Vienna Pharaon believes there is something in your life that created a “rupture” of freedom, trust, safety, belonging, or self-worth.

Pharaon, a popular marriage therapist and the author of the book The Origins of You, describes this formative event as your “origin wound.”

“When I say ‘origin wound,’ I'm talking about that first experience that shifts the trajectory around the way that we see ourselves the way that we see each other the way that we see the world at large,” she told me in an interview.

If you’ve been reading The Profile for a while, you know that I’m very interested in the psychology of relationships — perhaps as a byproduct of my own childhood “origin wound” stemming from the witness of divorce. I’ve written deep-dives on relationship therapists including Esther Perel, John Gottman, Lori Gottlieb, and Orna Guralnik.

I’ve also interviewed my great-grandmother about her 53-year marriage, solicited marriage advice from hundreds of Profile readers, and tried to use the “Hanlon’s Razor” mental model to be a better partner.

And still, I’m eager to learn more. When I got the opportunity to interview Pharaon, I wanted to go deeper with her on the power of conflict, repair, and connection. “I think the relationship with repair is one of the most underrated things,” she says. “When we race to repair, then we can move out of disconnection much faster.”

Pharaon shares many practical insights in our conversation below, but she left me with one “brave” question that will help us gauge the health of our current partnerships: “What is it like to be in a relationship with me right now?”

—

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

(Below is an excerpt, but I encourage you to listen and watch to the full interview below.)

🎧 LISTEN.

The Relationship Therapist Helping Heal Your ‘Origin Wound’ Polina Marinova Pompliano Episode

🎬 WATCH.

—

How do you see these big life events: marriage, moving in together, or having kids together affect the partnership?

PHARAON: Transitions are expansive, and they also invite in grief, always, no matter how objectively good something might be where you're like, ‘Yes, I'm so excited to become a mother,’ or, ‘Yes, I'm so excited to marry this person,’ or ‘Yes, I'm so excited to move in and bring our lives together.’ There are these dialectical experiences where I can be excited and joyful and also nervous, afraid, and grieving something.

There's former versions of our lives that are different than what these transitions are bringing us to. We often talk about the loss of freedom when we are moving into some of these big transitions.

I like to see where there is the expansion and growth that is happening, but to also honor the grief that is presenting. Sometimes, when we reject the grief because we're like, ‘But I'm getting married, I should be happy,” or “I’m having a child, I should be happy,” we sort of force this idea, and we really disconnect from the full experience. [The experience] is multi-dimensional, and it has lots of feelings that almost feel like they contradict one another. We should allow [ourselves] to feel both joy and fear, and I'm allowed to experience excitement and loss simultaneously.

Acknowledging and honoring your experience is not synonymous with hating [the experience] or being ungrateful.

You always hear about the couples that have been together for decades, and they’re still so in love. What are the patterns that they exhibit?

I think there's a deep understanding of each other's internal world. If I were to ask you, ‘What is your partner struggling with right now? What is your partner feeling most excited and grateful for? What's he most inspired by? Who has she felt the closest to at this point in her life right now — which friend of hers? What fear does she have right now? Where is she feeling most insecure?’

Can you answer those questions? Or are you like, ‘Sh*t, I don't know any of those answers. Like I could take a stab, but I'm not sure because we haven't talked about it. I don't really know what's happening in your world.’

I posted something on Instagram not too long ago, where, you know, you have people interview elderly couples that they see together, and they're like, ‘What's the secret sauce?’ And a lot of times they say really cute things.

But I heard a couple once say, ‘We didn't want to get divorced at the same time.’ And I loved that answer. There was something about this concept of knowing and accepting that at different points in the relationship, one of us is going to lead a little bit more than the other, sometimes one of us is going to have a foot out or we're going to be like, ‘I don't feel super motivated or invested in the relationship,’ but the other person is holding possibility. They're able to see the way through even when the other person might be struggling to see the way through.

Obviously, the hope would be that we don't enter into this place too often, but the inevitability of these major transitions that we go through that sometimes have us questioning, like, ‘Ah, I don't know. I'm not sure,’ and you have one person who can see the path through.

So I loved that answer, and I think there's so much truth to honoring the ebbs and flows of life and the inevitability of hitting rough patches along the way, but that if one person can hold possibility and see the sightline, then we have a pretty good chance of finding our way through.

What’s one super specific, practical thing we can do today to make our relationships instantly better?

Think about one thing that you have not acknowledged, [but] that you would like to acknowledge in your partner, or your child, or your parent, or your friend. Look for something that you have not acknowledged that you can acknowledge, and a really brave question that I often ask couples is: ‘What's it like to be in relationship with me right now? And what could I be doing differently for this relationship to align more for you?’

And be willing to hear the answer.

… For more like this, make sure to sign up for The Profile here:

✨ Order my book, HIDDEN GENIUS below: