Alexis Fernandez-Preiksa

What you don't want to do is maintain that emotion of like, I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever.

Okay.

If you allow yourself to rebuild after you go through emotional hardship, and especially if you're the one that rebuilds yourself and you're not like leaping into a new relationship or a new, you know, situationship or whatever, then you start to trust yourself.

You start to trust your ability to heal yourself, you know, to overcome adversity and things like that.

But I think for you, this needs to be communicated with your partner.

When they start to notice that your walls are up, if you've communicated this, saying this is my defense mechanism, I don't want it to be and I want us to be a team and I want us to be able to work through this.

But when I start putting my walls up, it's because I feel like this relationship is not heading in the direction it needs to be headed.

I'm starting to feel threatened and once I feel threatened, bang, the wall's going to go up.

If you felt safe and that the relationship was heading in the direction that it needed to be heading in, you would likely start to be able to pull your walls down, especially if your partner was able to see and detect these behaviors in you and intercept them sooner.

So it's not to say that your ex...

Was the right person for you or the wrong person for you?

I don't know.

I don't have insight into your ex at all.

But I think for almost any issue in a relationship, communication is the key.

Most of the things that break down a relationship is due to a lack of communication.

How well did he know this about you?

How did he interpret you?

bringing your walls up and shutting him out?

Like, what did that look like?

And do you think it could have played out differently if he knew exactly what your trigger points were and when you would start to kind of like ice him out of the relationship, you know?