 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
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 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  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  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   We can all find that we twist ourselves into knots at times. Feeling someone hurt us, wanting to be seen as valuable, loved or maybe it’s to avoid someone’s anger toward us or their discard. It could be a million other reasons we make ourselves into a pretzel to try and be seen, heard, known. Loved.
We tie these knots ourselves – no one is doing it TO us. What cinches the knot ever tighter is when we are looking for these things from someone who is not living in their heart, but from their wounds or ego. We twist ourselves ever tighter in the hopes that they will somehow move back into their wholeness and truth and see us from love. This is certainly our attempt at control and it can become an especially ginormous energy drain in these kind of dynamics. I recently happened upon a podcast with Fr. Greg Boyle and it would seem like a synchronistic event, coming right at the time I needed what he is all about... You can decide to live in love’s energy which will loosen the knots you’ve twisted yourself into. How? That practice is to see everyone’s unshakable goodness. A genuine and unconditional positive regard shown to all – even those who disagree with you. When I do this it opens up the gate for me to also give this to myself. This is not some pink paint, unicorn, rainbow, toxic positivity answer to finding your way back to yourself. Quite the contrary. It's not a destination, it’s a practice that you have to repeat nearly every breath, all day long for it to get traction. When something is true, you can feel it. It lightens your load, you can get your legs underneath you. “Loving from a place of no matter whatness” feels like truth to me because it feels good when I do it. Demonizing people or things is always the opposite of the truth. That’s why it feels so crappy after that white hot moment of satisfaction. It just takes more and more demonizing in order to feel okay if this is the path we take. The way to a kinder, more unconditional love for myself is to also have it for others. Yes, even those who you’ve tied yourself up in knots to get them to see your inherent goodness and refuse to do so. These are simply wounded, unhealthy people who have forgotten who and what they are. If we carry around a pack of victim cards with blaming, justifying & self-righteousness – we disempower ourselves and make loosening the knots in ourselves much more difficult. We can either live from a place of woundedness or open heartedness. Fr. Greg says that being resilient is about how you choose to see. Long after experiencing a traumatizing event or relationship, you can continue to see that event, relationship, person as traumatizing, and it will be traumatizing. Or you could see that it was an opportunity for growth and learning. There’s no denying how hard things can be sometimes. The way out to the place of resilience, the place of restoration, the place of not allowing your heart to be hardened by resentment relies on one thing: forgive everyone everything. This is what frees us from our self-imposed prisons of anger, hatred, & resentment. What about boundaries? It seems that if we truly get in a place of loving from a place of no matter whatness for ourselves as well as every other being, it kind of takes care of itself. Sure, there will be those who aren’t ready for what you have to offer them. When you are in your love energy, you’ll know when you’re starting to tie yourself in a knot and choose to stay in your wholeness – with or without distance from the unready person. This isn’t a check the box, get it done kind of thing. It’s a practice that will help loosen the knots so you can find your way back to your true self. Take just 50% of the energy you expend twisting yourself into a knot of some shape to gain the approval of someone else and aim it at seeing the unshakable goodness in others and in yourself. Something beautiful will come out of it no matter how things unfold. Guaranteed. This is what hope feels like. XOXOXOXOXO Sandy |
Sandy Edie HansenI use this space to "Chat" about things I am working through and learning in my life currently. Join me! Archives
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