How to have relationships that work without losing yourself

Quite a promise title, you might be thinking, and/or hoping. After years of being in this kind of struggle personally, I can tell you for sure that the heartache of being perpetually in them made me search to find out why. In this search, I found there were so many things that I never really knew.  

One of the things I discovered is that our nervous systems keep us attached to survive. Survival is our primary instinct, and when you are constantly in that space, there is little or no room for you to flourish. Let alone be authentic.

So we stay connected at any cost, or mostly at a cost to ourselves. Even later, as we grow, when the danger is gone, we are still doing the same old dance of hypervigilance. This is because our body (as I have learned from the teachings of Gabor Mate) doesn’t know that the war is over.

I thought that love had to be earned. This is usually the case for a “fixer”, being on the anxious side of attachment, who so often got into relationships with avoiders and those who prized distance as their safety fix.

This was not because I enjoyed the dynamic, but more so because it was familiar from a childhood of parenting rather than being parented, and not being focused on as a child. Instead, I had to fit in to get what I could with two parents who were prone to oversharing and being self-absorbed. I absolutely adored them, and to ensure the longevity of so many relationships that I was in (mostly alone on some kind of level), the whole two-way street thing was a complete anathema to me. I just knew that I had to give to be loved and to survive.

What I didn’t realise was the relevance of my part in these unhappy, unfulfilling relationships. 

I knew nothing about healthy boundaries, saying no, or being able to safely express anger. I was in a constant state of longing for love. So internally, I was always lonely. Often, the men I chose (or who chose me) had narcissistic traits, so, in the love bombing stage, I got hooked to a myth and then spent time aching for what had never been real but disingenuous, until I could no longer avoid reading the writing on the wall. This was all very traumatic and, being in fight or flight, my adrenals periodically burnt out. 

This also applied to my friendships. I don’t have those kinds of friendships anymore. My friends are loving, supportive and a joy to be around. I never feel unsure or inauthentic in them; I feel loved and safe and sure.

That has a lot to do with self-advocacy, which I hope I will cover in this article. And also where healing begins when we have “emptied our well”.

So let’s go back to beginnings, our beginnings.

Our beginnings

I will start by exploring how it is and how it feels to be in any relationship with someone who lets you down.

If you learn in childhood that you are the one who has to fix, seek, make up for and mend, emotional and relational inequality is totally normalised, as is chaos. It feels like love, and it is what “love” (notice I am italicising the word) looks like.

The truth is, this is not what love looks like, and this isn’t how love shows up. But the corrupt seem familiar, and traitors are like bees to honey when there is the scent of an empath's blood. 

Speaking of our needs or even being able to identify them, this can be difficult. Mostly because you were never asked as a child, so it would therefore never occur to you. Even when, and if, it might have done, it would have felt far too risky with the emotionally reticent people in your life (when they matter to you, more than you matter to them).

So a lot of suppressing goes on when saying no is punishable. Of course it does, and as we become adults, this corrupt blueprint carries on being what love feels like to us.

Somehow, we have to stay small. We learn to make up for the deficit, sometimes even “carrying the can”, for what we never even caused. Just to make things nice again, aka safe.

Anything to avoid losing the relationship, sound familiar? Holding on to the little you have so that it doesn’t become nothing. The nothing feels like nothing anyway, doesn’t it? It did to me.

The epitome of self-respect is walking away from people who make you feel like you don’t matter. Where the “fitting in” to stay feels like self-betrayal. You might not say it, but inside every single time you do it, you know it. It’s a little knot in your stomach, somewhere in your body – it shows up in the feeling, in the ache, the sense of the emotional unavailability, hoping maybe it will change next time.

Then something happens.

When the giver stops giving 

I read this quote and thought it was perfect to use as an illustration. 

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in a storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”

- Patrick Rothfuss.

The anger of a gentle man is so well phrased in depiction here, because it explains that when a gentle persons soul feels finally emptied and broken, in the mightiness of the 'nothing left to lose' when your heart has crossed the rubicon of hope and entered into truly believed hopelessness that what you longed for, for so long is not only no longer possible, but no longer possible for you.

This is a pivotal moment, and in the silence of this epiphany, you somehow begin to find the truth and self-advocate without fear.

Not someone else’s truth, but your truth, and there is the lighting of a new flame. That gives you the right to be enough.

That is where the eventual resentment of feeling like the perpetual giver, so haunted by far too many unreciprocated good deeds, becomes undeniable because its hollow lack finally trumps the fear of loss.

When you are done with walking on eggshells to protect someone else’s ego.

Recognising your part and choosing differently

Self-advocacy 

This requires having difficult conversations. Having difficult conversations when you have low self-esteem and when you have become used to keeping yourself small is very hard. It has to be learned. But if you are not aware of this, how can you learn?

All change starts through and by awareness. 

If you intrinsically believe you don’t deserve anything better, if you are prepared for very little rather than nothing, then that is exactly what you will get with emotionally unavailable people. Here is where self-advocacy comes in. 

You deserve to have your needs equally met. Don’t walk away to teach someone a lesson; walk away because you have learned your own. When your presence is not appreciated. No response is a response and, hard as it might be to accept, you are not obliged to make up for that, or fill the void left by it, by not expecting or deserving what is mutual and reciprocal.

Because if you don’t, you default to questioning yourself when you are perpetually doubted and questioned, when none of your needs are ever on their agenda and when they are expressed they are met with deflection and accusations of parenting (in the case of adult children) or inappropriate neediness, or not being able to take a joke or being boomeranged with what you did wrong always. Nobody mentions here all you did or all you do.

Nobody can honour your boundaries if you don’t have any 

Here is where we abandon ourselves so that we don’t get abandoned. But what is the cost, what is the price we pay? It is huge - here is what it looks like.

• We carry the can for everything for the sake of ephemeral peace.
• We may suppress (this is bad for our mental and physical health).
• We are often in a functional freeze state.
• We are full of undisclosed resentment.
• Our immune system is often shot to pieces.
• We may be ashamed of the self-betrayal.
• We can still feel empty. 
• We might be anxious and afraid quite a lot of the time.
• We accept the smallest amount of care as it's better than nothing (this is also known as intermittent reinforcement).
• We can feel sad and lonely because we are not truly with them, and we are not truly with ourselves either.
• We may be perpetually inauthentic.
• True safety feels absent - like there is nothing to count on. 

Reconciliation with those who have hurt us

Oh, here is a big one after hurt – hurt is a wound.

A lot has to happen to heal a wound; there is the time it organically takes for literal healing to take place, and this, emotionally, is the same as with a physical wound in that respect and process. But when there has been emotional wounding such as abandonment, betrayal, neglect and all that goes with the heartbreak that causes it, there is also the processing of where you are or were in that wounding and where they are or were too.

Reconciliation is about healing the relationship, and that includes your relationship with yourself – and that needs the person who hurt you to understand how they hurt you and how and why you let them in order for any kind of trust to be reestablished.

This involves them stepping into that pain and your perspective on it, and truly empathising with the impact of your experience. So accountability and behaviour that changes and is then consistently experienced as changed will need to take place. 

Learning to become authentic without fear is a process.

It takes time, and it takes the kind of therapeutic navigation that often comes from being in therapy with a therapist who has lived through this kind of experience themselves. In my opinion, it is an ongoing process and, in a way, a kind of rebirth.

I have been a therapist for over 15 years now, and I am still learning and humbled by the experience of my own self-acceptance, but along the way l have had the privilege through my own personal understanding, of being able to help others on this journey and the joy of seeing them heal through love and the embracing of their own authenticity at last.

This is only by the grace of God. So yes, there is a lot to learn, but you are absolutely worth it.

Surrender living in the hollows and shed the lie of your ill-perceived unworthiness, little by little, you will gather a small army of those who love and treasure you and who you really are, and love will no longer be a myth, but a known and felt reality.