"I'm afraid that sometimes you'll play lonely games too. Games you can't win 'cause you'll play against you" - D.S.
You know when someone you are close to - your partner, your crush, your kid, your co-worker does something that just makes your entire chest light on fire with a big absolutely not. Yeah, me too - this essay is about that and how most of the ways we are taught to deal with it backfire.
It’s the moment you realize your partner was hiding something like smoking from you. It’s the text you see pop up on your boyfriend’s phone that makes you want to throw up. It’s when your boss makes a fundamental change to your job role without seeking your agreement. It’s my male clients who are on dates with a woman who is warm and beautiful but her external representation makes them shudder when they imagine her at a family or work gathering. Her gym selfies garnering fire emojis from tons of younger men also give pause. Or maybe it’s less charged. Perhaps it’s just realizing that your money, time and general ways of being are going to be turned over if something doesn’t shift.
There are so many ways to deal with this.
I have addressed this every single way in many kinds of close relationships. I have also tracked my somatic clients through every kind of communication method they picked up online or in therapy. I know what I am talking about here.
I have taken on the task of surveying my friend group on if it’s my red flag or the other person’s (funny enough always the other person’s).
I have brought things up calmly, mid-week, with good timing and a regulated nervous system. Like glowing queen I am. Then crashed out quickly as it wasn’t received the way the online course I took told me it would be. Ugh.
I have written perfect texts walls and cringey emails.
I have used “I feel” language and tried to sexy-cry like I was trained to by my polarity teacher.
I have named the patterned behavior without judgement (literally impossible, but ok). I have named it again, gritted teeth, fake smile.
I have ignored it and focused on the positive. It will probably not matter or go away right? Right?
I have asked curious questions to see if the other person will pick up on what the fuck is wrong.
I have explained, with real precision, why a specific behavior was not okay with me — and on the worst day this makes someone feel attacked (fun). On the best day I have watched the person I was explaining it to nod, and shift something, and then six weeks later do some version of the same thing wearing a different outfit. Because they didn’t get it.
What I was doing, for years, was addressing the behavior.
Since, the behavior was never the problem, I was never getting the result I wanted.
Because, the behavior was evidence.
It was pointing at something — a value system, a wound, a way of moving through the world that was either compatible with mine or it wasn’t. And every time I aimed a conversation at the symptom, in a mature connection two things happened: I felt temporarily better, and nothing actually changed. We’d resolve the surface issue and both walk away thinking we’d handled something.
So evolved. So chill. So green flag.
But actually we were co-creating a trap and making sure the main conversation never had to happen.
We were, in a way, colluding — against the truth of the incompatibility, therefore against the friction that might have actually moved something.
The only way to create relationship change is through friction. The soup, it’s called in my courses. Through letting things get so obviously incongruent that everyone sees the problem.
That starts in the body, not with your TedTalk, not with emotional wet blankets.
I spent years in relationships having the wrong argument. Something would feel incoherent to me — not wrong exactly, just off, like a note that wasn’t quite in tune — and I’d go after the thing I could name. We’d argue about the nameable thing. My partner would adjust the nameable thing. I would look difficult. He would feel controlled. And there it would be again, in a different form, a few months later. So I would become more aggressive in getting what I needed and the I would check out. Yes, internet anxious-avoidant. Stop labeling each other’s fear states.
Whack-a-mole. I hate that game.
I wasn’t wrong about what I felt. I wasn’t wrong about there being a problem. I was just pointing at the wrong place. Actually I was hammering away at the visual evidence so I didn’t have to sit with the reality under it.
Fun times.
There’s a certain way of dealing with these situations that I’ve come to recognize, in myself and in almost everyone I work with, that I’ve started to think of as the rationalization loop. It’s the moment right after a hard no rises in the body — clean, sourced, unmistakable — when the mind starts quietly working against it.
It’s not that bad. Maybe I’m being too sensitive. Maybe if I were more secure I wouldn’t care about this. Maybe this is actually fine. Maybe if I just do the same thing it would be good for me! Maybe I am obligated to this. Maybe they are weaker than me and need me to look the other way.
That loop feels like fairness. It feels like maturity, even — like you’re giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, seeing their side, being a reasonable adult. But what it actually is, every time, is fear. Pity is fear. Trying to look chill and nice is fear.
The no is pointing at something real, and the real thing has consequences, and the mind cannot yet tolerate the consequences. So it starts dismantling the no instead.
The rationalization loop only happens when you’re afraid. You don’t rationalize things that don’t threaten you. And the threat isn’t the other person — it’s what your no actually means, followed all the way to the end. It might mean: this person is not going to change. It might mean: this isn’t the relationship I thought it was. It might mean: I have stayed somewhere past the point I should have. Those are heavy places to sit. No one wants to sit there.
So instead, you draft the email. You schedule the conversation. You address the behavior, which is smaller and more manageable than the truth. You hand your no over to someone else to honor, and then — as often as not — they don’t. And now you’re smaller than when you started.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand, mostly from watching myself fail at this and only occasionally get it right: you cannot outsource your no.
Not to a conversation, not to a boundary conversation, not to a beautifully worded text wall about your needs and values. That’s all crappy trash and no one can hear it and it will work against you.
The no has to be inhabited. It has to be matured. It has to become more real to you than the fear of what it means.
This is somatic work.
I don’t mean that in a soft, weird, breathe on your pink yoga mat way. Obnoxious. I mean that you have to stay in the body long enough for the immature parts of the no to fall away — and there are usually immature parts, early in the process. Younger no’s are often controlling, reactive, a little punishing. They sound like the child who was punished for having them. And if you act from that place, you’ll make a mess.
But if you stay — if you just keep breathing and attending to the no without explaining it or resolving it or handing it to someone else to fix over days — something happens. The younger parts settle. What’s left is something older and quieter. A part of the no that doesn’t need to be argued. A no that comes from pattern recognition, from having seen the movie already (so many times), from knowing yourself well enough to know that this particular thing will, over time, cost you the connection.
Not because you’re right and they’re wrong. Just because it’s true.
When the no gets that quiet and that solid, something shifts in you, too. You stop performing okay-ness. You stop the glass-half-full bizarre narration of how chill you are sure you can become. The situation becomes what it actually is, which is often disappointing, which is often just sad. And disappointment and sadness are, paradoxically, much more neutral states than the anxious back-and-forth of the loop. There’s no charge in them at all. Just reality.
The part that’s hard to hold, this is not the same as red-flagging everyone.
It is not the same as deciding in the first two months that someone is disqualified. It’s not doing some personal work and tossing your partner out for values they’ve had for decades and you’ve suddenly “grown out of”.
Plus, most people primarily grow inside their romantic relationships — those are often the only places with real accountability, real mirrors, real friction that can’t be walked away from.
A lot of people will not become who they’re capable of being until they’ve met someone whose embodied no they actually feel.
(Read that ten times.)
The difference is whether you’re handing them the no on a piece of paper — here, change this behavior — or whether you’re holding it so fully in your body that they feel the reality of it without being lectured. Those are completely different experiences for the other person. The first one is something to argue with, negotiate around, temporarily manage. The second one is information they have to do something with, in themselves, on their own timeline. A timeline that might be past your capacity.
Sometimes change happens. Sometimes the shift happens and it’s real. Sometimes something about encountering a no that doesn’t wobble or open itself to being gaslit or presents immaturely actually wakes a person up to a part of themselves they hadn’t been looking at.
But often — and this is the part I’ve had to stop lying to myself about — often they don’t. And no amount of carefully timed conversation changes that. What changes it, if anything does, is them. And the only thing you can do is stay in your own body, stay honest about who you actually are by making sure that your no in them is clean in your life, and let that be what it is — without managing it into something more comfortable, without gaslighting yourself back into okay.
The practice, concretely: when a no rises in you, don’t move it into a conversation right away.
Let it stay where it is. Breathe into it. Notice when the rationalization loop starts — and it will start — and just watch it. Don’t follow it. Don’t argue with it or shame yourself for it. Just notice that your nervous system got scared and started protecting you from the implications of the thing you felt.
Then come back to the no. Not as a weapon, not as a script, not as an agenda. Just as true. This is what I know. This is what my body has told me, from a place that is not afraid and not performing. This is real. I can have values. I can have standards for my life, my body, my boundaries and my external representation. I can hold my own no.
Stay there until it stops feeling like a nine-volt battery on your tongue.
Stay there until it just feels like the truth.
Because the truth, even when it’s disappointing, doesn’t need anything from you.
You don’t have to manage it or explain it or convince anyone of it or save anything or feel sorry for anyone. You just have to stop arguing with it yourself. That’s the whole job. And I think — I have come to slowly, reluctantly think — it might be the only thing that actually works.
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.