Relational Certainty Isn’t Coming Rescue You
Photo Credit: Brianna Clement, LMHC. Relational Shame Therapy Across the Greater Seattle Area
Is It the Right Relationship, or Is It You?
You’ve been keeping tabs on your relationship for a while now. Maybe you’ve always questioned whether it’s the right fit.
As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, I often meet clients who feel as consumed as a true-crime investigator. They’re building a case: did I choose the right partner, or the wrong one?
But what if this question is a red herring that keeps you fixated on your partner as a way to avoid changing something in yourself?
In my therapy practice, I encourage clients to view relationships as mirrors. Other people reflect traits back to us, and we see ourselves more clearly.
What if the traits you can’t tolerate in your partner are disowned qualities within yourself?
The Myth of “Maybe Someday”
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from waiting for the relationship to change. For your partner to evolve. For future potential to magically reveal itself.
The benefit of waiting is that you don’t have to change anything today.
Instead, you circle back to the checklist of all the positive aspects of your partner in your mind. Then you spiral into everything you’d lose if this ended. The life you’ve built together. The time and investment you’ve made. Imagining this level of loss becomes overwhelming. Terrifying even.
You shake your head, call yourself crazy, and brush it off.
Shrinking in More Than One Relationship
Meanwhile, you pretend that you’re okay with going through the motions. You’re playing the role of an overwhelmed, burnt out, resentful partner, who has lost vitality and passion.
This might show up in the creative project you can’t seem to prioritize, the hard conversations you’re not having at work, or the friendships you’re taking for granted.
Being cut off from your instincts carries real consequences (Estés, 1992).
If you grew up believing that you were never really enough, or that love was conditional, you might find yourself unconsciously managing this hurt to preserve a felt sense of safety, despite the toll it takes.
Hyper-Responsibility and Emotional Overextension
Developmental Roots
If you were raised by emotionally dysregulated adults who projected their issues outside of themselves, you likely absorbed the belief that you must be the issue.
One of the most profound wounds that happens in childhood is the experience of not being received. Not being understood. The lack of belonging that occurs from not having made an impact on the other ripples outward into adulthood.
When we have an experience of being received and understood, we begin to believe that we have value.
If Only I Could Be Better
In the eyes of a child, their parents are Gods. Their lives rest solely in the hands of the adults in charge, and if those adults weren’t dependable, that reality is too much for a child to fathom.
A child’s ego isn’t developed enough to reconcile a parent’s shortcomings, so it learns to manage the best it can. “If I were just quieter, nicer, more helpful, then maybe they’ll be okay.”
Emotional Anticipation in Childhood
Children raised in unpredictable environments learn to:
stay vigilant
anticipate conflict before it occurs
stabilize other’s moods by “being good”
absorb blame to stay safe
How Hypervigilance Becomes a Survival Strategy
Ideally, we all have an experience of an energetic and physical boundary in the world.
When that sense of being held in our own bodies gets violated, we exhaust our resources to adapt to stress.
What’s left is often overwhelming helplessness, and no internal sense of where we begin and end.
Trauma, Boundaries, and the Loss of Self
Gábor Maté defines trauma not as the event itself, but as an unhealed wound a person is left to defend. One that gets managed by constricting his or her own ability to feel, be present, and respond flexibly.
Childhood Neglect → Adulthood Overextension
Neglect in childhood promotes overextension in adulthood. A person stuck in constant performance, constant doing, constant hypervigilant tracking of the world around them.
Differentiation: Learning Where You End and Others Begin
A poorly differentiated self can't tolerate its own separateness (Bowen, 1994). It needs the approval of others to feel stable, so it borrows a sense of self from whoever's nearby. This exposes itself in two ways.
Fawning and Losing Yourself in Other People
Some people fold. They scan for what will please, then adjust their thoughts, words, and actions to match it, often before they've registered it consciously.
Control and Rigid Expectations
Others do the opposite. They hold a rigid, often moralized picture of how people should be, and they push others to fit it.
Neither one is a self in relationship with another self. One dissolves into the other person's expectations; the other tries to make the other person dissolve into theirs.
From Self-Abandonment to Self-Trust in Relationships
The Myth of the Overnight Transformation
What I don’t hear in the cultural zeitgeist is how destabilizing it can be to show up more honestly. For those who have yet to do their own inner work, there is a projected fantasy that relational healing is like an exorcism moment, where we suddenly shape-shift into a different human.
The Real Work of Becoming
It can be a hard reality when I remind my clients (and myself) that just because we have an “ah-hah” moment in our heads, doesn’t mean everything around us will magically fall into alignment.
Instead, we have to be with the extreme discomfort of being in the liminal space of who we were and who we are becoming. We must grieve the life we lost when we were half asleep. Unknowingly repeating the exact relational dynamics that caused us so much pain.
Then, we have to show up differently.
Which will be resisted from every part of your body that developed around keeping you small and safe. And you have to keep showing up differently. And again. And again. Until these patterns are recoded into your body, settled in your system, and reoriented within your relationships.
Two Failed Shortcuts: Demand and Retreat
What happens when we refuse to stay in integrity with this process of evolving into a more honest version of ourselves? What if we achieve this insight on TikTok and just decide to be different?
Two common manifestations of the supposed “overnight transformation”:
Stomping around the world demanding that my needs be met by other people. As if it’s their responsibility to mend my unresolved relational pain.
Operating from the belief that “if I can venture off and reconcile these issues alone on a mountain somewhere, I can figure all of this out on my own.”
While these paths may get quick dopamine hits of approval on social media, neither bodes well for authentic relating.
Betraying the Role I was Taught to Play
As someone who is currently navigating how to trade my fear-based conditioning for trust, I can tell you firsthand how horrifying it actually is. To feel like I am betraying my role as a woman to be unconditionally self-sacrificing, no matter the cost to my body, mind, and spiritual wellbeing.
When we live out of alignment with our truth, we begin to:
feel entitled to other people’s energy
view differences from a place of judgement instead of curiosity
act out in ways we are ashamed of
Feeling overqualified to have an opinion on someone else’s personal life is a signal that we are failing to meet our own needs.
Costco: My Personal Case Study
I always give my clients permission to embrace these new ways of engaging without needing to get them perfectly right. To adopt an experimental attitude, try things out, and see what happens.
Here’s an example from my own life:
I hate crowds. I get overstimulated and fatigued easily, and part of my healing has been learning to protect my energy the way an athlete protects their body.
So when my partner mentioned wanting to go to Costco on a weekend, my first thought was, absolutely not.
Choosing Honesty Over Self-Abandonment
He hadn't asked me to come, but I felt the familiar impulse to volunteer myself anyway. Since I've been intentional about showing up more honestly in my relationships, I told him I wasn't available.
What fascinated me was that showing up for myself meant adapting to an anger I hadn't consciously registered yet. Rewiring my impulse to say yes into a regulated "I'm not available" was itself an act of adaptive anger. My intuition sensed that he wanted me to go, but he didn’t say this explicitly.
Instead of circling what I perceived as his shortcomings and making proclamations about my needs for him to change like a toddler, I took responsibility for myself. I communicated my limits directly, without over explaining.
Personal Responsibility
The following day, I felt more energized and clear.
✨ When we learn to track our inner world, we begin to move from a place of trust and expansion. Our energy is constantly offering us feedback; we simply have to be willing to listen. ✨
This is a radically different approach from many couple’s therapies that place emphasis on communicating your needs to your parter and assume that they always have capacity to hear and receive them. Like a parent-child relationship. Which I personally, find deeply problematic.
How Small Choices Build Self-Trust in Relationships
After sitting with extreme discomfort in my nervous system from the day before, a spontaneous compromise emerged. I was willing to go, but only if we went right when they opened. Otherwise, he could go without me.
While this compromise may seem trivial, it's not. Tiny, incremental moments matter:
🌿 Attuning to self and containing existing anxiety
🌊 Holding internal anxiety before prematurely releasing it
🪄Training the nervous system to tolerate future stress
Moments of relational mindfulness prevent long-term resentment, self-loathing, and relational strain.
And here's the thing: nobody outside of yourself, not even a therapist, can hand you a script for this. It has to come from a place of alignment within you.
Creating Secure Connection Without Losing Yourself
After all was said and done, I noticed tenderness arise naturally. As I connected more deeply with myself, I discovered an innate impulse to move toward my partner. Not from guilt or obligation, but from a place of steady, open-heartedness.
This did two things:
Allowed me to see my partner not as an extension of myself but as his own person
Satisfied an unmet longing for feeling seen without feeling smothered
With a regulated nervous system and greater discernment, new relational experiences can help transform unconscious, unmet needs from the past.
Differentiation: Staying Grounded When Your Relationship Feels Uncertain
True differentiation requires us to remain present while caught inside of our projection. Notice the desire to actively do something. Then pause and ask yourself:
Am I calm and grounded in my own body, or am I chasing something?
What am I making someone else responsible for?
What am I asking them to feel so I don’t have to?
This quality of inner listening is not instinctive for most of us. We have been well trained to externalize. To look outward for the signal that confirms whether we're loved or safe. Reclaiming that signal as an internal one is the task at hand.
Breaking the Rescuer Reflex
From there, we can meet others as they are in the present, without unconsciously reparenting them or waiting for them to rescue us from our own discomfort. Because there’s truly nothing less sexy than turning your relationship into a parent-child dynamic.
In doing so, we interrupt long-term patterns of self-abandonment by taking conscious responsibility for our own anxiety. This opens up new pathways toward authentic connection without a hidden agenda.
The Difference Between Surrender and Self-Abandonment
Stop Waiting. Start Listening.
Depth psychologist Dene Logan dares us to ask: What would my life look like if this thing I'm waiting on never came? (Logan, 2024).
We spend so much time reaching for certainty that we often miss the synchronicities that offer clarity and steady assurance on a cellular level. We also miss an opportunity to surrender to a greater narrative beyond our ego’s limitations.
This is a genuine invitation to release your grip. To stop organizing your energy around an outcome you cannot control and take responsibility for change that’s within your control.
Not Giving Up, But Giving In.
We often hear surrender as defeat or giving up. Collapsing into the belief that nothing will ever change.
On the contrary, true surrender asks that you stop outsourcing your power to something outside yourself.
When we surrender in the depth psychology sense, something paradoxical happens. We stop leaking energy toward what isn't here, and we begin to feel what is.
Equanimity vs. Numbness
Equanimity, in the depth sense, means you can hold what is true, even when what is true is painful. Without collapsing into it or immediately reaching for the nearest distraction.
Creating Sacred Space
If you need support in discovering what’s true for you, create a ritual to help contain this process.
A ritual is a symbolic act practiced with intention. My yoga mat symbolizes my sanctuary: a place where I get to come into my body. Every morning, when I roll out that rectangular piece of polyvinyl chloride, I’m making space for the “irrational”—the parts of me that don’t need to be explained, solved, or shaped to fit someone else’s expectations.
Through breathwork, respectful listening, and mindful movement, I create the conditions for something new to come through. An idea to become inspired by. An image from my dream. An unresolved emotion. An avoided sensation. Or the thwarted instinctual anger I can claw out like a tiger and roar like a lion.
Yoga mobilizes me to expand beyond the ways I’ve been conditioned to be smaller, quieter, more agreeable, and easier to accommodate.
Ritual places us back into right relationship with the soul. Helping us to experientially feel where we begin and end.
Choosing a Different Life
While it’s completely understandable why you might want to avoid this work, relational wounds cannot be healed in isolation. They also can’t heal while unconscious patterns replay themselves in the present.
If you’re stuck in cycles of feeling misunderstood and are ready to take responsibility for how you’re showing up, integrative depth therapy offers a reparative experience within relationship.
I work with clients online throughout Washington, including Seattle and the surrounding areas, as well as in person at my Bellingham office.
You don't have to keep sleepwalking through life feeling powerless in your relationships. If you're ready to embrace relational risk in service of honest connection, reach out for more information about pricing and scheduling.
Citations
Bowen, M. (1993). Family therapy in clinical practice. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Estés, C. P. (1992). Women who run with the wolves: Myths and stories of the wild woman archetype. Ballantine Books.
Logan, D. (2024). Sovereign Love: A Guide to Healing Relationships by Reclaiming the Masculine and Feminine Within. Sounds True.
Brianna Clement is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Certified Kripalu Yoga Instructor based in Bellingham and online throughout Washington. She integrates Somatic EMDR, Yoga-Based Therapy, and Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy for holistic healing. Brianna’s approach is trauma-informed and depth oriented to help midlife professionals rebuild relational intimacy and discover their inner calling after traumatic loss. At Intra Psychotherapy & Embodiment, she is committed to integrating psychoanalytic wisdom with modern, research-backed methods to create meaningful change at the emotional core.
