Stop Negotiating With Withdrawal

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