The love I knew was conditional, unpredictable, and readily withheld. I had no template for love that was safe, steady, and kind.
I continued to reenact that relational trauma in nearly every relationship. While I am the common variable, so are my template for connection and the personality type it consistently draws me to.
For much of my life, I engaged in relationships that diminished me. I tried, with limited understanding and skill, to redeem them. Which seemed impossible, particularly once I stopped agreeing to matter less.
I’d try emphatically to understand what was happening between us so we could really connect, navigate our differences, and engage on mutual terms and in good faith. Instead, I was met with defensiveness, denial, and accusations of manufacturing chaos. Eventually, stonewalling.
I was seeking connection with people whose behavior, I now see, as prioritizing deference. I didn’t recognize that we weren’t seeking the same thing, or that my attempts to communicate and establish mutuality might be received as defiance. Apparently, I was challenging the terms of a power dynamic I hadn’t even recognized. And when I finally stopped trying, that was unacceptable, too.
With profound grief, I have had to acknowledge that the bond is too harmful to continue.
The choice to stop chasing connection and approval has been ill-received.
And cited only as further evidence of my troublesome, ungrateful, poor character and as the sole cause of our issues.
“See? This is what you always do.”
“Well, I guess that’s how much it meant to you.”
“I thought you said you wanted to work things out.”
“And you wonder why things are the way they are.”
But isn’t it kind of like a doctor calling the time of death or delivering a diagnosis? The doctor doesn’t speak the death or disease into existence. He simply records it and moves forward accordingly.
