 It has been a difficult thing for me to come to terms with the idea that not everyone has the same emotional capacity for repair. I guess I figure if I can expand my own emotional capacity, others can as well. But not everyone wants to expand.
As counter intuitive as it is to me, some people manage difficult feelings by cutting people off instead of repairing. Cutting off feels powerful. Repair requires vulnerability. My way of dealing with difficult feelings is to go into them, have the hard conversation. In my experience, that builds the relationship, not the opposite. Yet, like anything, while it seems like a strength, this can be my weakness when taken to too high a volume. I can tend to stay with it too long, over explain. I try to repair even when the other person won’t. In a way, the withdrawal of the other person reflects back to me my negotiating with it. Their withdrawal only works because I stay at the table negotiating with it. The lesson isn’t to become better at repair. The lesson is to stop negotiating with withdrawal. My deepest wounds live inside this dynamic. The withdrawal of the other person. My chasing repair. But repair requires two willing participants. If one person withdraws and refuses repair, what exactly are you repairing? You’re negotiating with absence. A ghost. You’re trying to repair unilaterally. And unilateral repair isn’t repair. It’s pursuit. What if I stop doing 150% of the relational labor? I’m simply respecting their withdrawal and radically accepting their limited emotional capacity. Why they withdraw isn’t the point. The impact on you is. You can spend years trying to solve the mystery. Or you can choose to live from your own center again. -That choice is the real turning point. So what if you could simply say to yourself: “She has a withdrawal pattern. I don’t thrive in that.” End. No villain. No diagnosis. No courtroom. Just mismatch. And mismatch doesn’t require prosecution. This doesn't mean it won't hurt like hell. It might lessen the amount of self-prosecution you do in trying to figure it out though. Chasing to be chosen by someone whose primary conflict strategy is withdrawal is how you abandon yourself. You are not required to be the exception in their life. XOXOXOX Sandy
0 Comments
 I have a complicated relationship with the word deserve.
It can carry a whiff of entitlement or victimhood. Like 'I don't have it and I am powerless to get it'. And yet—here’s the truth we often try to outrun: we all need love, care, and emotional safety. Where things go sideways is where we go looking for it. The pattern we can fall into unwittingly is asking for that love from those who do not have the capacity to give it to us. You try to get someone who isn't emotionally fit to meet you, to meet you. I've done it. I kept giving more. I kept trying more. I kept fixing it again and again. I kept doing more, stayed longer than felt healthy for me. But trying to get love from somebody else by abandoning yourself will never bring what you are really reaching for – connection to yourself. Over-functioning in the hope that someone will love you for it—especially when they’re operating in their own survival mode—often creates the very distance you’re trying to avoid and attracts people who can’t meet you emotionally. Pretending you don't have needs or feelings in an attempt to get love & to be valued by those who have limited capacity to give us this – is like voluntarily giving away your cake and then being mad at them for you doing it. Making people “wrong”, cutting them out of your life, won't get you what you seek either. It will only deny you of your own capacity to love fully. This isn’t about tolerating harm or staying where you’re diminished. It’s about not outsourcing your self-worth to either their approval or their rejection. I can love you and I have to tend to what I need. I can't tolerate over compensating and not being met as a means of my surviving emotionally. When you stop over-functioning, those who benefitted from you doing so will show you their actual capacity for relationship and connection. Some will leave, and this will break. your. heart. Let their disappointing behavior remind you of who you are and how you’ve grown—of what you would never do to someone else. For me I've had to become aware of my over-giving over-functioning and putting myself and my needs on the line to try and earn love from those who can't meet me emotionally and then be confused and resentful when they, of course, can't or won't. That's asking someone who's not emotionally fit to give you what you're not giving yourself. When I stopped trying to earn love from those who couldn’t meet me, I had to finally meet myself. XOXOXOXO Sandy  Oooofff. This subject is the motherload for me. I could go into a long outline of how fear of abandonment has been a long-term survival strategy in my life. It actually makes total sense that my nervous system would come to connect being alone or left with overwhelming fear. Yet, that's not the most interesting part of the story.
While I love a good paradox, my nervous system devised a strategy to deal with this fear that is so paradoxical it's almost imperceptible... Pre-emptively abandon MYSELF, that way the bond might hold with the other person. My nervous system learned: •make my needs negotiable •my truth - optional •my aliveness is dangerous •preserve the bond thru self-suppression Shut off of parts of myself in the belief that it's in service to the relationship. But, it's not. Those parts are still there and like a toddler tugging at your hem asking for attention, & they don't stop tugging, they get louder. Shut off the parts long enough and all your feelings end up being switched off. You can barely connect with what your own needs or wants are any more. Self-abandonment does not prevent others from abandoning you. It just guarantees that you're alone either way. You can do everything in your power to be there, contribute to, support another person while setting your own fears and needs aside, and they may still leave you. So you were alone in the relationship in your efforts, and still alone when they withdrew. It's this crazy-making deal, you seem to create what you defend against. You were twisting yourself into uncomfortable shapes to prevent them from leaving you, and that strategy backfires. Ironically, this strategy can still lead to disconnection. Not only from the other person, but most of all, from yourself. Ugh. So, my deep, abiding fear of abandonment kind of ran unnoticed in the background and as long as I stayed focused on my efforts to be liked, valued, and prevent the loss of the connection, I didn't have to look at how I was running on fear. I don’t have this figured out by any means yet. I’m trying to stay aware of my pattern of leaving myself to avoid disappointment in another person. I don’t need more confidence or better communication skills. I need more capacity—the capacity to tolerate someone else’s disappointment, withdrawal, or disapproval without disappearing from myself. I’m not conflict-averse. I’m afraid of losing the bond by showing all of me. Survival skills are developed for a good reason. They just outlived their usefulness and need to be retired. I'll let you know what I find on this path up ahead. I don’t know yet what it looks like to stay with myself when the bond feels threatened. But I know now that leaving myself is no longer the solution. 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
Categories
|
