From Child Consciousness to Adult Love: How to Show Up for Yourself in Relationships

Becoming Your Own Primary Caretaker: A Key to Healthy Love

In the book You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, Richard Schwartz reminds us that the love we seek from others is often a projection of the love we have not yet learned to give ourselves. This core idea — that we must become our own primary caretaker — is essential for cultivating secure, resilient, and mature romantic relationships. When each partner tends to their own inner world with care and responsibility, they create space for authentic intimacy rather than dependency or projection.

Many of us unconsciously enter relationships from what NARM calls child consciousness — the part of us shaped by early relational wounds, unmet needs, and survival adaptations. In this state, we might seek a partner to soothe, rescue, or validate us. We may assign them the role of primary caretaker, expecting them to regulate our emotions, anticipate our needs, or heal our past. When they inevitably fall short — as all humans do — we may experience disappointment, blame, or withdrawal, reinforcing cycles of disconnection and pain.

Shifting into adult consciousness allows us to access our inner resources: self-awareness, compassion, responsibility, and emotional regulation. From this place, we can tend to our own triggers and unmet needs without demanding our partner fix them. We become the parent to our own inner child, offering the love and stability we once lacked. When we take primary responsibility for our own care, we free our partners to show up as companions, not saviors.

Having a partner who acts as a secondary caretaker — someone who offers support, attunement, and presence — is still deeply important. But their care is complementary, not foundational. In this dynamic, love becomes a co-creation between two whole adults rather than a search for completion. Paradoxically, the more we take ownership of our own healing, the more capable we are of receiving and offering love in a way that’s nourishing and sustainable.

In essence, being your own primary caretaker is not about isolation or hyper-independence. It's about relating from your adult self — the part of you that can witness your child consciousness with compassion, while choosing to love and be loved from a place of wholeness.

How We Seek Love to Heal Us

In the early stages of a romantic relationship, it’s natural to feel swept away by the hope that this person — this beautiful, attentive, emotionally available partner — will finally give us what we’ve always longed for. Underneath the surface of this hope, however, often lies a deeper yearning — one formed in childhood — to be seen, soothed, and saved.

In You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, Dr. Richard Schwartz writes that we are often unconsciously seeking someone to heal the wounds we’ve carried since early life. These wounds might include emotional neglect, inconsistency, rejection, or unmet needs for closeness and safety. Without realizing it, we place the burden of our unmet needs onto our partner, hoping they will do the work that only we can truly do: to become our own primary caretaker.

What Does It Mean to Be Your Own Primary Caretaker?

Being your own primary caretaker means that you take responsibility for your emotional well-being, your inner world, and your healing journey. This doesn't mean you reject intimacy or support from your partner or that you do not allow yourself to rely on them. Rather, it means that you do not make them the primary source of your regulation, self-worth, or identity. You offer those things to yourself first.

When each person in a relationship shows up from this place of inner resourcing — what the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) calls adult consciousness — the relationship becomes a site of mutual care, rather than unconscious reenactment.

Child Consciousness Will Still Show Up — And That’s Okay

It’s important to say this: child consciousness will still enter the room. Every one of us carries parts of ourselves that are young, vulnerable, and shaped by unmet developmental needs. These parts are not wrong. They are human.

In fact, it's not realistic and very unlikely to expect to always operate from adult consciousness. The key is to recognize when child consciousness is activated — and to be able to name it.

For example, you might feel anxious, disconnected, or panicked if your partner pulls away or doesn’t respond to a message. Rather than lashing out, withdrawing or protesting, what if you could pause, turn inward, and notice: “Something in me is feeling abandoned right now. This might be a young part of me.” From there, you might say to your partner, “I think this could be coming from child consciousness, but I’m feeling really anxious and alone right now".

Naming it this way does several things:

• It builds self-awareness and self-compassion.

• It invites your partner into your emotional world without blaming them.

• It could allow your partner to respond from their adult consciousness rather than getting pulled into reactivity or defence. If they, in turn, become activated by your naming child consciousness and expressing a need from that place, that's information. They are likely reacting from child consciousness, too. When you are in adult consciousness, you can respond rather than react.

In this way, the relationship becomes a space where both people are invited to take responsibility for their internal experiences, while also being emotionally available and responsive to each other.

The Role of the Secondary Caretaker

When you become your own primary caretaker, your partner can become a loving and consistent secondary caretaker — someone who offers support, presence, and attunement without carrying the full weight of your emotional survival. They’re not responsible for regulating your nervous system, but they can co-regulate with you. They’re not required to fill your voids, but they can offer love that lands more deeply because you’re not clinging to it for survival.

In this dynamic, love becomes a shared offering between two adults who are each doing their inner work. It’s not free of pain or triggers, but it is full of honesty, repair, and growth.

Bringing It All Together

Relationships will always stir up our oldest wounds. That is part of their design. But when we learn to recognize when we’re operating from child consciousness — and respond to those parts with loving adult presence — we interrupt the old cycle. We give ourselves the very thing we’ve always needed: attunement, protection, and care.

From there, we can relate not from longing or fear, but from grounded connection. We can say to our partner: “I’ll care for me — and I’ll welcome you to walk beside me.”

That is the foundation of secure, nourishing love.