Your chest tightens and a lump lodges itself into this small cavity. Impossible to dislodge. How can this little space hold so much uncertainty and internal torment?

Th questions circle around mercilessly. What did I do wrong? Are they OK? Am I going to be rejected?

It can be over an unanswered text message. A curt reply. It doesn't matter how small the chink in your perception of yourself is OK is. It can also be the lack of feedback that you are OK. Its illogical and maddening and impossible to dissipate with appeals to reason.

It is a visceral fear bred in childhood. Before it could be questioned. Back then if you disappointed, failed to see a change of mood or demand in the caregiver the consequence were dire. Withholding of love or criticism. Being made to feel small. As a little developing being these things were impossible to endure. They tore at the very fabric of your being.

So you strategized and planned how to avoid the assault. How to keep them happy and therefore neutralised. Safe. Benign.

That was success. That was your sole focus. Their needs and annoyances and preferences. You learnt to bend and twist and contort to fit into the hollows they created with their demands. You became nimble, but also compressed and misshapen.

And in these contortions you lost touch and connection with something key. You.

Your needs.

Your wants.

Your loves.

The rich developing tapestry that was you.

Somewhere in the weaving of your personal story, bits are missed, not completed or hastily abandoned in service of self-protection.

The caregiver of course insists on this servitude usually unconsciously: addiction, narcissism, unhealed pain and trauma all pre-empt their blindness to how hard this little being they created is trying to appease.

They tear chunks out of the tapestry unknowingly. And of course they also add to it, as every parent does. There is love there. Often intense love behind their unpredictability and demand.

Nonetheless the ability to tend to self is not curated in co-dependent childhoods. The tapestry is ignored, used only to achieve approval or to avoid the threat of disapproval. Its beauty is not showcased.

Often once the parent is separated from the child by age and distance other obsessions take hold. Others step in who are demanding or difficult. They unconsciously pillage the capacity for appeasement developed in the co-dependent.

The key is that they are not the problem. They are a symptom of the disconnection between you and your needs.

Messages, events, changes are judged not instantly as good or bad. But whether they  are dangerous to the self or not. Threatening withdrawal of approval or not. Hence, "easy" people and relationships are ignored to tend to the difficult ones. To neutralise them. Devoid of the realisation that they do not pose the same threat or hold the same power of you that the caregiver did.

It's a pattern which is hard to break. Because we want to shift the guilt, the lump in the chest and the fear.

But its necessary. We do need to challenge people not appease them. Everyone craves authenticity in the people they love. We crave to uncover it in ourselves. We need to be ourselves and not beholden to their moods. We do need to sit with the discomfort of provoking less than positive reactions.

How? Perhaps by running enough experiments to see that it will not kill us. That it will fade. That being with it will free us to be ourselves.

Perfection, defined as all around being please with us, once obtained is seductive but it is not sustainable.

Ah but the rush of endorphins, the relief when you realise someone is not upset with you, or still loves you, or still needs you is blissful. It harks back to times in childhood when you were reassured that you were OK. Not for just existing, but for living up to expectations. This is the true relief, and perceived happiness, of the co-dependent.

We have to recalibrate the judgment function away from others and towards ourselves. Because if we don't we will end up closing our heart to avoid the pain. Not letting people in close enough to hold enough sway over our inner world.

This would be a tragedy indeed.  

How about this instead: Realising that being able to put a hand on your own chest and say its OK is the ultimate soothing balm. That your tapestry deserves time and attention and consideration. And that the question of "what do you need?" should first and foremost be directed to you.

Over time the lumps will release.

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