When relationships break, you notice it immediately. The conversation that suddenly feels forced. The meeting where everyone’s walking on eggshells. The family gathering you’re already dreading. You know something’s wrong. You just don’t know how to name it, much less fix it.

Most people focus on one of two things when they realise something’s broken: either they pour all their energy into fixing the relationship (trying to get the other person to acknowledge what happened, to change, to make things right), or they turn inward (therapy, processing, working on themselves) whilst avoiding the actual relationship entirely.

Both approaches miss something essential: repair doesn’t happen in one direction. It happens on two fronts simultaneously: with others and with yourself.

What breaks

When a rupture happens, two things break at once: what’s between you and the other person, and what’s happening inside you because of it.

The relational work is visible. It’s addressing what’s broken between you directly - the conversation you need to have, the boundary you need to set, the truth you need to speak. This work requires courage because it makes the rupture explicit. You’re naming what everyone else wants to pretend isn’t happening.

But here’s what most advice gets wrong: this work doesn’t require the other person’s cooperation to begin. You can’t control whether they acknowledge the harm. You can’t control whether they apologise or change or do their part. But you can control whether you stay silent or speak. Whether you accept their version of events or hold your own truth. Whether you remain in relationship on their terms or establish your own.

The internal work is less visible but equally essential. It’s what happens when you stop gaslighting yourself about what you experienced. When you stop minimising harm to keep the peace. When you stop explaining away behaviour that violated your boundaries.

At the repair clinic I run (aka Thanet Mediation Centre), I watch people arrive having done neither kind of work. They haven’t addressed what’s broken with the other person, and they haven’t processed what’s broken inside themselves. They’re stuck, waiting for the relationship to magically improve whilst the internal damage compounds.

Staying present in both

The hardest part isn’t doing one or the other. It’s holding both simultaneously.

You do the internal work (processing your experience, naming the harm, understanding its impact) whilst also showing up to the relationship itself. You don’t withdraw into solitary processing and call it healing. You don’t throw yourself at reconciliation whilst ignoring what it’s costing you internally.

You stay present to what’s happening between you and the other person AND what’s happening inside you because of what’s happening between you.

This requires particular attention. You’re tracking two things at once: the relationship’s condition and your own. You’re asking both “what does this relationship need?” and “what do I need?” You’re honest about the gap between those two questions and what it means.

Sometimes the relationship needs something you can’t give. Sometimes you need something the relationship can’t provide. Staying present in both means facing that reality rather than pretending one or the other doesn’t matter.

Why both matter

Repair fails when you focus exclusively on one dimension.

If you only do the relational work (trying endlessly to fix what’s broken between you) you accumulate damage internally that eventually makes continued relationship impossible. You’re pouring from an empty cup, fixing things for everyone else whilst breaking yourself in the process.

If you only do the internal work (processing endlessly without ever addressing the relationship directly) you create a fiction where you’ve “healed” whilst the actual fracture remains unaddressed. You’ve made peace with the broken thing without ever attempting to repair it.

Real repair requires both. It requires showing up to the relationship whilst also showing up to yourself. It requires staying in the tension between what you want the relationship to be and what it actually is. It requires doing your part of the work even when the other person won’t do theirs.

What’s coming

Over the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring what this actually looks like in practice. How to trust yourself when you’ve lost trust in the other person. How to do the work regardless of whether the relationship is restored.

This isn’t about pretending harm didn’t happen. It’s not about letting people off the hook. It’s about recognising that repair addresses broken things (trust, connection, safety, patterns) not broken people. And that you have agency to begin that work, even when you’re the only one willing to look at what’s broken.

The work of repair starts with recognising what actually needs attention: not broken people, but broken things.

Trust.

Connection.

Safety.

Patterns.

And each of those things need addressing both between you and within you.