Why We Keep Accepting the Same Painful Relationship Patterns

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~George Santayana

I was gone about two hours.

I’d gone to see my stepbrother, who lived nearby. My girlfriend didn’t want to come, so I told her to rest, and I’d be back soon.

When I got back to my father’s property, where we lived in the camper we’d bought together, it was gone. So was she.

She’d packed my clothes into a bag and left them on my father’s porch on her way out. That told me everything I needed to know. The camper was the only place we’d been living, which meant I didn’t just lose a relationship that night. I also lost my address.

It was the second time in a year she’d disappeared like that. No calls. No warning. Just gone, until she decided to come back and be the easier version of herself again.

I called my stepbrother. I posted online asking if anyone had seen her. Then I went back to his place and slept on his couch, because there was nowhere else to go.

That’s when the crying started.

My kids weren’t really speaking to me at that point either, in the aftermath of a divorce a year earlier. The floor of my life had been pulled out from under me, and I was still standing on the spot where it used to be.

The next morning, an old friend called. He’d seen my post overnight. He was about to leave for a week at his second home near the coast, and when he heard what happened, he told me to come with him. Take a week off from your life, he said. Come get your head together.

A few hours later, we were on the road.

He gave me a room. He handed me a hundred dollars, because I genuinely had almost nothing. He bought me a pair of flip-flops because I’d left with basically the clothes on my back.

I want to sit with that detail for a second. My friend looked at a grown man with nothing, and the thing he did was make sure that man had shoes for his feet.

A few days into staying with him, wearing flip-flops he’d bought me, I felt an old, familiar sentence start forming in my head: of course this happened. You’re not somebody people stay for.

Maybe you’ve had a version of this thought yourself. It’s the conclusion a kid reaches when the people who are supposed to show up don’t, over and over, until “I’m not worth staying for” stops feeling like a feeling and starts feeling like a fact.

I caught it doing that, though. I noticed the sentence forming and asked it a question I now ask on purpose most mornings: is this actually true, or is this just the oldest story I know how to tell myself when someone leaves?

Then I looked around the actual room. My friend had come to get me. A woman had left. The evidence in the room didn’t support the sentence my head was trying to hand me.

Here’s what I didn’t understand yet, standing in those borrowed flip-flops: that porch wasn’t really the story. It was one scene in a much longer one.

When I was around nine, there were stretches when my sister and I wouldn’t hear from our mother for months, or we would be left with our grandparents without really understanding why. At that age, I didn’t have the ability to understand whatever she might have been struggling with. I only knew that she wasn’t there, and I turned her absence into a belief about myself.

As an adult, I’ve been able to look at my mother and those years with much more understanding and compassion, but the belief a child forms can survive long after the child grows up.

My relationship with my ex-girlfriend ran for nearly seven years, on and off, until the night it finally ended for good. There was real damage running in both directions across all of it. I’m not going to pretend I was only the one left standing on porches.

Looking back, she had two sides, and I mean that plainly, not as some tidy metaphor. One side showed up warm and easy, picking up exactly where things had left off like no time had passed. The other side was the one that packed a bag and vanished, no calls, no explanation, until she decided to be the first version again.

I’d already half-forgiven her first disappearance by the time we decided to build a life together. That tells you something about how little it took to reset the pattern before I’d even finished learning from the last round of it.

For a long stretch of those years, I let myself be treated worse than I should have allowed. I’ve had to be honest with myself about that part, because it would be easy to tell this story as something that only happened to me.

For a long time, the question I kept asking was, “Why does she keep doing this?” It took me much longer to ask the harder question: “Why do I keep opening the door?”

Those aren’t the same question, even though they feel related. The first one keeps you focused on someone else’s behavior, which you can’t actually change. The second one points you back at the one pattern you can actually do something about: your own.

When I finally sat with that second question honestly, I didn’t find a villain. I found a nine-year-old’s verdict about his own worth, still running the show decades later, still deciding who I let stay and who I kept forgiving for leaving.

That’s the same question I ask now whenever an old story starts forming about what I think I deserve, whether it’s about a partner, a parent, or a decision I’m scared to make. Not “Why did this happen to me?” but “Why did I keep accepting the same pattern?”

I don’t think my willingness to keep letting her back in was really about her. I think it was about a much older belief I hadn’t examined yet: that love was supposed to be earned back, over and over, from anyone who threatened to leave.

I still don’t have a clean, one-sentence fix for that belief. What I have instead is a habit: when an old, familiar story starts forming in my head about what I deserve, I stop and check it against the actual room I’m standing in, the way I did in those flip-flops.

Most of the time, the room tells a kinder story than the one I was about to believe.

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About Chuck Waters

Chuck Waters is a writer in coastal Georgia exploring midlife, relationships, forgiveness, and what it means to live more intentionally. More of his writing lives at ChuckWatersAuthor.com.

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From Hyper-Independent to Human: Learning How to Accept Help

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.” ~Brené Brown

It happened on a regular Tuesday night over the smallest thing. I was cooking dinner after a really long, exhausting day at my job. I spent the whole day fixing problems for everyone else, and I was completely drained.

I reached into the cupboard to grab a heavy glass jar of pasta sauce. It slipped right out of my fingers and smashed all over the hard floor.

Red sauce splashed across the white cabinets, covered my shoes, and ruined the floor I had just mopped. Most people would probably just take a deep breath, grab some paper towels, and wipe it up. But I didn’t do that.

Instead, I just dropped to the ground right in the middle of the mess. I buried my face in my hands and started crying as hard as I possibly could.

The tears weren’t really about the spilled food, of course. My mind and body just gave up under a really heavy, hidden weight. I had been carrying that weight all by myself for years without telling a single soul.

I was crying because I was so incredibly tired of always being the “strong friend.”

The Hidden Cost of Being the Rock

All my life, I thought I had to do everything on my own. I was the person who fixed things, planned events, and listened to everyone’s bad days. I was the solid rock for my whole family and all my friends.

Whenever a friend went through a bad breakup, I showed up with ice cream and stayed up late listening. If my family had a fight, I stepped in right away to smooth things over and keep the peace.

People gave me so much praise for acting this way. They told me I was strong, capable, and wonderfully independent. The world loves to cheer for people who give everything to others and never ask for a favor.

What no one saw was how lonely it gets when you have to be that strong. Since I always looked like I had my life together, people assumed I never needed a hand. I was terrified of bothering anyone, so I never told them I was struggling.

Doing everything alone wasn’t a superpower like I tried to believe. It was just a giant wall I built to keep myself from getting hurt or feeling let down. I figured that if I never asked for help, nobody could ever say no to me.

I thought that if I handled everything on my own, I would always stay safe and in control.

Sitting on that sticky kitchen floor, that fake sense of control broke right along with the glass jar. I finally realized that pushing people away wasn’t keeping me safe anymore. It was just making my life harder and leaving me feeling totally empty.

Deep down, I was secretly angry that nobody was stepping up to help me out. But the honest truth is that I trained them to act exactly that way. Anytime a friend or family member offered a hand, I would force a smile and say, “I’ve got it, don’t worry!”

I built a huge, lonely wall around myself. And now, I was stuck on the inside without any backup.

The Words That Changed Everything

Things started to change a few days later while I was chatting with a close friend. She was telling me about a tough problem she was facing. Out of pure habit, I jumped right in and tried to fix it for her with a bunch of advice.

She gently stopped me, looked me in the eye, and said something I won’t ever forget. She said, “You know, you don’t always have to be useful for us to care about you. Sometimes I just want you to listen.”

Her simple words hit me right in the chest. You don’t have to be useful to be loved.

For my entire adult life, I truly believed my worth came from what I did for others. I thought people only kept me around because I solved all their problems. I was so sure that if I stopped helping and fixing things, everyone would pack up and leave.

Realizing this was pretty scary, but it was exactly what I needed to hear. I decided right then and there that I couldn’t play the “strong friend” role anymore. I needed to learn how to just be human, along with all the messy feelings and needs that come with it.

You can’t change a lifetime of doing things alone overnight. It takes a lot of practice to teach your brain that it’s safe to lean on people. Here are the simple, and sometimes very awkward, steps I took to stop trying to earn love and start accepting help.

Know the Difference Between Being Independent and Being Lonely

Real independence means knowing you can handle life but choosing to share the heavy stuff with others anyway. What I was doing wasn’t real independence; it was just hiding my loneliness behind a brave face. I had to admit to myself that pushing my friends away didn’t make me stronger.

It actually kept me far away from the people who really wanted to support me. A good relationship is a two-way street where both people give and take. By never letting anyone do a favor for me, I blocked them from getting close.

I had to learn that letting someone help me is actually a nice gift I can give to them.

Start with Tiny Acts of Asking for Help

When you are scared to ask for support, you can’t start by sharing your biggest, darkest secrets. Your brain will just panic and make you want to run for the hills. Instead, I started with very tiny, everyday moments of opening up.

If I was carrying too many grocery bags, I would ask someone to hold one for me. If a friend asked how my day was, I stopped saying my fake “Everything is great!” line. I started saying, “Actually, I’m feeling a little bit tired today.”

These little moments felt super weird and scary at first. But every time I asked for a small favor and the world didn’t end, my brain learned a new lesson. I slowly figured out that it’s totally safe to be tired, imperfect, and human.

Get Used to the Uncomfortable Feeling of Being Helped

For me, the hardest part of giving up control was how it felt in my body. When I first let my partner cook dinner or handle the bills, my anxiety would spike. My chest felt tight, and my brain yelled that they were going to mess it all up.

I had to teach myself to sit still and let someone else do the work. When someone did a favor for me, I would literally sit on my hands and take deep breaths. I had to bite my tongue to keep from jumping up and taking over.

I had to let them do things their own way, even if I thought my way was faster. Every single day, I reminded myself that the goal wasn’t to be perfect. The real goal was to share the load and act like a team.

Separate Who You Are from What You Do for Others

This was the hardest mental work I had to do on my journey. I needed to figure out who I was when I wasn’t saving the day or fixing a crisis. If I wasn’t the “strong friend” who did it all, then who was I?

To figure that out, I started doing hobbies that didn’t help anyone else. I did some really bad watercolor painting, I read fun books, and I sat outside just to watch the birds. I had to prove to myself that just being alive was enough.

You don’t have to pay rent to live in the hearts of the people who love you. You don’t have to work hard for their love. Just being yourself is plenty.

Let People Make Mistakes Without Pushing Them Away

A big reason we try to do everything alone is because someone let us down in the past. We got hurt when we needed help, so we decided it was safer to never need anyone again. But when you start letting people back in, someone will eventually drop the ball.

When this happened to me—like when a friend forgot to call me back—my first thought was to build my wall again. I wanted to scream, “See? This is exactly why I just do everything myself!”

But instead of running away, I had to learn how to share my feelings without ending the friendship. I learned to say, “I really needed you yesterday, and I felt sad when you didn’t show up.” People make mistakes, but a messy friendship is much better than being perfectly alone.

Allow Yourself to Feel Sad About the Past

As I started to let my walls down, I felt a huge wave of sadness. I felt so sorry for the younger version of me who thought I had to carry the whole world on my back. I felt sad about how tired and burned out I had made myself.

If you want to stop being the “strong friend,” please give yourself permission to feel sad. It’s okay to cry about how heavy that weight was for all those years. Be very kind to yourself as you heal from doing way too much for way too long.

Finding Peace in the Mess

Today, my daily life looks totally different than it did on that messy kitchen floor. I still drop things, I still break things, and my life is far from perfect. But I don’t sit in the mess all by myself anymore.

These days, I ask for a hand when I feel stressed, even if my voice shakes. I let my close friends see me cry when I feel sad. My partner now carries the heavy bags and folds the laundry, even if they fold the towels completely wrong.

I’m no longer the strongest person in the room, and I think that’s the best choice I ever made. Finally, I’m allowed to just be a regular person.

If you’re reading this and you feel incredibly tired, please listen to me. You can put the heavy bags down right now. The people who truly love you won’t walk away when you stop fixing their problems.

Actually, giving up control gives them a real chance to step up and care for you. You don’t have to earn your spot in this world by working so hard all the time. You deserve care, rest, and love simply because you are here.

Take a very deep breath, reach out to someone, and let them help you carry the weight today.

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About Bijoy Pal

Bijoy Pal is a writer and traveler who loves living a simple, quiet life. He shares real stories about mental health, personal growth, and finding peace. When he isn't writing, you can usually find him lost in a good book, exploring a new place, or sharing intentional travel and life tips at Briefvoy.

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When Doing More Is Really an Attempt to Control the Outcome

“Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” ~John Allen Paulos

I refreshed the analytics page even though I had checked it only a few minutes earlier. The number had not changed, so I opened the project, reread the opening line, tested a button, and returned to the dashboard. My shoulders were tight and my eyes felt dry, but I kept moving between the same pages as though one of them might suddenly tell me what to do next.

The work was finished for the evening. Everything important was functioning, and nothing required an immediate decision. Closing the laptop still felt careless.

I told myself I was being thorough. Small mistakes can go unnoticed, early feedback can be useful, and a little more attention might prevent a problem later. Those reasons sounded sensible until I admitted that I was no longer checking with a clear purpose.

I was circling the work because I could not control what happened after I finished it.

Each visit to the dashboard gave me a brief feeling of involvement, then the uncertainty returned. I answered that feeling by finding another detail to inspect.

This happened whenever I cared deeply about an outcome that needed time. I searched for advice, reopened choices I had already made, and compared my progress with people whose circumstances I barely understood. By the time I opened the tenth tab, it still felt like the first one that might contain the answer.

I rarely absorbed much during those sessions. I scanned quickly for evidence that I had missed something or for a promise that one small change would improve the result. A useful idea brought relief for a few minutes, but another question soon replaced it.

I had always considered myself fairly self-aware. I could recognize perfectionism, impatience, and the need for reassurance in my own behavior. Years of reflection had given me a detailed vocabulary for describing my patterns.

That evening exposed the limit of that vocabulary. I could explain exactly why I was checking and still reach for the refresh button. Understanding the habit had become a comfortable substitute for interrupting it.

My hand was resting on the trackpad when I asked myself what I would do if I accepted that certainty was unavailable. The answer came immediately: I would close the laptop and wait. My body reacted to that thought as though waiting were a reckless choice.

My mind quickly built a case for staying. There were still details I could review, other people were probably working harder, and the outcome mattered to me. Each thought contained enough truth to disguise what was happening.

Effort had stopped improving the work, but it was still helping me manage my feelings. Activity made me feel less exposed because it gave the uncertainty somewhere to go. I could turn it into reading, checking, adjusting, and measuring.

I closed the laptop. Relief did not arrive, and my mind continued reviewing everything that might be wrong. After a few minutes, I walked into the kitchen for water and nearly reopened the computer when I returned.

That moment helped me understand why the checking felt so necessary. It gave me something to do when I felt powerless. Leaving the screen dark meant accepting that I had reached the limit of what effort could accomplish that evening.

I sat beside the closed laptop while my mind offered new reasons to continue. Nothing dramatic happened, and the discomfort did not disappear on command. The evening simply moved forward without another visit to the dashboard.

The next morning, the project was still there. Nothing disastrous had happened, the numbers remained modest, and the work had survived several hours without my supervision. The experience did not transform me, but it made the pattern harder to ignore.

A few days later, I caught myself repeating it. I had opened one analytics tool, then another, and was about to search for an explanation of a change too small to mean anything. My chest had tightened, and I was reading without really taking in the words.

I stopped and asked what new information I expected to find. A clear answer never came, so I closed the browser. That question became more useful to me than another explanation of my behavior.

A real task usually had an outcome I could describe. The anxious version of work kept expanding because its purpose was relief rather than progress. Every answer created another uncertainty, and completion remained just beyond reach.

My body often recognized the difference before my thoughts did. Useful work could leave me tired, but I usually felt settled when I stopped. Nervous activity left my attention scattered and made the idea of stopping feel dangerous.

Some evenings I ignored those signs and continued until I was exhausted. At other times, I closed the laptop while the urge to keep checking was still strong. I would make tea, read something unrelated, or sit quietly while my mind tried to pull me back.

Those moments did not feel like personal growth. They felt unfinished. That was precisely what made them difficult.

I had treated waiting as evidence that I was falling behind. Staying active felt responsible, while leaving an outcome alone felt passive and weak. That belief worked when a problem still needed action, but it became harmful when time was the only remaining ingredient.

Waiting slowly became a form of restraint rather than neglect. It required me to notice when another action would add nothing. It also forced me to feel the gap between doing the work and learning what the work would become.

The urge to check still appears when progress is slow or feedback is unclear. It also shows up when I am waiting for a reply, a decision, or any result that matters to me. My mind remains skilled at turning discomfort into a convincing task.

I now ask what I expect the next action to change. A specific answer usually means there is something useful left to do. A vague answer often means I am searching for reassurance.

This has made me more honest about the limits of effort. Care can improve what I create, and discipline can help me continue, but neither can control how quickly the world responds. Accepting that limit has made my work calmer without making it less serious.

Last week, I finished something late in the evening and checked it once. I wrote down two points to review the next morning, then closed the computer while the familiar unease gathered in my chest. My attention kept drifting toward the screen, but I left the laptop closed.

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About Kaies Saidi

Kaies Saidi is an English teacher and the creator of PersonaHaven, a free platform offering personality tests and practical self-awareness tools. Visit her site at https://personahaven.com.

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When “Nothing Is Wrong” Keeps You in the Wrong Life

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” ~Carl Jung

I was twenty-eight years old, standing in front of a mirror, reaching for my lipstick.

I couldn’t put it on.

I was engaged. A wedding was ahead of me. The invitations, expectations, and imagined future were already gathering momentum.

Nothing was visibly wrong.

That was the problem.

As I looked at my reflection, I could not find myself inside the life I was preparing to enter.

There had been no betrayal, no dramatic confrontation, and no single moment I could point to and say, “There. That is why I must leave.”

But in that moment, with the lipstick still in my hand, I knew.

And because I could not prove what I knew, I kept trying to talk myself out of it.

When “Not Wrong” Becomes the Reason We Stay

We are taught to recognize a life that is falling apart.

We know what to do with danger, cruelty, betrayal, and circumstances that have become impossible to endure. A visible crisis supplies both the reason and the permission to change direction.

Quiet disconnection is much harder to defend.

How do you explain leaving when the honest answer is not, “This is terrible,” but “I cannot feel myself inside it anymore”?

How do you disappoint people when they can see everything you are giving up but not what staying is costing you?

I told myself I should be grateful. I reminded myself that other people had it worse, and I searched for evidence that my discomfort was serious enough to deserve attention.

Most of all, I waited for something to happen that would make the decision obvious. Something undeniable. Something everyone else would understand.

But nothing happened.

The relationship did not become dramatically worse. The future did not collapse. I simply became more aware that I was preparing to live a life I no longer consciously chose.

Eventually, I called off the wedding.

I did not do it because I knew exactly what should happen next. I did it because I finally admitted what could not happen next.

The Most Dangerous Question Wasn’t “Can I?”

For a long time, I asked myself whether I could go through with it.

Of course I could.

I could manage the discomfort, complete the plans, smile in the photographs, and become highly competent at living the life I had already set in motion. I had always been capable.

That capability nearly became the reason I stayed.

Many of us remain in relationships, careers, commitments, and identities that no longer fit because we are still able to perform them beautifully.

We adjust. We solve the next problem, manage our emotions, meet expectations, and become even more efficient at carrying what no longer feels like ours.

Eventually, our ability to cope becomes the evidence we use to convince ourselves that everything must be fine.

But “Can I continue?” is not the same question as “Do I still want to?”

Being able to carry something does not necessarily mean it belongs to you. Being able to make a situation work does not automatically make it yours to keep.

The more honest question was not whether I was capable of going through with the wedding.

It was whether I wanted to live inside the future I was so capable of completing.

The Struggle Continued After the Decision

Calling off the wedding did not immediately feel brave or liberating.

It felt devastating.

There was grief for the relationship and for the future I had imagined. There was shame about disappointing people and fear that I had ruined something good because I was restless, selfish, or impossible to satisfy.

There were practical consequences and emotional ones. Plans had to be undone. Conversations had to be endured. Other people had opinions about a decision they did not have to live inside.

I questioned myself because the decision hurt.

Some part of me had believed that the right choice would arrive with certainty and relief. Instead, it arrived with sadness, fear, and no replacement future waiting for me.

For a while, I mistook that pain for proof that I had made a mistake.

But grief does not necessarily mean a decision was wrong.

We can love someone and still know we cannot build a life with them. We can appreciate what something gave us and still recognize that it is no longer ours to continue.

We can feel deep sorrow while also feeling the first quiet return of ourselves.

Pain is not always a warning to turn back. Sometimes it is the natural cost of telling the truth before circumstances force us to.

The Truth Often Arrives Before Confidence

I wish I could say I felt completely certain when I made the decision.

I did not.

The truth rarely arrived as a loud, commanding voice. It appeared as a thought that kept returning after I had dismissed it.

It appeared as heaviness when I imagined the future. It appeared as the difference between how my life looked and how it felt to be the person living it.

Sometimes truth does not arrive as a desire to leave.

Sometimes it arrives as an absence.

We are no longer curious. We no longer feel expanded by what is ahead. We hear ourselves repeatedly explaining why something should be enough rather than experiencing that it is.

None of these feelings automatically means we should end a relationship, abandon a career, or disrupt our lives. Doubt is not always direction, and discomfort is not always a sign that something is wrong.

But recurring disconnection deserves our attention.

We do not need to obey every feeling. We do need to stop treating every inconvenient feeling as something to overcome.

What Was Really at Stake

At the time, I thought the decision was about one relationship and one wedding.

It was larger than that.

What was truly at stake was whether I would learn to trust my own recognition before someone else agreed with it.

Had I gone through with the wedding, I may have continued building a future that appeared increasingly legitimate from the outside.

The plans would have become a marriage. The marriage would have created more plans. Each new commitment would have made the original truth harder to acknowledge.

That is how a life can become very full and increasingly distant at the same time.

We do not usually wake up one morning and deliberately choose a life that does not fit. We make one accommodation, then another.

We remain because leaving would be inconvenient. We continue because people are counting on us. We tell ourselves that the absence of disaster must mean the presence of truth.

Years can pass that way.

The cost is not always visible unhappiness. Sometimes the cost is that we become less available to our own lives.

We stop expecting to feel moved. We stop asking what fascinates us. We become grateful for what works and quietly ashamed that working is no longer enough.

The Success Was Not a Perfect Life

Calling off the wedding did not protect me from future hardship.

It did not guarantee that every decision afterward would be correct. It did not make me fearless, certain, or immune to disappointing people.

The success was something quieter.

I learned that I could survive telling the truth. I learned that uncertainty was not more dangerous than abandoning myself.

Most importantly, I began developing the self-trust to recognize when I was continuing something because it was true and when I was continuing merely because I was capable.

That distinction would matter many times in my life.

It would matter when decisions were far more complicated than a wedding. It would matter when the stakes were higher, when the answers were less obvious, and when other people’s certainty was louder than my own knowing.

The choice I made at twenty-eight did not hand me a perfect future.

It gave me the chance to participate honestly in the future I would create.

You Do Not Have to Blow Up Your Life to Become Honest

Listening to yourself does not require immediate or impulsive action.

It may begin with nothing more dramatic than admitting what you have repeatedly refused to finish thinking.

You might stop asking, “How can I make this work?” long enough to ask, “Do I still want the life I am working so hard to preserve?”

You might write down the truth without deciding what to do about it yet. You might speak to someone who can listen without rushing to reassure you, judge you, or tell you what your life should look like.

Before making a major decision, I now find it helpful to ask three questions:

What am I preserving?

Is it the relationship, career, commitment, or life itself? Or am I preserving the appearance of consistency, the comfort of other people, or the identity I have already invested in?

What is preserving it costing me?

Not only financially or practically, but also emotionally. What parts of me have become quieter, smaller, or less available because so much energy goes into making this continue?

What might become possible if I looked again?

Not if I immediately left, resigned, ended, or changed everything. Simply if I allowed myself to see the situation as it is now, rather than as I once hoped it would be.

These questions may lead to repair rather than departure.

You may discover that the relationship still matters deeply but needs a more honest conversation. You may realize that you are exhausted, grieving, or temporarily disconnected and need support rather than a different life.

You may choose to recommit with greater clarity.

Or you may recognize that you have been waiting for a disaster to release you from something you no longer want to choose.

Nothing Has to Be Wrong Before You Look Again

I did not learn that every doubt should become a departure.

I learned that I do not need a catastrophe before I am allowed to pay attention.

There are times to remain, repair, and recommit. There are also times when staying becomes a performance we continue because we cannot produce enough evidence to justify leaving.

Only we can discern the difference.

That discernment begins when we stop asking whether we are capable of continuing and become willing to ask whether continuing feels right for us.

You may not know exactly what comes next. You may feel afraid, conflicted, or deeply sad. You may wish the truth had arrived in a form that was easier to explain.

But the quiet truth is still the truth.

Your life does not have to fall apart before you are allowed to look again.

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About Gina Maier Vincent

Gina Maier Vincent is the founder of Exquisitely Aligned® and creator of Underliving. A writer, speaker, podcast host, and modern culture observer, she explores what happens when capable people become so skilled at functioning that they stop noticing whether their lives still reach them. She is the author of the award-recognized book Exquisitely Aligned: A Pocket Guide to Your Magnificent Future.

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The Year I Tried to Optimize My Way into Love

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~William Bruce Cameron

I noticed it halfway through the conversation.

We were outside a café on a warm Saturday, close enough to the next table that I could hear someone laughing behind me. The person across from me was telling a story about getting lost on a hike, because they had been certain they could manage without a map, and they were laughing at themselves as they told it. I laughed in the right place.

Then my attention slid. Sense of humor, strong. Conversation, easy. Shared interests, moderate. Long-term prospects, probably above average.

It happened so automatically that I nearly missed it. Someone was opening up to me, and I had stopped listening and started scoring, assigning values to things that never hold still long enough to be measured.

I liked this person. That was the part that stayed with me afterward. I liked them, and I was grading them anyway.

By then I had spent fourteen months trying to optimize something that had never asked to be optimized.

How I Got Here

The logic had seemed reasonable at every step, which is how these things usually go.

Dating had not been going well, and my instinct when something is not working is to take it apart and find out why. Every flat evening became a data point. Every conversation that faded felt like proof that a better method existed somewhere, and I had not found it yet.

That instinct had served me everywhere else. I like patterns, and I like knowing why things happen, so when a problem appears, I go looking for the variable that explains it. Dating did not seem like it should be an exception.

Around the same time, I started testing dating apps for work, which meant seeing more platforms and matching systems in a month than most people encounter in a lifetime. I stopped being someone who used dating apps and became someone who studied them.

The more I learned, the more certain I got that better analysis produced better decisions. I read the research on attraction. I compared matching algorithms and noticed which opening messages got replies.

None of that was harmful on its own. The problem was that I stopped applying it to the apps and started applying it to people, and I didn’t notice the moment it happened.

It felt productive right up until it made connection almost impossible.

What the System Actually Looked Like

There was never a spreadsheet, but there might as well have been.

I had a rule about second dates. They had to happen within nine days, or I assumed the interest was not real. Nine. Not a week, not ten days, nine.

I tracked reply speed without deciding to. I noticed which conversations had more questions than answers and whether someone’s humor arrived naturally or seemed assembled. After a date I would replay small moments looking for signals rather than remembering how the evening had felt.

Sometimes I would walk home from a genuinely good night unable to answer the only question that mattered, which was whether I had enjoyed myself. I would answer a different one instead. Would this work long-term, based on everything available to me right now?

That question has no answer. People are not finished objects waiting to be assessed, and I kept behaving as though enough information would eventually take the uncertainty out of it.

Work reinforced all of it. Compatibility scores, personality questionnaires, response rates, theory after theory about what predicts a lasting relationship.

The more I collected, the less I was actually in the room. I was watching conversations from somewhere just outside them, quietly gathering evidence about a future that had not happened.

What It Cost

The evening I still think about was not dramatic. Nobody argued, and nobody left upset.

I had met Tom a few times by then. He repaired pianos and had never once asked me what I did for work.

On paper we made no sense. Different work, different weekends, almost none of the shared interests I had convinced myself were non-negotiable, and if I had compared our profiles first, I would probably not have gone.

Every conversation was effortless anyway.

For the first hour that night I forgot the rules entirely. We talked about his mother’s habit of narrating films out loud, and I laughed more than I had in months.

Then the analysis started up again, the way it always did. Maybe our long-term goals did not line up. Maybe we were too different. Maybe there was someone more compatible if I kept looking.

I could feel my attention leaving the table. He said something about his sister’s wedding and the wrong suit arriving, and I was somewhere else, running the numbers on whether any of this made sense.

The evening ended well enough. A few days later I stopped replying.

Nothing had been wrong. My checklist simply could not tell me it was right, and I had made those the same thing.

I have forgotten almost everyone else I turned down in those months. I have not forgotten that evening, and not because I think we would have lasted. It was the first time I understood that I had walked away from something real in order to feel certain.

The certainty never came. Every new match just gave me something else to evaluate.

The Turn

It changed because of one question.

I was telling Dan about yet another date I had spent dissecting instead of enjoying, laying out my reasoning the way I always did. Not the best long-term fit. Too many unknowns. Better to wait for someone who checked more of the boxes.

He let me finish. Then he asked whether I had actually enjoyed being with them.

I started answering with another list.

“No,” he said. “That’s not what I asked.”

I could not answer for a while. I had been so busy predicting what would happen that I had lost the ability to notice what was happening.

That question has stayed with me longer than any compatibility score. It didn’t fix my habits overnight. It gave me a reason to doubt the voice insisting that everything needed more analysis before it could be trusted.

What I Understand Now

Optimization works beautifully on problems that hold still. A recipe does not change while you cook it.

People are not like that. The person across the table is different this year than last, the same way you are, and they are not the sum of their hobbies and their answers to profile prompts. You find out who someone is slowly, through ordinary time spent together.

Connection happens in exactly the places where certainty is not available.

I do not regret learning how any of it works. What I regret is believing that enough information could take the vulnerability out of it, because that is the one thing information cannot do.

The habit reached further than dating, which is the part I did not expect. I have caught myself running the same process on friendships and on decisions about work.

When something feels uncertain it is tempting to believe another round of thinking will settle it. Sometimes it does. Often it just postpones the living part.

There is a difference between paying attention to someone and keeping score of them. One of those brings you closer.

What Helped

Notice when you are evaluating instead of listening.

This became the first thing I checked. When I caught myself ranking someone or forecasting how it would go, I brought my attention back to what they were actually saying. The point was not to stop thinking, only to be present enough to hear the real sentence rather than the one I was already interpreting.

Choose curiosity over certainty.

I stopped expecting to know where something was heading after two meetings. Rather than asking whether a person fit the future I had drawn, I asked whether I wanted to know more about them. That left room for people to surprise me, which no checklist has ever done.

Do not keep score of anything you could not say out loud.

This turned out to be the most useful rule I have. If I was silently holding something against someone that I could not imagine raising with them kindly, I treated my own judgment as suspect. Relationships are not built out of private assessments.

None of this made dating easier straight away. It made it more human, and once I stopped trying to control how every evening would turn out, I started enjoying them again.

The old habit still surfaces. The difference is that I catch it now, usually before it takes the conversation with it.

I think about that café sometimes.

Most of the details have gone. I could not tell you what we ordered or how long we stayed. What I remember is realizing I was turning a person into a set of observations rather than sitting with them.

The impulse has not disappeared. Every so often I notice my mind reaching for patterns that promise to keep me safe from disappointment, and when it does I go back to the question Dan asked me.

Did you actually enjoy being with them?

Most of the time, that is enough.

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About Sarah Whitemoore

Sarah Whitemoore writes about dating and relationships at MarriageScience, where she has tested more than fifty dating platforms and spends most of her time on the parts of finding love that nobody romanticizes. She is still not very good at first dates. You can find her writing at https://marriagescience.com/author/sarah-whitemoore.

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Why Rest Should Be a Priority, Not a Reward

“In an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.” ~Pico Iyer, from his TED talk “The Art of Stillness”

It was a Tuesday in late September, the kind of afternoon that feels borrowed from summer. I had a work deadline at 5:00. I went to the park anyway.

I spread a blanket on the grass, unpacked a little cheese and some fruit, and poured tea from the thermos I’d filled mostly out of habit. I had a book in my bag that I never opened.

For two hours, I sat outside in the middle of an ordinary weekday, watched the light shift through the oaks, ate slowly, and thought about nothing that needed to be thought about.

I also spent a significant portion of those two hours feeling like I shouldn’t be there.

Not because anyone needed me. Not because a crisis was unfolding at home.

But because somewhere deep in the architecture of how I understand time and worth, an afternoon spent outside doing nothing productive felt uncomfortably close to failure.

Like a truancy. Like something I would eventually have to account for.

I stayed anyway. And what happened in that park—and what has happened each time I’ve gone back since—quietly changed something in me.

At some point—gradually, collectively, so incrementally most of us didn’t notice—rest stopped being a natural part of life and became something you earned.

You rest after you finish. You relax when the work is done. The afternoon that belongs entirely to you comes after the afternoon of tasks, and only then, and only if you’ve completed enough to feel justified.

This story is so pervasive that most of us have stopped noticing it’s a story at all.

It feels like common sense. It feels like responsibility. It feels, in the particular way that deeply absorbed beliefs always feel, simply like the way things are.

But the costs of living inside this story are significant and cumulative.

When rest must be earned, it is always deferred. The list is never empty. There is always one more thing that could reasonably be completed before you allow yourself to stop.

What comes instead is a kind of grinding exhaustion we’ve learned to normalize.

A chronic depletion we manage with coffee and the quiet promise that things will slow down soon—after this project, after this season, after this particular stretch of demands.

The slowing down tends not to come on its own. It has to be chosen.

Neuroscience has a name for a network of brain regions that becomes especially active during periods of wakeful rest: the default mode network. This neural system is associated with self-reflection, creative integration, and the processing of experience.

It is, in a sense, a system through which we make sense of our own lives, and  the empty space of doing nothing supports its particular, essential work.

We are not built for perpetual productivity.

We are built for rhythm—effort and rest, engagement and withdrawal, doing and being. When we remove one half of that rhythm, we don’t simply become tired.

We become, over time, somewhat lost. Disconnected from the thread of our own experience. Unable to hear the quieter signals of what we actually need and value and want.

Doing nothing—real, unscheduled, purposeless nothing—is how we find that thread again.

That September afternoon, I didn’t meditate. I didn’t journal. I didn’t set an intention or practice anything in particular. I just sat outside with food I didn’t rush through and nowhere I had to be for two hours.

The first thirty minutes were uncomfortable.

My mind kept drafting the work email I hadn’t sent. I catalogued what I could have accomplished if I’d stayed home.

I had the distinct sense I was doing leisure wrong—performing rest rather than actually resting.

I stayed anyway. I ate a little more. I watched a dog chase a ball across the field.

And somewhere in the second hour, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not with a sudden flash of insight. My shoulders dropped. My breath slowed without my trying.

The afternoon opened into something I didn’t have a name for but recognized immediately as something I’d been missing.

Presence. Simple, full, unhurried presence in an ordinary day.

The trees, I noticed, had no opinion about my inbox.

Nature doesn’t care whether you’re being productive. There is a relief in that, which the body finds before the mind does.

How do we stop this perpetual productivity? I’m not going to suggest meditation, because this isn’t about meditation. I’m not going to recommend a specific number of minutes, because that would turn rest into another task to optimize.

What I’ll suggest instead is smaller and stranger: go outside with something simple to eat and no plan for the time. Leave the podcast. Bring the book if you want, but give yourself permission not to open it. Sit somewhere that isn’t your home or your office.

Let the discomfort come. It will.

The reaching for your phone, the mental inventory of what you should be doing—that’s the productivity guilt looking for a foothold. It’s not a signal to leave. It’s a signal that you needed to come.

Stay through it. Eat something. Watch what’s around you.

When every hour has a purpose, you are always serving the hour. You are never simply in it. This is the practice of getting back in it: showing up somewhere pleasant, with no goal except to be there.

You are allowed to stop.

Not after you finish. Not once you’ve earned it. Not when things slow down of their own accord—now, in the life you actually have.

Doing nothing is not laziness. It is not self-indulgence. It is not time stolen from the people and responsibilities that matter to you. It is maintenance. It is the rhythm your nervous system was designed for.

The afternoon you keep postponing is not a reward at the end of a finished list. It is part of the list.

It belongs in the week the same way sleep belongs in the day—not as a luxury for when everything else is done, but as a foundation without which everything else slowly deteriorates.

I go back to that park now, most weeks. I bring something simple. I sit on the grass.

I don’t always manage to quiet the guilt, but I stay anyway.

Staying anyway. That, I’ve found, is enough.

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About Lori Roach

Lori writes about the quiet practice of slowing down—finding presence in ordinary moments, especially outdoors. She believes that stillness isn’t something you earn after productivity; it’s something you practice in the middle of a regular Tuesday. When she’s not sitting on a blanket in the park, she’s writing about why more of us should be. You can find her work at mindfulpicnics.com.

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How “Doing Fine” Was Actually Holding Me Back

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers

For most of my life, the story looked like a straight line going up. I never hit bottom. This isn’t that kind of story.

And for a long time, that was exactly the problem.

From the outside, my life looked good. I had built things I was proud of and a family I love. If you knew me, you would have said I was doing well, and you would probably have been right.

So this isn’t a story about hitting bottom. It’s a story about something quieter and, honestly, harder to admit.

I was doing well, and I still knew, somewhere underneath it, that I was capable of more than I was actually giving. And instead of doing anything about that, I had gotten very good at explaining it away.

The Most Comfortable Lie I Told Myself

The lie wasn’t “I can’t.” I had shown myself I could. The lie was “This is fine.”

I was in decent shape, so it was fine. I was around for my family, so it was fine. Life was going well, so it was fine.

Every one of those was true in a way, and that’s exactly what made it so easy to believe.

When your life is genuinely good, it takes almost no effort to convince yourself that good is the finish line. Nobody around you is going to argue with it. The world happily rewards “good” and rarely asks you for more.

But I knew. That’s the part I couldn’t shake.

In the quiet moments, the ones where you’re honest with yourself whether you want to be or not, I knew I was settling for a version of my life that was comfortable instead of the version I was actually capable of.

There’s a difference between being grateful for what you have and using gratitude as a place to hide. I had started doing the second one while telling myself it was the first.

A Month That Was Supposed to Be Temporary

The first real crack in all of that came from something small and almost trendy. On January 1, two years ago, I decided to do a dry January.

There wasn’t a big dramatic reason behind it. I didn’t drink every day, and on paper everything looked fine.

But some of the moments I regret most in my life involved alcohol, and not because of how much I drank. It was because of who I was in those moments.

A version of myself I wasn’t proud of and didn’t want my wife or my three boys to see. So a month off felt like a reasonable little challenge.

It was harder than I expected. I remember being at a cocktail hour to celebrate someone I knew, and somebody asked me why I wasn’t drinking.

It caught me off guard, and then it kept happening. At sporting events, at concerts, at gatherings, the same question, and me standing there feeling awkward about an answer that shouldn’t have needed one.

For a while I was anxious about this, wondering what other people thought about the fact that I wasn’t drinking.

It took time before I stopped caring. And before I realized that the discomfort was never really coming from the room. It was coming from the voice in my own head.

Once I got quiet enough to notice that, I could see that the people I was with and the experience I was having mattered far more than whatever drink was in my hand.

And somewhere in that stretch, instead of counting down the days until I could go back to normal, I decided to keep going.

I wanted to stay in that uncomfortable place a little longer and see who I was on the other side of the thing I usually reached for without thinking.

That’s how the sobriety I’ve now held for over two years began. Not with rock bottom.

It began with a month-long challenge I chose to keep extending, because for the first time in a while, I was doing something specifically because it was hard, not because it was easy.

And what surprised me was how it didn’t stay contained to drinking. That clarity showed up everywhere. In how I took care of myself and in how I showed up at the end of a long day.

The thing I was most proud of wasn’t the not-drinking. It was knowing my boys and my wife were getting the same person at night that they got in the morning.

The Reason I Stopped Waiting

While all of that was still new, life reminded me why it mattered, in the hardest way it could have.

We took the family to Disney World and then to the beach. It was the boys’ first time at Disney and their first time seeing the ocean.

We opened the park in the morning and stayed until the fireworks. Long days, a lot of walking, a lot of laughing.

A few days in, my mom called and said she hadn’t seen my dad and didn’t think he’d come home the night before.

It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t someone who disappeared. But I told her he’d probably left early or was running an errand, and I pushed it aside because we were supposed to be having fun.

The next morning, we took the boys into the ocean for the first time.

We were in the water, laughing, jumping waves, nothing rushed and nothing loud, just being there together.

It was the kind of moment you wish you could slow down, without knowing yet how much you’ll want it back later.

Then my phone rang. The moment I heard my mom’s voice, I knew.

My dad had driven to check on his truck, something he did from time to time, and at some point, he’d had a heart attack and passed away. He was in his fifties.

He was my best friend, the one who helped raise my kids, the one who showed up every time without hesitation.

And I remember standing there in the water while everything around me kept moving. The waves kept rolling in. My kids kept playing.

But I wasn’t there anymore. I had been pulled completely inside my own head, trying to understand how something so permanent could happen in the middle of a moment that felt so ordinary.

The thought I couldn’t get away from was this: I don’t get another chance.

No more conversations. No more asking his advice. No more telling him what he meant to me.

It’s strange how fast your mind starts replaying ordinary moments the second you realize there won’t be another one.

That didn’t just hurt. It changed how I see time.

Because the truth is, time isn’t guaranteed. It doesn’t wait for you to be ready, and it doesn’t slow down when life gets busy.

It just keeps moving whether you’re paying attention or not, and most of us live like we have far more of it than we actually do.

We wait to say the thing. We wait to be more present. We wait to take our health seriously, to chase the goal that matters, to become the person we already know we’re capable of being.

And “later” arrives faster than any of us expect.

What Actually Changed for Me

So I stopped waiting to feel ready, and I started taking ownership of the decision every day.

That word, ownership, is the one that changed things for me.

For years I had treated my better habits like a mood. I did them when I felt motivated and let them slide when I didn’t. Then I used the sliding as proof that this was just how I was.

Ownership took the mood out of it. It meant the decision was already made, and my only job each day was to honor a decision I had already committed to, not to argue about it every time I felt tired or busy or uncomfortable.

My health was where this got real. I couldn’t control everything about how my story ends, especially knowing what took my dad and how young he was.

But I could control whether I was actually taking care of the body my family needs me in, or whether I was quietly telling myself that “good enough” was good enough.

It wasn’t. Not with three boys and a wife who need me here for a long time.

And here’s what surprised me. Owning it didn’t make my life feel heavier. It made it feel lighter.

Because I wasn’t negotiating with myself all day anymore. The question was no longer “Do I feel like doing this today?” The question was just “how?”

That’s a much smaller and much more answerable question, and it gave me back an enormous amount of energy I hadn’t realized I was spending on the daily argument.

If Any of This Sounds Like You

I wrote this for the person who is doing well and quietly knows they’re capable of more.

Not the person at rock bottom, though I have real respect for anyone climbing out of one.

I mean the person whose life genuinely looks good, who has real things to be grateful for, and who has also gotten a little too comfortable calling “good” the end of the road, while some honest voice inside keeps saying there’s more in there.

If that’s you, here is what I would say if we were sitting across a table.

Notice when “I’m doing fine” is doing too much work. Gratitude is real, and it matters. But if you’re using “it’s fine” to avoid looking at a gap you already know is there, that’s not gratitude; that’s a nicer word for settling.

You’re allowed to be grateful for where you are and still decide you want more from yourself.

Do one hard thing on purpose. Not because you have to, but because you may have forgotten what it feels like to choose something difficult when your life doesn’t require it.

That’s what a dry month did for me. Pick something small and a little uncomfortable, and stay with the discomfort instead of reaching past it. You learn a lot about yourself in the staying.

And don’t wait for a phone call to make you serious about your time. This is the one I wish I could go back and tell myself.

The people you love, the health you keep putting off, the person you keep meaning to become—none of that is promised the extra time we all assume it has.

Make the decision once, own it every day, and stop treating the things that matter most like they depend on how you feel that morning.

I’m not writing this from a finish line. I’m writing it as someone still doing this every day, someone who had a good life and decided that good wasn’t the same as living up to what I actually had in me.

That decision cost me the comfort of my easiest excuse. What it gave back was worth far more.

It was the quiet, honest feeling that I’m finally showing up for the people counting on me to be here, and actually being here while I am.

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About Chris Sund

Chris Sund is a keynote speaker and the author of You Are Capable of More: A No-Excuses Guide to Becoming Your Best Self. He is President and COO of Uniti Med, GQR Healthcare, and Nebula, a husband, and a dad of three boys. He writes about growth, ownership, and becoming the person you already know you can be. You can find him at YouAreCapableOfMore.com.

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Emotionally Overwhelmed? 5 Simple Practices That Can Help

“Whatever you’re feeling, it will eventually pass. You won’t feel sad forever. At some point, you will feel happy again. You won’t feel anxious forever. In time, you will feel calm again. You don’t have to fight your feelings or feel guilty for having them. You just have to accept them and be good to yourself while you ride this out. Resisting your emotions and shaming yourself will only cause you more pain, and you don’t deserve that. You deserve your own love, acceptance, and compassion.”  ~Lori Deschene

One cry a day. I have used this four-word phrase to defend my personality for over a decade.

“I always cry at least once a day,” I explain in jest to a new co-worker who is watching in bewilderment as tears roll down my cheeks. She is surprised that letting me cut her in the restroom line elicited such an emotional response. I assure her that the tears are not “bad” and it is not her “fault.” In fact, crying is frequently my go-to response to relatively arbitrary, fleeting moments.

Whatever the emotion, whether it be joy, gratitude, surprise, fear, sadness… you name it, I’ll cry it. The tendency to cry is not a recently acquired characteristic. I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. I now know that I was born with an emotionally sensitive temperament; however, as a child, I was like, “What is happening to me?!”

My first memory of being overpowered by emotions is from the day my younger sister was born.

When I was six years old, my mom was pregnant with her fourth child. I was tired of being the female meat patty sandwiched between two male bread slices (my brothers), and I fantasized about having a baby sister. On September 14, 1995, Mimi, Aunt Sheila, Eddie, Joe, and I sat around the dining room table in the kitchen of my childhood home in Southern California while my mom and dad were in the hospital.

I (im)patiently awaited the life-changing news, and the phone rang after what seemed like hours. My Aunt Sheila answered and quickly exclaimed, “It’s a girl!” She held my small hands, and we jumped up and down.

I quickly noticed something odd… I was sobbing. What the heck was happening? I thought I wanted a baby sister?! With tears streaming down my face, I looked up to my aunt with fear in my eyes and asked, “Why am I crying?” Aunt Sheila crouched down, smiled gently, and assured me that my tears were not the “bad” kind—these were happy tears.

This moment taught me that there are different types of cries and, more importantly, highlighted a greater personal truth: I am a very emotional person. I do not believe that I have overactive tear ducts; the crying is a concrete representation of my emotions. I follow those tears—my emotions guide me.

High sensitivity is a quality that many possess, especially therapists. “It is good to be in touch with my emotions,” I remind myself during my daily cry. “It’s why I can do the work that I do.”

Growing up, emotional sensitivity impacted my daily life, mainly because big feelings are typically connected to thoughts, physiological sensations, action urges, and behaviors. Big emotions can feel like a tornado whirling me up. Sometimes, the ability to genuinely experience these emotions is exhilarating. Who wouldn’t want to be the girl simultaneously tearing up and jumping up and down because she is so overwhelmingly excited to hear Whitney Houston’s 1987 hit “I Wanna Dance with Somebody”?

Though the flow of tears can be a response to nearly any emotion, I often cry because I am experiencing a less pleasant one. These more difficult feelings are the other side of the girl who is beyond elated because a kind soul allowed her to cut the bathroom line. Unfortunately, humans can’t pick and choose feelings, so I get the wanted ones with the unwanted ones.

At some point during high school, “one cry a day” was no longer a mantra but a benchmark to aspire to: to cry only one time in twenty-four hours. Such emotional reactivity was too much for my self-conscious teenage self. The intensity of the emotion was now coupled with shame and embarrassment.

I believed I was getting too old to respond so emotionally to situations that were “no big deal.” A running internal monologue informed me that everyone around me had more self-control. My inability to handle my emotions was a clear sign that something was seriously wrong with me.

Riding a daily rollercoaster of emotion was exhausting—exhilarating highs were quickly followed by stomach-dropping lows. By the end of high school, I had discovered that I could mediate these ups and downs through a series of behaviors that developed into an eating disorder.

Over the next two years, the quick tricks became compulsive obsessions, steadily increasing in frequency; in time, I needed the eating disorder rituals to function because, without them, the emotional intensity of my daily experience was too much.

In college, I struggled to leave my room, go to class, or socialize with friends without the help of my little friend E.D. (short for eating disorder). After realizing that, despite my desperate determination, I could not stop these behaviors, I begrudgingly went to see a school counselor.

Through weekly cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) sessions beginning my sophomore year of college, I learned that the eating disorder had very little to do with food or weight; it was a way of coping. CBT taught me that my thoughts and feelings about myself led to my actions.

Even after a year of CBT, my understanding of my emotional sensitivity and eating disorder was limited. I was still engaging in eating disorder behaviors on occasion, my relapses correlating to stress levels, and after a tumultuous transition to New York City—nearly ten years after I first developed my eating disorder—the frequency of disordered thoughts and behaviors escalated to a crippling peak. E.D. had won the decade-long game of tug o’ war; my consolation prize was intensive eating disorder treatment.

In treatment, I was introduced to the ultimate game-changer: dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).

American psychologist Marsha Linehan (1993) developed DBT in the early 1990s as a treatment for women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). DBT is an approach to therapy that combines behavioral sciences and Zen practices, proposing that pathology is rooted in an inability to regulate emotion.

Though I considered myself to be in touch with my emotions, DBT taught me that I was actively resisting and engaging them, which increased the intensity of the painful feelings. The avoidance resulted in an undercurrent of persistent emotional overloading, leading to increased behaviors—the unending cycle felt impenetrable and unbreakable.

The philosophy of DBT rang true for me, providing me with a compassionate understanding of my emotional vulnerability and the intense shame that I carried as a result of my sensitivity. During treatment, I developed new ways to tolerate and regulate emotion, which ultimately helped me to break the relentless cycle that I felt stuck in before treatment. I learned to ride the waves of my feelings.

While sharing all of the amazing things I’ve learned in treatment and as a therapist is not within this blog post’s scope, I want to discuss my five favorite skills from DBT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). ACT is like a sister therapy of DBT, and it’s great because it teaches us to stop fighting our feelings.

1. Stop and notice.

When intense feelings come roaring in, hit the brakes. Take a moment to identify what’s happening inside you.

Ask yourself: What emotion am I experiencing? What physical sensations am I feeling (like that knot in your stomach or a racing heart)? Where in my body do I feel these sensations? What thoughts are taking center stage? What are my instincts pushing me to do?

Remember, the goal isn’t to label your emotions perfectly; it’s simply to hit pause and observe. This empowers you to make choices rather than having emotions dictate your actions. Initially, this can be very difficult because we may feel like we are in a tornado of thoughts, sensations, and urges. Keep practicing—it becomes easier over time.

2. Describe nonjudgmentally.

Articulate your inner experiences using factual, nonjudgmental language. It’s like talking out loud to an impartial observer.

For instance, say, “I’m having the thought that things are hard,” or “I’m experiencing a pounding sensation in my chest.”

Remember: When we are emotional, we want to judge ourselves (i.e., “I shouldn’t be feeling this way!”). Do your best to notice when you are judging your experiences as “good” or “bad.” Judgments often fuel emotional reactivity. By sticking to the facts, you are taking steps to regulate your emotions.

3. Try “defusing.”

Defusion is my favorite skill from ACT! It’s a made-up word that teaches us how to create space between our internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, memories, images) and who we are.

When working with clients, I ask them to think about their emotions as tinted sunglasses. When they feel a big feeling, they see the world through that emotion. Defusion is taking off those shades! You deliberately look at your emotions (like a scientist observing a lab experiment), rather than looking through your feelings (like a person with sunglasses on seeing only a tinted version of the world). There are many defusion strategies, but I encourage you to try this one:

Say, “I am having the feeling of… [insert any emotion, mad-lib style].”

By naming the emotion separate from yourself, you start to “defuse it.” In other words, the language of “I’m having the…” helps you step back and creates space between you and your feelings. This simple act can reduce the intensity of the emotion.

4. Drop the struggle.

Picture this: your emotions are like waves in the ocean. Trying to change or escape them is like trying to stop the waves. It’s exhausting and, ultimately, futile. Dropping the struggle is about letting go of the fight against your thoughts and emotions. Instead of resisting or distracting yourself, accept these internal experiences as part of being human.

When you drop the struggle, you allow emotions to be. It’s not an easy task, but it’s incredibly liberating. You prevent emotions from growing larger and maintain control over your actions.

5. Do what you really want.

You’ve got emotions telling you to do this or that. But what do you truly want? This is where values come into play. Values are your guiding stars, reflecting what you want to be about. When your actions align with your values, you experience a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Discovering your values helps you know what steps to take, especially when big emotions come knocking. It’s like having a personalized roadmap for life’s emotional rollercoaster.

These tools helped me, and I hope you benefit from them too.

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About Mary Kate Roohan

Dr. Mary Kate Roohan is a psychologist and drama therapist based in Pasadena, California. She is the founder of Thrive and Feel and is passionate about teaching evidence-based therapy skills to highly sensitive people (HSPs). You can sign up for Mary Kate's free guide to managing emotions at her website.

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