Therapist Insights: Falling Out of Love, Codependency, and Rekindling Connection

In this Therapist Insights episode of The Yearning Heart Podcast, Jennifer Lehr, LMFT, unpacks the deeper emotional themes from Episode 12, where Samantha shared her story of reconnection after separation.

Jennifer explores the emotional and psychological dynamics of falling out of love, the role of postpartum depression in creating disconnection, and how couples can rekindle intimacy by learning to communicate, express needs, and take responsibility for their relational patterns.

This episode also dives into attachment styles, codependency, and the importance of character in sustaining long-term love.

💗 If you’ve ever felt lost in your relationship, struggled with emotional disconnect, or wondered how to rebuild after crisis — this episode offers both clarity and compassionate tools.

💬 Topics We Explore:

• Why couples fall out of love (and how to reconnect)

• How postpartum depression affects intimacy and attachment

• Communication as a bridge to deeper connection

• Attachment styles and how they show up in conflict

• Codependency vs. interdependence

• The role of character, responsibility, and emotional regulation

• Understanding the roots of infidelity

• Healing family-of-origin wounds that influence love

• Growing individually and together

Chapters:

00:00 Understanding Love and Infidelity

00:23 Jennifer's Intro

00:53 Falling Out of Love and Looking for Connection

01:37 Chemistry Versus Character

04:22 The Impact of Postpartum Depression

05:12 Expressing Needs in Relationships

07:55 The Importance of Communication and Connection

09:33 Attachment Styles in Relationships

11:36 The Willingness to Work on Relationships

12:23 WE-Ness

13:15 The Importance of Character in Relationships

15:38 Discussing Goals and Dreams

16:02 Puer and Puella

17:19 Navigating Codependency and Independence

18:00 Interdependence

20:27 The Impact of Parenting on Relationships

21:34 The Role of Feelings in Relationships

23:09 Taking Responsibility in Relationships and Cycles

24:34 Understanding Infidelity

26:06 Effective Communication in Relationships

27:44 Growth Through Relationship Challenges

28:21 Falling Back in Love

29:23 Closing

Transcript:

Jennifer Lehr (00:00)

in Samantha's case, her husband had bad habits, but good character. He wanted a good relationship. He didn't want it to end. He didn't know how to fix it.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Lehr. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist. I'm your host of the Yearning Heart podcast. And today we're going to go into therapist insights of episode 12 with Samantha. And if you watched episode 12, you'll know that Samantha actually left her husband, got divorced, got into another relationship, which turned out to be toxic, and then got back together with her husband and has worked out a fabulous relationship. So there's a huge amount to talk about.

and let's get going.

can fall out of love for a lot of reasons. And some are more common than others.

So people often fall out of love because they're having big issues in their relationship. They don't feel connected. They're fighting. They have patterns that are disconnecting, whether it's yelling or distancing or just the way they communicate is not connecting. And what happens when we fall out of love,

we tend to crave connection with someone else. so we often go looking for someone else. Now this can happen before we end the relationship or after. And before it's infidelity, after it's a new relationship that isn't infidelity.

But that's why often relationships end up where people fall out of love.

Now, another thing to bring up here is people often don't understand the difference between chemistry and character.

character

is the quality of the person that you're with.

It doesn't mean they've got great relationship skills. They might yell, they might withdraw, they might pursue, they might ⁓ do all kinds of things that are not fun for a relationship. But Good character means they're honest, they are trustworthy, they are basically good people. Bad character means they lie.

They are not trustworthy, things like that. That's what character is. So people often don't realize, ⁓ I can solve my my relationship problems with this person if they wanna solve it too, obviously, rather than falling out of love, starting over, bringing your problems with you. so in this particular case with Samantha, she,

began an emotional affair at work because her and her husband had bad connection. She called it fragmented. Their connection was fragmented. And they didn't have good tools of communication. They didn't know how to be vulnerable with each other. And as a result, she who had a lot of need to be seen and affirmed as an anxious attachment left the relationship. They got divorced and turned out she was in a toxic relationship with someone.

who did not have good character, was pretty narcissistic and abusive, it turns out, even though initially when the chemistry was going, it felt like it was a good relationship. So her husband who had good character, although neither of them had skills yet at this point, basically said to her, I'm worried about you. And so she and him got back together. She ended it with the dysfunctional person and she's now been back with her husband for...

I don't know how many years, at least seven or eight years, and they have a great relationship. And that's an example of, yeah, you can work it out if both parties want to, and if both people ⁓ are good people who are going to be trustworthy and care about each other.

another thing that can come up is, if you lose hope and when the frustrations pile on top of each other and the lack of connection piles on top over and over and over, you can lose hope. And that can also send you looking for someone who can do better. And sometimes that's appropriate. Sometimes the person you're with could not be either isn't willing or isn't capable or doesn't want to do the work to create a better relationship. In which case, yeah, get out. But

Sometimes the person is a good person who wants to, who still loves you. You love each other underneath all the shit and it's worth working it out.

another thing that Samantha talked about is that she was deep in postpartum depression after the birth of both of her children, which contributed to her, not feeling connected, needing affirmation. And her husband at the time did not have the skillset to help her with her depression. Now,

A person with postpartum depression, that's serious. The world is dark. They need ways of finding support and possibly additional support outside of the family unit, but they need ways to support.

Postpartum depression is not my area of expertise, but if you were someone who had a partner with postpartum depression, you would want to get them help, you would want to get them support, you would want to be supportive of them. it's a really serious issue.

So one of the things Samantha talked about is how she didn't have a voice. She could not say what she needed, what she wanted. Can you do this? I want this. So all those feelings, that inability to express what she wanted crippled her in a relationship. I mean, how do you get your needs met if you can't even say what they are? So one of the things Samantha did when she was...

not in the relationship is a lot of therapy and she learned how to find her voice, find her feet, gain more independence because she was very dependent and really didn't know how to say, I need this, I want this, please show up for me in this way. That is an essential relational skill.

The other thing going on when you can't express your needs is you will feel unseen, unheard, not valued, because who, where are you? Like if you're not present fully, how can you feel seen and heard? You don't feel seen and heard. So it's a huge, huge issue. And it's each of our responsibilities.

to get the learning, the therapy, the training, the education, whatever, to be able to find our power to say what we need. Now, this often originates in childhood where we aren't taught to say, ⁓ I'm feeling this and I need this. Really important that parents help their children learn how to ask for what they need and acknowledge their feelings.

So we'll take Samantha's case, ⁓ anxious attachment and not being able to express who she is and feeling, you know, coming out of postpartum depression, maybe already being still being in it. And the relationship at home is failing and somebody at work is all bright and shining and happy to see her and you're so beautiful or whatever. And it feels like love. So she was vulnerable.

to the attention of someone outside of her marriage because she had so many unmet needs, so many unfinished parts of herself. And because of that, the attention coming from this other person felt nourishing.

that can happen and can leave a person really vulnerable to what feels like connection, but turns out to actually be just the mirroring of a narcissistic person's own needs on you.

It wasn't until later that she found out, there's something wrong here. This attention was very superficial and really wasn't about me.

Samantha brings up lot about the importance of connection and communication and

So when we aren't connected, we're disengaged or we are trying to get connection and the other person's running away, but we're still, there's a disengagement between the two people and a disconnection. the communication isn't open and vulnerable. It's, usually angry or resentful or something that doesn't work. And it's really important to learn how to communicate and say, right now I'm feeling frustrated and

I need you to come and talk to me and not get into these defensive cycles where we are defending ourselves. Instead, we're being open about what we're feeling, what we need. That is a huge piece of learning because it does require understanding our feelings and being vulnerable. And that's the kind of communication that Samantha developed with her husband in couples therapy while they were trying to get back together.

So I know, I wasn't in the therapy room with them, but I know from talking to Samantha that we were dealing with an anxious partner and an avoidant partner. I knew that the husband did not show up for Samantha the way she needed, ⁓ did not communicate the way she needed, wasn't present the way she needed. That would be the avoidant. And that Samantha didn't have good self-esteem, didn't know.

fully under didn't know how to ask for what she needed, was, needing much more than she was getting. That's more of a signal of the anxious partner.

So the default mode of the avoidant partner is to leave the trigger that's creating, because the avoidant partner has anxiety too. They might be less aware of it, but they're also anxious underneath it all. But they are cut off enough from their feelings, they're less aware of it generally. So the default mode of the avoidant partner is to leave the trigger causing the stress or the anxiety.

The default mode of the anxious partner is until they're a burnt out anxious partner, which then it changes and they can be avoidant as well, which happened to me in my first marriage. But anyway, the default mode of the anxious partner is to try to get their needs met,

to try to get the partner to show up for them, whether it's through nagging or criticism or.

desperation or crying, the anxious partner's anxiety will cause them to try to close the gap. And those are the two different strategies that the avoidant, and it's not black and white, there's many shades of gray here and exceptions, but generally I would say those are the strategies that the avoidant versus the anxious partner use.

So in our case, and I don't know the husband, only talked to Samantha, ⁓ she had issues, obvious issues of self-esteem. And both partners would have had insecurities of some kind. In the avoidant case, Samantha's husband, he would be less able to connect. He probably had an escape mechanism. We don't know what that was.

but a way of getting away from his feelings. Some people use, some people have affairs, some people watch TV, some people go on the computer, but there's different strategies to escape the feelings that you don't wanna feel. And so both partners have things that need to be healed and capacities that need to be developed.

So again, just to emphasize this, if you want your marriage or relationship to work, both partners have to be willing. One person, I mean, you could, if you're in the 12-step program and you learn how to accept the other partner, even if they're still drinking or whatever, that is a strategy. However, you will learn how to tolerate, ⁓ how to deal with your anxiety yourself and tolerate a less functional partner.

which is not the same as two functional partners. It is a way, some people choose that way, other people are like, I'm out of here, I want a functional partner. So, but for couples therapy to work, really want, both partners want to say, hey, let's make this work.

to touch on a little bit more on couples therapy, the couples therapy is about the we of the relationship. Stan Tatkin calls it a couple bubble, which means there is a protected space around the relationship that the couple lives within and who gets in and out is controlled by the couple. So if someone's intruding into that couple bubble, the protected space of the relationship, the we-ness as I call it,

that needs to be managed because that can also negatively impact relationships like ⁓ a relative or a parent can cause disruption if the loyalty to the couple, to the other partner is at risk because of a loyalty outside of the relationship.

another issue and I've touched on this before is character.

Character is how we behave, what our values are, how we hold ourself. If you're a liar, that's bad character. If you tell the truth, good character. If you honor your word, again, good character. If you pretend you're gonna do something and you don't do it, bad character. If you make promises that you break, bad character. If you are trustworthy, if you're...

honest if you respect your partner. Good character. And you can have a bad character because you're afraid. You might have a good heart, but be too afraid to be honest. Well, so you lie or you don't want to disappoint the person. instead of saying, I've got plans for tonight, you say,

I'll pick you up at six and then you never show up. That's bad character, but it may have come out of a fear of some kind. Still bad character.

Another thing about character, and this is important, you don't know a person's character right away. You might think you do. But unless you've been friends and know them as a friend, you probably don't know their character. Because when we meet people, we usually haven't known them before. Let's suppose you start dating someone and you, you just know that they show up, they pick you up in a nice car. And I talked about this in another podcast, and I'll bring it up again.

And when that is, one of the podcasts I did, I don't remember which episode, with Kristina, she talked about how the person she was dating, I believe this was the first or second date, came and picked her up in his shiny, special car. But then when they were driving, he had the music blasting. And she said, please turn that down, it's hurting my ears. He didn't. He didn't turn it down.

because he wanted the attention from the other drivers to look at his pretty classic car. And immediately that's character. Now she didn't pick up on this. She wasn't yet, she was in, you know, enamored with who he was or who he appeared to be. But as she got to know more and more, it became more and more obvious that getting attention from other people was more important than her feelings and her comfort. Now that is a complete character issue.

In this case, it was also an addiction issue. was someone who was, not dealing with a full deck in the sense that he had addiction issues.

another thing that happens, And that has to do with talking to who you're with about their intentions, what they want, their dreams. Like, do they want kids or not? Do they want a committed relationship or not? It's not exactly character, it's more like, who are you? What do you need? but another way to get to character is finding out about the past.

Like, are they friends with their exes? Why did the relationship end? Have they had relationships with people 40 years younger than them? I mean, there are definitely things to look at. There's a concept called a puer. Puer is, and the puella, it would be the female version, a puer is a person, a male in this case, who wants to flip from flower to flower and doesn't want to settle down.

because each flower is so beautiful and we're talking about women here. That character structure, someone who is a Puer is not someone you want to commit a relationship with because they won't either won't be capable of monogamy or they will do serial monogamy and move on pretty quickly because you won't be able to hold their attention because there's always going to be another younger prettier flower out there. All this is character.

Character is extremely important to understand so that you can not just get caught in chemistry, but also go, hmm, is this someone I really want to be involved in? And you have to have that frontal lobe engaged to make that decision. And it can't just be swept off your feet with chemistry,

everyone is guilty of.

in Samantha's case, her husband had bad habits, but good character. He wanted a good relationship. He didn't want it to end. He didn't know how to fix it. He didn't know how to deal with her depression. She, the one who was suffering from the depression,

wanted to feel better and thus she ended the marriage. And then it turns out she got a second chance because he was, well, he basically said, Hey, I'm worried about you. And gave her a chance to look at what was going on, to become closer to her husband and to start doing the work with him, which they did.

Samantha talks a lot about being codependent versus independent. And ⁓ she actually missed the word interdependent, which I unfortunately didn't bring up with her. probably should have, and she probably knew it, but it didn't come up. So for whatever reason, Samantha was very, as she self-identified, codependent, which meant she needed a lot of affirmation.

She wanted the other person to take care of things and be there, that kind of thing. And her work for her was becoming much more independent. Now, two codependent people or an independent person and a codependent person, however you look at this, it's not the same as interdependence. Interdependence is what relationships are about. We...

function fully as an individual. We are independent. We also have a dependency on our partner. But the interdependent piece means we support each other. We are there for each other. We help co-regulate each other. If you're having feelings that are difficult, I can help calm you down and vice versa. When we fight, we fight in a way that neither of us goes through the roof.

The, in order to be interdependent, we have to be able to be both have some dependency on our partner and be a full whole person who is independent, who can go out and do whatever they need to do in the world. if you're missing an ingredient, you're going to have trouble having a healthy functioning relationship.

another thing to bring up is that...

Samantha's husband was probably too far on the independent scale and Samantha was probably too far in the the codependent scale. And Samantha's husband would have had to move closer towards how do I be a little bit less independent and a little bit more relational, a little bit more.

interdependent and obviously Samantha's role or job was to find more of her own independence so that she could do more self-regulation so when things didn't happen her way she could manage her feelings. She wouldn't just fall into a pile or do whatever she did and that's another reason why feelings are so important. access and managing your feelings is so incredibly important.

another thing Samantha brought up is that she didn't blame her parents. And that's great. We're not here to blame parents. However, it is okay to analyze what happened with our parents. And in some cases, we do have a right to confront parents, especially in cases of abuse and severe neglect. So Samantha,

does not blame her parents, yet she was able to identify where it went wrong. Her parents' own defects, gaps from their own childhood caused them not to be able to help Samantha metabolize her feelings, help her integrate them, help her find her voice, help her say what she needs as a child. So she grew up with these deficits. Now these capacities would have to be rebuilt in adulthood

And she did that. So, but that's where the parent thing falls in. Parents come in, they do their best usually, not always. They do their best and they miss things. And then we have the work of rebuilding ourselves.

I touched on this earlier.

Feelings are integral to our health. We have to know what we're feeling. We have to be able to communicate what we're feeling. Sometimes we're raised in such a way, and often this happens with boys, but not always, where, you're not allowed to cry, where you're not supposed to express your feelings. And this causes great damage to children who become adults who have to be in relationships.

And they have to be able to identify their feelings, honor their feelings, make their feelings part of their world. Because if they don't, guess what? You're avoidant or you're insecure or whatever. You're in some kind of insecure attachment because Secure attachment implies that you have

a good handle on understanding your feelings and your feelings are your friends, not your enemies. You don't shove them down in the basement and lock them away. Now the flip side of this is emotional regulation. You can have too big a feelings that you don't regulate, which when I was younger, I'm sure that was me, not anymore. But when you have really big feelings that you can't regulate and your partner doesn't know how to deal with that, it can push them away.

especially if they aren't secure. If they're secure, they can probably help you regulate and you'll learn how to regulate. So much depends on what the work you do, what your childhood was, who your partner is, but feelings are incredibly important.

responsibility for your part, also known as accountability. ⁓

When a couple gets into a bad cycle and relationship cycles need to be identified. So a relationship cycle would be when you get upset, I can't handle it, I pull away, you get more upset, I pull away further, there's many cycles, but that's an example of a relationship cycle. They have to be identified and you have to take responsibility for your part. What did I just do that triggered my partner?

Can it be adjusted? Can I do it differently? What did my partner just do that triggered me? Can it be adjusted? Can we talk about it? Can we do it differently? Now,

There's many ways to work on this. Emotionally focused therapy for couples does very specifically in a stage of the work, focus on the cycle and brings the feelings into it. My app, WeConcile, also very much helps people understand their cycle and bring their feelings into it. But you have to have accountability for your relationship cycle. It's not just there's a cycle, it just happens. It's, ⁓

This is happening because I'm doing X, Y, Z, and this is happening because you're doing X, Y, Z. I am responsible for my part. I will try to do this differently, and you need to try to do this differently so that we don't keep triggering each other.

So again, in Samantha's case, we talked about emotional infidelity, and then she actually entered the relationship later on fully. ⁓ Infidelity can occur for different reasons. One of them, of course, is dissatisfaction with the relationship, need for accessibility, attention, responsiveness, that kind of thing. And infidelity can also come out of

which is not Samantha's case, but infidelity can also come out of addiction. and as I mentioned before, the Puer type of personality or character construct. So if you have a sex or love addiction, you will probably, unless you can get your sex addiction filled in your relationship, but generally you will go looking for getting that fix. You need a fix.

Addictions mean you need a fix because it's a way to avoid feelings. if you deep feelings, not surface feelings, anger, but deep feelings, deep grief, deep discontent, deep depression, deep feelings. So you go out looking for your next fix, whether it's a drug or alcohol or, picking someone up. so infidelity,

can come out of different things. And again, it can be repaired if the partner committing the infidelity, sees what they're doing, wants to change, and the other partner is willing to forgive.

So communication. You have to imagine each person is a different world. We have different experiences, we're raised by different parents, we have all kinds of different things that happen to us. We have different structures of how we're wired, whether we pull away or move forward or how our insecure attachment manifests. And because we're so different,

and we fall in love and we want to merge. And then we find out, this guy's not like me at all. What do I do? So you realize we're two different worlds and we have to build a bridge. Communication is the bridge between two different worlds.

When we learn how to communicate properly, we are learning to talk about our experience and the other person is curious about our experience. This doesn't happen well if we're triggered, which is why we wanna get the cycle under control, because we trigger each other, we're out of our frontal lobes, we're into another part of our brain, more primitive, and we don't know how to slow down, breathe, my God, I feel this because of this, and we don't know how to comfort,

because we're both triggered, our wounds have hit each other. So communication is a huge piece of work. It's not just saying the right words. It is more a developing of the ability to talk about our experience in a non-defensive, vulnerable way and to be able to listen to our partner's experience in a vulnerable, non-defensive way.

And relationships are not supposed to be easy. They challenge us to grow. Again, we're dealing with two completely different people, different worlds. There's no way two people who are that different are gonna, you know, mesh just nicely without some adjustments. It is a growth process to be in a long-term relationship. So no, they're not supposed to be easy. They're supposed to be a place where we each develop and become better and better at

supporting the other person, supporting ourselves, and making a relationship satisfying and not difficult.

In Samantha's case, her and her husband fell back in love, meaning as they healed the pieces that didn't work, they were able to start feeling the love they had for each other. It moved to the foreground. They could feel it. It wasn't hidden behind all the stuff.

And this can happen in a long-term relationship. You can fall in and out of love. You might go through a month where you just feel resentful and you don't want to have anything to do with your partner or a month where you aren't interested or a month where they're repulsive, whatever. And yet you know you love them. And then those difficult feelings subside and the love re-emerges sometimes by itself. Sometimes you have to do work around whatever's going on, but relationships, whether they actually end,

or they just go through difficult periods, have cycles where the love is more predominant and where the love is more background. And that is just a normal part of a long-term relationship.

please check out the WeConcile app and give it a shot feedback is always appreciated. And I hope if you found this show informative, please share it, let other people know so I can.

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