Repair

The key to healthy relationships that involve such ruptures is repair—repair, repair, repair. Repair is of central importance in healthy, secure attachments. Repair is an interactive process in which the rupture is recognized, reconnection is established, and attunement and resonance are experienced as a soothing process.

Siegel defines repair as the central, definitional process of secure attachment—an interactive restoration of attunement following rupture that enables relational continuity.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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ruptures are common, can be small and not life threatening, and most important can be repaired. The Reciprocity, Rupture, and Repair process is designed as a way to track reciprocity and build a habit of repair.

Dana presents repair as a teachable, habituable skill embedded in the Reciprocity-Rupture-Repair clinical protocol, through which clients wire new neural expectations of relational safety.

Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018thesis

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In each of the forms of insecure attachment, there is a problem with connection and repair. In the avoidantly attached dyad, connections are consistently infrequent and unsoothing; there is no repair.

Siegel differentiates insecure attachment patterns by their characteristic failures of repair, arguing that the absence or distortion of repair is the diagnostic signature of developmental relational trauma.

Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis

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The sense of falling out of reciprocity into rupture brings with it a neuroception of danger. The experience is often described in its simplest terms as a sense of moving from friend to stranger. The repair brings a return to the safety of friendship.

Dana frames repair in polyvagal terms as the autonomic restoration of safety after neuroception of danger, re-establishing the ventral vagal state associated with social engagement.

Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018thesis

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With a successful repair experience, clients begin to gain confidence in their abilities to engage in repair. Successful repair experiences invite a commitment to building a habit of repair.

Dana argues that repeated successful repair experiences are self-reinforcing, building autonomic confidence and consolidating the capacity for relational reconnection.

Dana, Deb, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, 2018supporting

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Repair allows our shame response to become part of personal growth (Schore 1999). We learn from our mistakes. Something went wrong and we learn ways of setting it right, of mending what was broke.

Dayton, drawing on Schore, positions repair as the developmental mechanism that transforms shame from a toxic, growth-inhibiting affect into an occasion for learning and self-integration.

Dayton, Tian, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Lasting Fulfillment, 2007supporting

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ruptures are common, can be small and not life threatening, and most important can be repaired. The Reciprocity, Rupture, and Repair process is designed as a way to track reciprocity and build a habit of repair.

Porges's foundational neurophysiological framework supports the same Reciprocity-Rupture-Repair model, grounding the clinical protocol in autonomic nervous system theory.

Porges, Stephen W., The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, 2011supporting

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bonding is inhibited to any free L particle which is in the immediate vicinity of another L particle which is doubly bonded... a free L particle can form bond(s) when it is at the end of a chain; and, especially, when it is positioned at a site where a chain has broken (i.e. a rupture site).

Thompson and Varela's autopoietic model describes membrane repair as a structurally governed self-organizing process, providing a biological homology to the psychodynamic concept of relational repair.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside

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We give each other support as we try to repair our lives. We do not have any place else to go. We must stick together and love one another and help one another while realizing there will be bumps.

The ACA recovery literature invokes repair as a collective, community-based process of restoring lives fractured by relational trauma, embedding the term in a fellowship model of mutual support.

INC , ACA WSO, ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES, 2012aside

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