I think she enjoys treating her boyfriend like a chore because her relationship with her parents acclimated her to the feeling of being depended on. She likes the feeling of parenting and babying someone because her child-self had to do that to stay on her parents’ good side. In other words, her psyche felt like, in order to keep her parents’ love and protection, she needed to turn herself into a caretaker, going above and beyond what she knows she should be doing.

Patterns that are formed out of necessity in an earlier stage of life determine what you look for for the rest of your life. The behaviors you were forced to do when you were younger become the behaviors you itch to do when you’re older.

Like making a tie-dye T-shirt, the twists and turns of childhood shape the way we’re colored as adults.

When our relationship first got rocky early on, everyone told me to try couples therapy. As a good little millennial raised on daily Oprah episodes and bolstered by viral Gabor Maté clips on Instagram, I thought it seemed like the obvious decision. And so for years, from the time we were just dating all the way to the brittle end of our marriage, we sat in front of an array of interchangeable therapists

I thought our troubles were fundamental to our personalities and would require significant work; my husband thought our issues could be chalked up to stressful life events.

I twirled in front of him in a new pair of gold sequin pants before my company’s Christmas party. “How do I look?” I asked, to which he replied, “You didn’t take out the trash.” We were such disappointments to each other.

Teresa No. 1 thought everything was my ex-husband’s fault, but Teresa No. 4 thought it was all mine. Teresa No. 2, after listening to me talk for 51 minutes about how I felt hopeless, shrugged her shoulders at me. “I don’t know what to say,” she replied. I did. I wanted her to say that we should end our relationship with the remaining scraps of dignity we had. She never did, and we instead just moved on to the next Teresa we found. When I cried to Teresa No. 3 that I felt like a failure as a wife, she cried with me, her heavy tears rivaling my own. That night, my ex suggested we should stop seeing her.

Teresa No. 5 told us we needed more sessions more frequently. “There’s a lot of work to do here,” she said, and I wanted to pull her hair. Should there be this much work between two people who ostensibly love each other? Even the ones who seemed to know we were doomed still opened their calendars at the end of each session and urged us to come back, to try again.

instead of helping us see each other more clearly, therapy gave us new words to use to criticize each other. Every constructive lesson became a knife. I learned about trauma responses, and so everything he did elicited a trauma response in me. He was my father! I was his mother! When he learned about gaslighting, everything I did became gaslighting. When we argued about a time he called me stupid, therapy gave him a new explanation for why he said it (repeatedly): “We talked about this. I lashed out because I felt disconnected from you. We need more date nights.”

The kindest thing my ex could have done was leave me, even if we were still trying to make it work. After therapy, on the morose subway ride home where I would hold his limp hand, we’d zone out staring at ads for dating apps. “What should we do for dinner?” he’d ask, and we’d pretend, yet again, to be on the same team.

I don’t regret any of our time with the Teresas; I needed to try just a few more times to make it work, and I needed someone to be a witness to my misery. Teresas No. 1 through No. 6 never told me to leave, but little by little they helped me give myself permission all the same.

my ex made this final assessment about me: No one would put as much work into me as he did. No one would love me enough to try this hard. He would be the only person who’d ever try to keep me. I thought about this a lot as I untangled my life from his, as I went through my calendar and removed the future sessions we had planned with lucky Teresa No. 7. I thought about it when I added sessions for just me and my own therapist — while no one would split the cost with me, I knew it would be worth every out-of-pocket cent. I knew he meant it as a cruelty, but I repeated his words to myself whenever I felt unsure about ending things for good: No one will ever put this particular kind of work into a relationship with me again. No one will ever fight this hard to stay with me.  God. I hope he’s right.

Your emotions are a signaling mechanism. They are your subconscious mind’s toolkit for protecting you from dangers, improving your circumstances, and navigating an otherwise incomprehensibly complex world. Every emotion has some adaptive purpose: fear keeps you safe; anger enforces your boundaries; sadness slows you down; joy speeds you up.

The first step towards living better is to recognize that your subconscious mind is trying to tell you things you don’t yet know (primarily through your emotions, but also via other channels like your dreams). A lot of people struggle to realize even this basic fact; they think of emotions as a disruption: a distraction from, say, their career development, or an impediment to their capacity to “be rational.”

your emotions are worth heeding because they carry wisdom your conscious mind doesn’t have access to. And at that point you must embark on the second step—the much harder step—of figuring out what it is that your mind is trying to tell you.

an attitude of curiosity rather than doubt. Embodiment rather than intellect. You find the answer by allowing yourself to be playful, generative, and spontaneous; not by being methodical, intentional, and constricted. Sit back and feel your way to the answer

The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.

Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.

the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.

Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.

I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.

If you are using emotionally independent language, it may trigger some insecurities in the other person who may think that you aren’t as interested or invested in the relationship. It may be helpful to let the other person know that you are working on your emotional reactivity and trying out new approaches, to help minimize the potential perceived threat on their end.

Becoming emotionally independent can be a challenging journey, although there are numerous potential benefits to reclaiming your own needs and desires and decreasing your emotional reactivity to other people (i.e., managing your own insecurities or unproductive relationship expectations).