I used to think my relationships would get better when other people got better at understanding me. When they finally saw what I saw.
When they admitted what I already knew was true.
I thought clarity was the fix. To be fair, I was told that. I was taught that if I could just make someone understand my perspective, the whole thing would settle.
It didn’t settle. It never settled. Because what I was actually doing was challenging other people’s reality. Not my reality. Theirs. I was arguing with how they saw things. How they interpreted what happened. What they believed about themselves and about me and about life I guess.
And the more I argued it the more entrenched everything became. Through trying to be seen, I doubled down on what I didn’t want.
I was probably an extreme case of this.
It was very easy to move me into a position of proving I wasn’t wrong in a romantic connection and sometimes even at work. I could be pulled into that stance faster than almost anything else. And once I was there I couldn’t leave. I would stay in that posture for days. Weeks.
I would build a case in my head like I was preparing for cross examination and I would not rest until I delivered it. The delivery never helped.
What it did was guarantee that every intimate relationship I had functioned primarily as a warning system.
People warning me. Me warning them. Everyone watching each other for signs of danger and calling it connection. If you look online at modern therapy-like connection you will see that I didn’t invent this. I was told this way of relating would keep me safe.
Which is such an odd part of modern culture when you step back far enough to see it.
We warn each other constantly.
We call it love. We call it looking out for you. We call it just being real (I hate that term). But what it actually is, if you are honest about it, is a refusal to believe in the other person’s ability to navigate their own life.
And it goes both directions.
It is normalized to not believe in people, to evaluate and label them until there is no human left.
It is ordinary to prescribe some way of living that is “healthy” and label some other way, not your way, a “red flag.” We have an entire vocabulary for what is acceptable attachment and what is disordered attachment and we freely apply it to every person we meet like a screening tool.
Which completely obliterates your own ability to do then only thing that matters - feel and listen to yourself.
This shows up on both sides of the political landscape.
The conservative version tells you what a good person looks like. The progressive version tells you what a healed person looks like. They run on the same operating system.
Someone else knows better than you do about your own life. Someone else has the rule book and you need to fit inside it or you are broken or you are unsafe or you are bad or you are possibly worst of all… not doing the work.
And we all know this isn’t true.
We know our grandparents got married during war after one date. We know arranged marriages have a high likelihood of success. We know people who never married and are genuinely happy. We know couples that broke every rule in the book and built something real and lasting. We know others that sat on a yoga mat, meditated and let a therapist arbitrate every conflict and lost it all.
We know that the only thing that works inside each connection is a new set of rules. Every single time.
There has never been a formula.
Believing there is a formula is the thing that keeps you from finding out what actually works between you and another person.
So I stopped arguing other people’s reality. I stopped correcting. I stopped warning. I stopped building a case. That was the first thing.
The second thing I did was incorporate my trauma instead of labeling it. You have to do this.
I threw out attachment labels. I threw out words like codependent. I stopped diagnosing how I attach to people and started just watching it. Just letting it happen. Letting the pattern exist without immediately categorizing it as something clinical that needed to be fixed before I was allowed to be in a relationship. As something sinful that I needed to repent for.
I just let myself be.
What happened next was not what any book told me would happen. What happened was I found people willing to play with me in my actual personality. Not the cleaned up version. Not the faux consistent one either. Not the one who had done enough therapy to present as securely attached - whatever that means. The real one. The one who feels things at full volume and sometimes can’t turn it down and sometimes doesn’t want to.
You cannot integrate and mature all parts of yourself if they are not allowed to be seen.
That is the whole trick. That is the gatekept thing keeping everyone stuck and out of relationships that work. They tell you to heal in private and show up whole. But you cannot heal what you are hiding. You cannot integrate what is locked in a room getting sicker by the minute. The parts that need the most attention are the ones that need a witness. A person. Someone sitting across from you who does not flinch.
Finally, you cannot erase yourself. You might want to. I wanted to. I wanted to mentally override how I felt and install some better, green flag operating system. Something easier and more compliant. Something that didn’t need so much or feel so raw about things that other people seemed to move through without breaking stride.
But how you feel will still run the show, even if you pretend it doesn’t. Especially if you pretend it doesn’t.
Your emotions and energy will run life from underneath if you won’t let them run it from the front. This will show up as resentment or withdrawal or perfectionism or control or child-like resistance.
It will find a way to the surface. It always finds a way.
I bet you know this. I bet you have experience this. I bet you are realizing that everyone, including you, is just integrating human beingness.
Being with your emotions, especially the ones that are raw and untamed, is the only way to stop swinging back and forth your whole life. From failure to huge unsustainable highs. From collapse to performance. From falling apart to holding it all together so tightly that no one can breathe.
That pendulum does not stop until you sit with what is actually there.
Not what you think should be there.
Not what you wish was there.
What is actually there.
The ugly stuff.
The stuff you are embarrassed by.
The needs you think make you weak.
The reactions you think make you too much.
You have to find the ugliest parts of yourself and love the fuck out of them.
Especially when other people don’t. Not theoretically. Not as a caption. Not as a thing you say in therapy and then go home and white knuckle through the evening. Actually love them. Let them breathe. Let them take up space. Let them mature. Let them be visible to the people you are building something with.
That is when it changes. That is when all of it changes.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.
That's more therapy than 10 years of therapy: "You have to find the ugliest parts of yourself and love the fuck out of them."