Why Better Relationships Begin With Waking Up

Beatrice Chestnut | August 14, 2026

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to have better relationships. We learn communication techniques. We read about attachment styles. We wonder whether we’ve found the right partner or whether we’re repeating old mistakes. We ask why relationships can feel so difficult when connection is one of our deepest human needs.

All of those questions are important. But underneath them is another question that I think matters even more: Do you actually know yourself?

It may seem like an odd question. After all, you’ve spent your entire life with yourself. Who could possibly know you better? And yet one of the humbling truths about being human is that much of what drives us remains outside our conscious awareness. And so when relating to others, we often react before we understand why. We repeat patterns we promise ourselves we will never repeat—even when this leads to suffering. We have the same arguments, make the same assumptions, and sometimes find ourselves in the same kinds of relationships without fully understanding how we got there.

Welcome to being human!

The patterns that shape our lives don’t simply appear out of nowhere. Starting very early, we develop ways of navigating the world, protecting ourselves, getting our needs met, and adapting when we don’t get the love or connection we need. Over time, these strategies become so familiar that we stop seeing them as adaptations and start believing, “This is just who I am.”

But what if it isn’t?

What if some of the ways you think, feel, and relate to other people are not the deepest expression of who you are, but habitual strategies you developed to make your way through a world populated by unconscious humans? If that’s true, then you aren’t stuck with them.

We can learn to observe our automatic reactions and habitual defensive patterns instead of acting them out over and over. We can understand where they come from, that they developed out of our need to protect ourselves from pain, and learn to have more compassion for ourselves. Eventually, we can learn to let go of the patterns that no longer serve us.

This is where healthier relationships begin.

To improve our relationships—or to simply start on the path to finding new ones—we first need to learn about ourselves. We need to know how to connect to our own hearts. When we know that we can accept ourselves and be there for ourselves, without needing that support from outside ourselves, we don’t need to operate from the fear that someone can’t be there for us in the exact way we imagined.

The problem is that most of us were never really taught how to do this.

We may not have been affirmed emotionally or taught how to feel our feelings. We may not actually like ourselves. So we can’t be expected to simply “know” how to connect with the deepest parts of ourselves with self-love and self-compassion. Developing a high-quality connection to our inner selves takes conscious effort. And I can tell you from my own experience: none of this is easy.

Freud told us that what drives us is mostly not conscious. This is why we habitually repeat these patterns, even when they lead to painful outcomes—he called it Wiederholungszwang, which translates to “compulsion to repeat.” We usually call it “repetition compulsion,” and while Freud wasn’t right about everything, it remains one of his most helpful concepts. It describes the act of doing the same thing again and again, often unconsciously, because we’re driven by the hope for something better but unable to achieve it.

Later psychological theories shifted more attention to the nature and quality of our early relationships and how they shape us. Attachment Theory is one of these theories, helping us understand how those early experiences influence our relationships later in life and our basic capacity to attach—or connect—with others.

The Enneagram adds another important dimension. It reveals some of the inborn tendencies that affect our experiences then and today. It gives us a window into the patterns that make up our inborn tendencies, helping us understand how nature and nurture work together to shape our personalities and relationship challenges. And, perhaps even more importantly, it gives us a map to become aware of them and ultimately shift them.

That’s one of the reasons I have worked with the Enneagram for more than three decades. I use it in my own relationships all the time. And I definitely don’t approach this work as someone who has relationships figured out. I am a flawed fellow human who knows how difficult connection can be from personal experience—and how much understanding our own patterns can help.

Most people encounter the Enneagram as a personality typology, and it certainly is that. It describes our characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving, and the motivations behind them, including the patterned ways we relate to other people. But the Enneagram is also an empowering map of transformation. With roots in ancient Wisdom traditions, it points toward the larger journey of human development.

Throughout history, those traditions have described the ordinary human condition as a kind of “sleep state.” The term may not make sense—how can we be “asleep” when we drive cars, do our jobs, make decisions, raise children, and manage complicated lives? “Sleep” in this case means as a lack of awareness. It’s like living on autopilot, performing all those daily tasks while not being actively conscious of and present to the habitual patterns we play out every day that are rooted in the adaptations we developed early in life. It’s where repetition compulsion comes from.

One of the teachers associated with the deeper Wisdom tradition connected to the Enneagram, G. I. Gurdjieff, put the problem much more provocatively. He said that human beings, in our ordinary state, are like machines.

It sounds harsh. But he was pointing to the mechanical quality of those same unconscious patterns. We react automatically. We defend ourselves automatically. We repeat the strategies we learned long ago without realizing that we’re doing it. And even when we get a glimpse of what causes the suffering connected to our automatic defensive patterns, the power of the mechanicity behind them makes it hard for us to know how to change.

And then we try to have relationships with other people who are doing exactly the same thing—who are also asleep and stuck in their repetitive defensive patterns.

When two sleepwalking machines try to love each other, what could possibly go wrong?

However—the great thing about relating to others is that relationships make our automatic patterns really easy to see, because other people activate those places in us where we were hurt before and thus where we are most defended. They disappoint us, misunderstand us, need things from us, fail to give us what we want, or trigger old fears we may not even know we have. When that happens, we can become controlling, accommodating, distant, anxious, angry, critical, or self-protective before we have any conscious awareness of what is going on.

From inside the reaction, we usually think the problem is obvious: Look at this bad thing this person is doing to me. We blame the person that is hurting us. And then we project all our unconscious fears and expectations onto the other person—making it even more difficult to see ourselves and feel safe enough to open up to others.

But the Enneagram gives us an opportunity to become curious about something else: What is happening in me right now? What familiar pattern has been activated? What am I afraid of? What am I trying to protect?

That shift matters because we cannot change a pattern we cannot see. And the Enneagram shines a light on our patterns in a powerful way—especially the ones we cannot see without some sort of help.

This is what I mean by waking up. We start observing our personality—our habitual, ego-based way of moving through the world—instead of automatically identifying with everything it tells us we should be or do. We become more aware of our mechanical reactions, which means we gradually gain more freedom to consciously choose to not act them out.

The Enneagram is valuable not because it gives us nine increasingly sophisticated ways of explaining why we behave badly. If learning your type only leads to “Well, I’m a Six, so of course I worry,” or “I’m an Eight, so I get mad sometimes,” you’ve missed the point. The descriptions of our types are supposed to help us see the machine in action so we can become less mechanical.

And relationships give us endless opportunities to practice this.

This is also why one of the most common Enneagram questions has a very simple answer. People often ask, what type is ideal for me?

Well, no type is better than the other. What matters is how self-aware we become. The best partner is someone who is willing to look at their own patterns and do the (uncomfortable) work of growing through witnessing them, understanding them, and changing them.

When we remain unconscious, our relationships suffer. We keep doing what we’ve always done, playing out the same old patterns dictated by our fears, survival strategies, and old ways of protecting ourselves from pain. But when we become more mindful and aware, we begin to see the ways we get defensive in the moment and can choose to put down some of those defenses. We also grow our capacity to see others as they actually are, instead of through the filter of what we need, fear, or expect from them.

The better connected we become to ourselves, the more freedom we have in our connections with others. We can experience disappointment without immediately assuming abandonment. We can face conflict without treating it as a threat to our whole sense of self. We can care deeply about another person without making them entirely responsible for our safety, worth, or happiness.

We become better relationship material.

The work we do on ourselves has the power to transform our partnerships, friendships, families, communities, and every other relationship we touch.

We can wake up. We can grow up. We can learn to notice what we think, feel, and do without judging ourselves and losing ourselves in our need to protect ourselves. And, little by little, as we become more conscious, we become more capable of bringing that self-awareness and presence to our connections.