’re immature or broken. It’s because their inner children are asking for something bigger than the marriage alone can provide.
Amy and I are still learning. We’re studying what a real village looks like—not socially, but somatically. What it means to be seen and regulated by many nervous systems. We no longer see our fights as failures. We see them as portals—signals that our nervous systems are still waiting for something humans have always needed: distributed belonging.
If your relationship feels intense, volatile, or exhausting, it doesn’t mean you chose wrong. It may mean you chose deeply in a world that forgot the village. And no single relationship, no matter how loving, can carry awakening alone.
Healing doesn’t happen by fixing the relationship. It happens by widening the field it lives in.
“Out beyond right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Rumi
