Every person enters a relationship with a blueprint. Formed through early relational experiences—caregivers, family climate, sibling dynamics—the blueprint becomes the experiential lens through which we register the world: what we notice, what we miss, how we interpret threat or safety, and how we make sense of another person’s behaviour. It is not chosen; it is the residue of lived experience. And it operates in all relationships, not just intimate ones.

Inside a relationship, something else takes shape: the caricature. Unlike the blueprint, which precedes the relationship, the caricature emerges within it. Over time, partners begin to see each other through a narrowed and simplified filter that exaggerates certain features and erases the rest. It may be anchored in real events, but its structure is a distortion. Complexity collapses into a fixed sketch that feels predictable but obscures the person in front of them.

Both blueprint and caricature are lenses, but they function at different levels. The blueprint organises how we meet the world; the caricature organises how we meet this specific partner. The blueprint is broad and enduring; the caricature is relational and emergent. One shapes how we enter the relationship; the other shapes how we remain stuck inside it.

Therapeutic work begins by helping partners recognise the distortion—seeing how the caricature has contracted their perception—and then creating corrective experiences that challenge and expand it. This is why the work is not about changing the other person but about changing how we step into the relational space: how we look, listen, and respond. These shifts loosen the caricature and allow complexity to return. And while the blueprint runs deeper, meaningful relational experience can, over time, soften and reshape it. Neither lens is fixed; what matters is understanding how they operate and how new experience transforms them.