 When there are rough feelings in a relationship, a dynamic, or a situation, my training—and my personality—push me toward the hard conversation. To name the thing. To be honest. To get it on the table. That part of me isn’t wrong. Courage and clarity matter. But what I’m coming to understand is that honesty isn’t the only driver here. My nervous system is. For me, repair—fixing what feels off—brings relief. A sense of safety. A settling in my body. When things are named and smoothed, my system calms. That works well when both people move toward connection the same way. But what happens when the other person’s path to relief is the opposite of yours? What if their way of regulating is to pull away, shut down, or break the connection? And what if they can’t—or won’t—tell you why? Ambiguity is control for some people. And it is hell for a fixer. When someone withholds clarity, the power imbalance isn't accidental. When Fixing Stops Working When the connection breaks, the only real option is to sit with what’s left. The grief. The heartbreak. The confusion. The guilt. And the long list of uncomfortable feelings we would all rather bypass. For an overthinker, sitting still is brutal. My mind immediately goes to why. Why would someone do this? What did I miss? What would make it make sense? Because if I could understand them, maybe I could repair it. That strategy makes sense. We tell ourselves that clarity will protect us—that if we can just figure it out, we won’t end up here again. But clarity isn’t what protects you going forward. Boundaries are. The Wrong Question Rather than looping on, “Why would they discard me like that?” a more useful set of questions emerges:
They do something harder. They put the focus back where it belongs. Fixing as an Addiction Fixing, repairing, chasing that feeling of relief inside a connection can become addictive. The nervous system gets hooked. There’s a hit of calm after the repair. A sense of closeness. A feeling of okay, we’re safe again. Until the next rupture. And then the cycle repeats. At some point, often quietly, self-respect shows up. Not dramatically. Not angrily. More like Forrest Gump mid-run—when you suddenly realize you’re done running. Done chasing repair. Done contorting yourself for relief that never lasts. What It Actually Costs Sitting with the discomfort isn’t noble or pretty. It will churn up worthiness questions. It may wake you up in the middle of the night. It may follow you into your dreams. This is the part where fixing used to rescue you. But if you stay—if you don’t abandon yourself this time—something else happens. You gain integrity. You gain peace that isn’t dependent on who stays or who goes. Your nervous system begins to rewire. Slowly. Imperfectly. But for real. You stop outsourcing your sense of safety to someone else’s ability to stay connected. And that changes everything. The Real Repair The deepest repair isn’t fixing the connection. It’s refusing to disappear from yourself in order to keep one. It’s learning that relief can come from standing still. From letting the feelings move through without chasing an explanation. From choosing boundaries over certainty. And from realizing that you don’t need to understand why someone couldn’t stay—in order to decide that you will. With yourself. XOXOXOXO Sandy
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 Winter in Iowa. Weather gets talked about a LOT. It gets our attention.
Each of us also walks around with our own internal weather systems via our emotional state. This too gets our attention. And when "bad weather" rolls in, internally, we can give this too much of our attention in ourselves and in others. We can find ourselves outsourcing our own internal wx to other people's mood. Ugh. Guilty. My discomfort with someone else's emotional weather has equaled "assignment" in my own nervous system, maybe most of my life. This can be positive in some ways. It means I'm not afraid to have a hard conversation, to lead, to negotiate. The down side - some people can't metabolize this kind of approach. They may be locked into bitterness, or contempt, or judgement and my attempt to talk with them about how their internal weather systems is impacting me, or their own life, will simply give them an added grievance. So, what to do? Internal boundaries around energy and attention. This means: •Don't contort myself in the presence of contempt. •Don't personalize their energy. •Remain kind, and unhooked. Being in proximity to the energy of contempt is rough. Their "feels like temperature" is painful to be around. Relationship research (like the Gottmans’ work) shows contempt to be the most corrosive emotional climate. You don’t need to diagnose it to know when you’re standing in it. While we cannot know anyone's internal state for sure, we can know it's impact on us. Other people's internal weather can impact us just like the weather in nature. If we are going to be in the presence of a cold, rough emotional system, put on your "coat" with internal boundaries. Bottom line: You don't have to reject people to protect yourself from their internal weather. You don’t have to diagnose it, fix it, or confront it. But you do have to stop outsourcing your sense of steadiness to it. Other people’s moods are not data about you. They are information about them. Decentering is not withdrawal. It’s stewardship. And choosing where your attention lives may be one of the most self-respecting, self-leadership moves you ever make. XOXOXO Sandy  If you have spent any considerable amount of time around a dysregulated system or an emotionally dysregulated person, you know what happens. You wind up in survival mode. You become hypervigilant. You track tone, facial cues, mojo. You read subtext. You chase clarity, reassurance, resolution, – often around things that, in a regulated system or person, wouldn’t even be issues. You start responding to nonsense as if it’s urgent, because in that environment, it often is. YOUR nervous system gets hijacked. Not because you are weak. Because you’re human. In fact, your strength is often what causes you to stay way past the expiration date. You keep trying to get things calmed down. And if you stay long enough, you may start to believe what will really lock you in – you start to believe the problem is you. Then, if you are lucky – or brave – or finally exhausted enough – something shifts. You step back. You regain your consciousness. You realize you weren’t failing or “bad” or the whole problem. You were functioning inside a system that required constant self-abandonment to survive. A continual feed of chaos that kept you on your back foot and trying to explain, over and over and over again. You’ve been living on alert. Your thoughts loop. You’ve spent so much energy trying to keep it all going while appearing to have a handle on things. Stepping out of survival mode doesn’t feel immediately better. You’ve been investing 95% of your energy into managing what wasn’t yours to manage and when it goes quiet, it feels pretty empty. Kind of scary in fact. Because chaos, for a long time, was the organizing principle. And, it’s the beginning of leadership – of yourself. Self-leadership. Sovereignty. Because the work isn’t fixing the unpredictable person or system. It’s retraining your own nervous system to trust steadiness again. To stop chasing what never did or ever will stabilize. Regulated people, regulate the environment around them. Dysregulated people and systems do too. You can feel when people are emotionally stable or not in the room, on the other end of the phone, in the text you’re reading from them. Steadiness is actually medicine. For those around you and for yourself. I heard Cory Muscara say in his podcast Practicing Human today: “(steadiness) helps others access parts of themselves that are otherwise offline when stress takes over.” And it also helps us to access these parts in ourselves when we can take ourselves there. This steadiness can’t be an avoidance of discomfort. That’s calm, but not leadership. It’s being present WITH discomfort and holding steady. When your nervous system gets hijacked, your steadiness goes offline when you go into survival mode. No one, not even a Zen master can stay in steadiness when they are under chronic threat with a dysregulated person or system. That’s not a character flaw – you’re simply in an environment that is impossible to feel steady. Your steadiness cannot coexist in:
So ask yourself;
Stillness isn’t something you force. It’s what returns when you stop living where armor is required. XOXOXOX Sandy  Endings often hurt. Not always—but often. Relationships of all kinds can end in many ways. What I’ve noticed in myself is how quickly I assume fault when an ending was not my choice.
How do you let something hurt without turning the pain inward? That’s been the harder question for me. What I hadn’t fully metabolized before is that when connection ends abruptly, my body looks for fault. In me. A heartbreaking ending arrived, and almost immediately I found myself scanning for what I’d done wrong. How had I caused this? Did I over-share? Yes. I’m pretty sure I did. Did I complain too much about what was happening in a hard, hard season of my life? Yes. Without a doubt. Was the energy I was bringing just too heavy? Perhaps. It seems I learned early that if I could identify what was wrong with me, I could restore safety. If I’m the problem, then I have the power to fix it. When things ended surprisingly, suddenly, I felt an old familiar urgency to fix myself. When they vanished, my nervous system went looking for one question: What did I do wrong? Not curiosity. Correction. As if belonging could be restored by tightening myself just a little more. The cost of that reflex was self-erasure. I noticed myself wondering whether, if I amputated part of my feelings or my experience, I might be accepted again. Whether connection could be restored if I edited myself just right. What I didn’t do this time was chase. I didn’t contort myself to be accepted or beg to be understood. I didn’t try to correct myself back into belonging. Instead, I tried self-respect. I noticed how silence from others often triggers self-prosecution in me. I wasn’t using silence as information about the relationship—I was using it as evidence against myself. That realization stopped me. The part of me that wants to explain myself to those who walked away is the part that’s afraid silence means I was “wrong”. This time, my aim wasn’t to stop the silence. It was to stop negotiating with it. I also noticed something else: meaning isn’t retroactively erased because someone else lacked the capacity to hold it. I gave all of me. I held nothing back. That matters to me. Sitting with not knowing why something ended—without turning that not-knowing into self-blame—was (and some days still is to some degree) the hardest part. My mind’s old wiring system, looping toward self-correction. Each time, I practice staying with myself instead. Not fixing. Not explaining. Just staying. You see, the thing I’ve tried to outrun in relationships, is being left. And that was exactly what I’ve been doing to MYSELF – abandoning me, to belong in the eyes and hearts of others. What I’m learning is that sovereignty doesn’t arrive with certainty. It arrives with restraint. With not chasing what left. With not rewriting myself to be kept. This time, I stayed with myself. And that was enough. XOXOXO Sandy  Is your mindset your responsibility?
Yes. Ultimately, yes. And—the environment you are swimming in matters. You wouldn’t expect to stand next to a smoker multiple times a day and not smell like smoke. We are influenced by the people around us. And when that influence repeatedly assigns negative intent, paints you as “the villain,” or keeps fear and vigilance front and center, existing self-protective patterns inside you will amplify. Removing people who keep those circuits hot can absolutely help. Distance matters. Volume matters. But it isn’t the whole answer. Removing someone like that is like turning down a blaring speaker—not installing a whole new sound system. Your steadiness does not depend on anyone else. It comes from the steady broadcast of your own frequency. Many of us go through long, difficult seasons with people who feel like constant background noise—buzzing feedback, distortions, urgency, fear. You don’t need them gone in order to be clear. You need you, back online. Leadership—especially self-leadership—is the ability to set the tone rather than match it. That can feel challenging when someone else’s low-frequency broadcast is loud. But they are not the cause of your patterns. They may amplify them—but they did not create them. The good news is this: You control the volume now. Returning to your frequency is not about controlling others. It’s about reclaiming yourself. XOXOXO Sandy  For a long time, I thought I was dealing with isolated moments of misunderstanding. A comment here. A joke there. A recurring sense that I needed to clarify myself. What I didn’t see—until recently—was that this wasn’t occasional miscommunication. It was a system. Specifically, a system where someone routinely assigned negative motives to me instead of asking, and where my role slowly became defending myself against things I never said, thought, or intended. It sounded like:
Just conclusions. At first, I responded the way many reasonable people do: I explained. I clarified. I corrected the record. I assumed goodwill and tried to be understood. But here’s what I eventually noticed. When this happens occasionally, it’s annoying. When it happens daily, it becomes an environment. And environments shape people. Over time, I found myself:
This is the part many capable, high-functioning people miss: You can keep performing while quietly eroding. You can run companies, lead teams, make decisions, and still be absorbing a steady psychological tax that no one else sees. The turning point came when I stopped asking, “Why does this keep happening?” and instead asked, “What is this system doing to me?” That’s when I realized: I wasn’t in conversations. I was in a courtroom. Once I named that, everything changed. I stopped defending my inner life. I stopped correcting every mischaracterization. I stopped reassuring narratives that weren’t mine. Sometimes my response became as simple as: “Okay.” Or: “I’m not engaging that.” And sometimes it meant ending the interaction entirely. What I learned is this: You don’t reclaim power by winning arguments inside a distorted frame. You reclaim it by stepping out of the frame altogether. This isn’t about blame. It’s about recognizing when interpretation replaces curiosity—and how costly that is over time. The leadership lesson is simple and uncomfortable: If an environment requires you to constantly prove your goodness, clarity, or intent—it is not a neutral environment. And refusing further erosion is not withdrawal. It’s self-leadership. What Healthy Environments Do Differently Healthy environments don’t require mind-reading, prosecution, or defense. They are built on curiosity rather than conclusions, questions rather than accusations, and the assumption of goodwill rather than suspicion. In healthy systems, people are allowed to be imprecise, uncertain, and human without their character being put on trial. Directness is met with listening, not reinterpretation. And when something is unclear, it’s clarified through asking—not asserted as truth. These environments don’t drain confidence over time; they reinforce it. You leave them with more access to yourself, not less. And once you’ve experienced the difference, you stop trying to survive inside anything else. XOXOXO Sandy  |
Sandy Edie HansenI use this space to "Chat" about things I am working through and learning in my life currently. Join me! Archives
February 2026
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