Nicole LePera

I'm very annoying with my partner.

I say, are you OK?

What's wrong?

What's wrong?

Anytime her voice shifts in tone or she gets short, nothing to do with me.

But in childhood, my mother wouldn't speak to me.

On the other side of that look often wasn't an explosion like my brother and sister got.

Thankfully, by the time I came along 15 years later, it was the silent treatment.

So now when you're not giving me and you're giving me shortened answers, maybe because you're stressed out at work, we run the business together.

I get it.

I live it.

But I'm interpreting that as, oh, I'm being rejected again.

I'm being abandoned.

Right.

So those it's important to acknowledge when we're kind of talking about all of the ways we've adapted that we've adapted from pain.

And what we're desperately trying to do, which is why we please and achieve and caretake and do all of the things, deflect, and everything's fine and good all the time and we're joking when it's not, it's because that was too painful.

So we are very adaptive and savvy to try to avoid that pain at all costs, which often, of course, comes with cost.

And again, whether or not we have access to exactly the details of what happened, we could just start even now.

What's not working now?

One of the moments that I feel flooded, overwhelmed or confused or knowing that I am not being the person that I want to be or expressing myself authentically.