Hey everyone, welcome back to “The Thread.” If you are new here, this is a weekly essay read by its author. These essays are inspired by the forthcoming book that Bridger and I have coming out soon “EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread.” And this is my first one to share so here we go....
There is a particular kind of grief in understanding someone you can no longer be close to in the same way.
Sometimes, not understanding would be easier.
It would be easier if the behavior made no sense. If we could call someone cruel or selfish or manipulative and allow the certainty of that story to carry us away. There can be a strange relief in a villain.
Villains simplify grief.
But many of us who find ourselves estranged from someone we love are left with something far more complicated.
We understand.
We understand the loneliness underneath the reaching.
We understand why the phone call comes.
Why the promise gets made again.
Why anger follows the boundary.
Why distance can be experienced as abandonment.
Sometimes we understand the other person so well that understanding itself becomes dangerous.
Because for a long time, understanding was followed by participation.
I see why you are hurting.
So I will come closer.
I know why you are afraid.
So I will make myself smaller.
I understand why you need reassurance.
So I will give you more than I actually have.
I know what happens when you feel abandoned.
So I will not leave, even when staying requires me to abandon myself.
There is a difference between understanding someone’s pain and organizing your life around it.
For some of us, it takes years to learn the difference.
The dance is older than the argument
In close relationships, we don’t simply learn things about one another.
We learn choreography.
A change in tone means something.
A pause means something.
The way someone closes a door, takes a breath, begins a sentence, or says your name can tell your body what is coming long before your conscious mind catches up.
We learn when to move closer.
When to become quiet.
When to explain.
When to fix.
When to rescue.
When to disappear.
Over time, these exchanges become less like decisions and more like rhythm.
The term relational memory describes some of this.
Relational memory is different from simply remembering what happened. It is the implicit knowing carried forward from repeated experiences with other people: what closeness requires, what conflict predicts, what happens when someone is disappointed, and what shape we need to take in order to preserve connection.
The past does not remain neatly stored behind us.
Sometimes it comes forward as expectation.
As anticipation.
As an impulse in the body.
As knowing exactly what comes next.
This is one reason estrangement can be so disorienting.
You may have spent years understanding a relationship intellectually before your body stopped participating in it automatically.
You knew the pattern.
You talked about the pattern.
Maybe you even joked about the pattern.
And still, when the familiar distress arrived, you found yourself moving into place.
Because knowing the choreography and no longer dancing it are very different achievements.
Who I had to be
In this context, strategy is not meant in the calculated sense.
It is not manipulation or something we consciously invent to get what we want.
Strategy is the way a human system learns to organize itself in response to experience.
We learn what helps us preserve connection.
What keeps the room calm.
What prevents rejection.
What makes us useful.
What keeps someone we love from falling apart.
What helps us belong.
These adaptations are intelligent.
They make sense inside the relationships that shaped them.
And with enough repetition, they can become so automatic that we no longer experience them as strategies at all.
They simply feel like who we are.
One child learns to disappear.
Another learns to perform.
Another becomes funny.
Another becomes endlessly competent.
Another becomes easy.
Another becomes responsible for the emotional temperature of the entire room.
And some of us learn to rescue.
We become exquisitely sensitive to another person’s distress. We anticipate what is needed before it is spoken. We notice changes in mood before anyone else. We move quickly toward reassurance, explanation, smoothing, fixing.
These qualities can become beautiful parts of us.
They can make us deeply attentive partners, parents, friends, therapists, leaders.
And still, something adaptive can carry a cost.
The problem is not that we learned the strategy.
The problem comes when we no longer know that we have one.
When care becomes obligation.
When empathy becomes self-erasure.
When understanding someone means losing the right to understand ourselves.
When another person’s pain automatically becomes an instruction.
The invitation
One way to describe an enactment is old relational choreography becoming active again.
It is not simply two people behaving badly.
It is a familiar relational pattern becoming alive enough in the present that the people inside it begin to feel its pull.
One person moves.
The other knows the next step.
A look.
A withdrawal.
A criticism.
A crisis.
A promise.
An apology.
A silence.
And before either person has consciously decided what is happening, the dance has begun.
I think this is part of what makes changing a close relationship so difficult.
You are not only changing what you do.
You are changing something that has been organized between people.
When one person stops taking the familiar step, the other person feels it.
Of course they do.
The system has changed.
The person who once rescued does not.
The person who explained stops explaining.
The person who absorbed the anger allows the anger to remain where it originated.
The person who always moved toward the rupture stays still long enough to see whether anyone else will cross the distance.
That change can feel enormous to everyone involved.
And sometimes the relationship begins reaching for the old version of you.
Not necessarily maliciously.
Sometimes desperately.
Because that is the version of you the relationship knows.
The reaching may come as promises.
Anger.
Guilt.
Tenderness.
Crisis.
Accusation.
Reminders of who you used to be.
And suddenly the central question of estrangement is not simply:
Do I want this person in my life?
It becomes something subtler:
Who do I have to become in order for this relationship to continue in its familiar form?
That question can change everything.
Understanding without participating
One of the painful misconceptions about boundaries and estrangement is that distance must require a loss of empathy.
As if remaining compassionate means remaining available.
As if recognizing another person’s pain means agreeing to organize around it.
As if the only proof that we understand someone’s suffering is our willingness to relieve it.
But perhaps there is another kind of understanding.
One that can hold both people at the same time.
Your pain is real.
And so is mine.
Your longing matters.
And so does my limit.
Your history helps me understand what you are doing.
And my understanding does not require me to participate in it.
Your loneliness may explain the reaching without making the reaching safe for me.
This is not indifference.
In some ways, indifference would be easier.
Indifference asks very little.
It is much harder to see the humanity of someone you love and remain unwilling to disappear on their behalf.
There is grief in that.
Because sometimes we are not only grieving the relationship we lost.
We are grieving the hope that if we could just understand enough, love enough, explain clearly enough, rescue carefully enough, or stay long enough, the relationship might finally become what we kept believing it could be.
And relinquishing that hope can feel almost like relinquishing the person.
It isn’t.
But the body may not know the difference immediately.
When recognition becomes choice
The hopeful part is not that our old strategies eventually disappear.
I don’t think most of us heal that way.
The body can remain extraordinarily fluent in an old language long after we stop speaking it every day.
A familiar relationship can still awaken an old impulse.
You can feel yourself wanting to explain.
To fix.
To defend.
To reassure.
To make the ache stop.
The change may simply be that now you can feel the impulse arrive.
There is a moment between invitation and participation.
A breath.
A recognition.
There I am.
There is that old move.
I know what happens next.
And sometimes that moment is enough.
Not to make the history disappear.
Not to make the relationship uncomplicated.
But to restore choice.
The old response becomes something we could do instead of something we automatically become.
That may sound small.
It isn’t.
A life can change inside that pause.
So can a relationship.
And sometimes, painfully, the relationship cannot survive it.
Because some relationships have only ever known us through our participation in the old choreography.
That does not necessarily mean anyone is evil.
It may simply mean the dance was doing more of the connecting than anyone realized.
About a month ago, I woke from a dream with a few lines of a poem still moving through my mind.
I hadn’t gone to sleep intending to write anything. But something about the experience of estrangement—the ache of understanding someone’s reaching and still being unable to return to an old way of being—had apparently followed me into sleep.
I wrote the lines down before they disappeared.
What emerged was this.
I Cannot Re-member
I know the loneliness beneath her reaching.
I know the desperation of someone whose pain has become the only language she knows for connection.
I watch her struggle.
I feel her reaching for me, inviting me to step back into the dance we once knew so well—the dance of pain and rescue, disappointment and abandonment.
I hear her calling for me to react.
To participate.
To give in.
To rescue.
To become who I used to be.
Because that is where she still knows how to find me.
I deeply know the shallowness of her promises.
Not because I question whether she means them in the moment…
But because I have lived long enough to know that the promises are never what endure.
The dance does.
I recall who I once had to be.
I remember how quickly I learned the steps.
How instinctively I anticipated her needs before I ever noticed my own.
How naturally I abandoned myself in hopes that this time love might stay.
I know all of it.
I recall it with remarkable clarity.
But I cannot re-member.
I cannot gather those fractured pieces of myself and place them back into the shape that once made our relationship possible.
Love has changed me.
Loyalty.
Curiosity.
Truly being known.
The kind of love that remains instead of disappearing.
The kind of love that asks nothing of me except that I remain fully myself.
Now I know another way to belong.
And because I know it…
I refuse to re-member.
I cannot return to surviving now that I’ve learned to live.
So I watch her.
I grieve her.
I ache with her.
But I cannot join her.
Not because I no longer love her.
But because I no longer know how to leave myself.
That is the quiet grief of healing.
I still recall the person I once was.
But I can no longer re-member him.
What remains
I keep noticing how often the poem says I know.
Not I hate.
Not I don’t care.
Not even I don’t understand.
I know.
Maybe that is part of what makes estrangement so painful.
Sometimes we leave with enormous understanding.
We can see the loneliness beneath the reaching and still not reach back in the same way.
We can have compassion for the strategy without accepting the role it assigns us.
We can grieve someone without returning to the version of ourselves the relationship once required.
And perhaps that is one of the quieter signs of healing.
Not forgetting.
Not hardening.
Not finally becoming untouched.
But learning that love does not have to require self-abandonment.
That belonging can hold the whole of us.
That another person’s pain can move us without becoming an instruction.
The invitation may still come.
The body may still recognize the music.
We may still remember every step.
But now there is something else we know too.
We know another way to belong.
And sometimes that knowing changes what we are able to return to.
Not because love disappeared.
But because we no longer know how to disappear with it.
The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.
I loved this! Thank you for the words that describe my own feelings.