Bonding

I convalesce 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

In the sanitarium of my mind

I convalesce

Just what then will I epitomize?

Or, do I digress?

The mind is a curious domain

You can turn your attention inside

Discover the connections you’ve made

Then learn where the pit of your fears reside

Consider the invisible opérations

Disassociation or self defense

The subconscious training rituals

The impulse to build a fence

Observations from the playground

Internalized with limited objectivity

Often laid dormant or forgotten

In the shadows of obscurity

Is it really too much to ask?

How we descend upon humanity? 

How we treat each other and ourselves? 

The question in perpetuity 

Some say only knowing the reasons

Will not be enough

You must also be able to feel

Or your experience is just a bluff

The body holds its own accounting
A ledger written in the chest,
A tightness where the words fall silent,
A weight that will not let me rest


What wounds the most is often absent,
Not the blow, but what was never there,
The comfort missing from the doorway,
The empty space of unmet care


A child will trade away the feeling
To keep the bond that keeps him fed,
Authenticity for attachment,
A quiet bargain in his head.


So I learned to think instead of feeling,
To analyze and not to weep,
Assembled reason like a fortress,
And buried sorrow in the keep.


But thought without the heart is exile,
And feeling without thought, a flood;
The mind must learn to hear the body,
The pulse, the breath, the rush of blood.


So I return to meet the younger,
The one who stood beside the wall,
And name the ache he could not utter,
And answer, finally, his call.


To face the shadow is not surrender,
But gathering what was cast aside;
The anger I was taught to swallow
Becomes the strength I need not hide.


Responsibility becomes the medicine,
To carry what I did not choose,
To bear the load and find the meaning
Within the things I feared to lose.


Compassion, then, is not indulgence,
But curiosity made kind,
A question asked without a verdict,
A gentle light within the mind.


The fence I built becomes a garden,
With gates I open and I close;
Not every soul will find the entrance,
But those who do, the heart well knows.


So in the sanitarium of my mind,
I convalesce, but not alone;
The thinking and the feeling marry,
And I, at last, am coming home.

…

DCG

If every lock opened with every key, keys would become useless. People work the same way. You aren’t meant to connect with everyone. The people worth keeping are the ones your personality was meant to unlock. Because your job isn’t to open every door, it’s to find the ones you were made for.

— unknown 

The Razor’s Inner Edge 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

From Thought to Presence


There was a time when I believed that understanding life meant thinking my way through it.
I was drawn to psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, literature, and the restless effort to locate some order beneath the confusion of experience. I wanted to understand why people loved and withdrew, why families carried silence like an inheritance, why pain hardened some people and deepened others. I had always been observant, often more comfortable in thought than in exposure. The mind was a refuge: a place where experience could be examined, named, sorted, and perhaps made less dangerous.
But thought alone could not teach me how to live.
During my early years at San Diego State University, I volunteered as a crisis-intervention counselor in an SDSU-connected setting. The training was Rogerian—rooted in Carl Rogers’s client-centered approach—and it confronted something essential in me. I had long been what I would call a “heady” person: introspective, analytical, philosophical, and inclined to meet life through reflection. Yet crisis work demanded something that analysis could not replace. It required presence. It required trust. It required the ability to hear another person without rushing to correct, diagnose, rescue, or turn their pain into an intellectual problem.
The work taught me that people in distress do not always need an answer first. Often they need to know that another human being has remained in the room with them—emotionally, attentively, without judgment or abandonment.
That realization became an awakening. I began to see how much of my own emotional life had been held at a distance. My childhood and adolescence had taught me ways of surviving that were often more cerebral than relational. I could think deeply about pain without always allowing myself to feel it. I could understand emotional patterns without fully entering the vulnerability of emotional connection. The Rogerian environment challenged that division. It asked me not to abandon thought, but to join it with feeling.
This did not make me less philosophical. It made philosophy more personal.
I began to understand that empathy is not a mystical power, nor is it the claim that one can see perfectly into another person’s private mind. It is a discipline of attention. It is the willingness to listen closely enough that another person feels less invisible. It is the humility to recognize that we may understand someone’s wound without excusing what they do with it. It is compassion with boundaries; it is mercy without blindness.
That tension has remained at the center of my writing.
Through essays, poems, personal reflections, and explorations of attachment, memory, loss, forgiveness, vulnerability, and the human condition, I have tried to give language to emotions that people often carry without a voice. I have written about loneliness and longing, the injuries passed through families, the difficult work of self-knowledge, and the possibility that pain can become something other than a life sentence. Not a badge of superiority. Not an excuse for harm. But a source of humility, insight, and a deeper responsibility toward others.
My interest in becoming a more emotionally mature person has never meant rejecting the intellect. I believe the intellect matters. It gives us discernment, context, language, proportion, and the ability to question our own assumptions. But intellect without tenderness can become cold observation; emotion without reflection can become chaos. I have spent much of my life trying to bring the two together: mind and heart, analysis and presence, moral responsibility and compassion.
The ideal has been self-actualization—not as a polished image of perfection, but as an ongoing act of becoming. To become more honest without becoming cruel. To become more emotionally open without losing oneself. To understand suffering without worshipping it. To recognize the woundedness in another person without permitting that woundedness to govern one’s own life.
This pursuit was also shaped by The Razor’s Edge, both W. Somerset Maugham’s novel and the classic film adaptation starring Tyrone Power as Larry Darrell. Larry’s journey gave dramatic form to a question that had already begun forming in me: What would it mean to refuse the shallow measurements of success and seek a truer inner life?
The story did not offer me a formula. It offered a spiritual and psychological challenge. Larry’s search suggested that a human being could choose a life of inward examination, moral seriousness, and compassionate awakening—even at the cost of certainty, approval, comfort, or convention. The story helped make visible a conviction I have carried for years: that character is not merely inherited, announced, or assumed. It is designed in the choices we make when no one is applauding.
I remain unfinished. I remain a person who thinks too much at times, feels deeply at others, and continues to wrestle with the distance between who I have been and who I hope to become. But the pledge remains clear.
To be more present.
To listen more carefully.
To let compassion be intelligent.
To let intelligence become humane.
To become, however imperfectly, a person whose character is built upon a foundation of goodness.


The Razor’s Inner Edge


I came to thought as others come to prayer,
A quiet room where troubled echoes cease;
I built my shelters out of words and air,
And called the distance from my heart a peace.
The mind could name the fracture in the bone,
Could chart the grief that wandered through the years;
Yet every answer kept me still alone,
A careful scholar of unwept-for tears.
At State, where youth still argued with the dawn,
I entered rooms where broken voices came;
The masks I wore in thought were slowly drawn,
By sorrow speaking softly of its name.
No clever phrase could lift a soul from night,
No theory held a trembling hand in place;
I learned that listening was its own hard light,
And trust began when judgment left the face.
The heady self was challenged by the heart,
The guarded child was asked to come inside;
I learned compassion was a living art,
Not merely pain observed and classified.
I felt the old partitions start to bend,
The mind and feeling meeting without war;
A stranger’s anguish could become a friend,
Without becoming all that I was for.
Then Larry walked the razor’s inward edge,
Through wealth and war, through solitude and flame;
He made no loud or righteous public pledge,
But sought the soul beneath ambition’s name.
Tyrone Power, quiet in that searching role,
Gave shape to questions living under mine:
What is the worth of gaining all control,
If we abandon what is most divine?
Not fame, not ease, not monuments of praise,
Could settle what the inward journey asks;
A life is formed in ordinary days,
When truth removes the well-rehearsed masks.
I do not claim a wisdom I have won,
Nor sight that reads the secrets others hide;
I only know the work is never done,
To meet the world with conscience at my side.
To feel without becoming ruled by grief,
To think without becoming cold or proud;
To offer wounded hearts a little relief,
And speak with kindness when the world is loud.
To know a wound may explain a cruel way,
Yet never make its consequence dissolve;
To give forgiveness room, but not betray
The self that must be guarded to evolve.
So let me build, through error and repair,
A character no passing storm can bend;
With reason, mercy, courage, and with care,
Becoming more humane until the end.

…

DCG

The chapters in your hand

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The Chapters in Your Hand

You did not choose the room where you were shaped,
The tone, the silence, or the door that closed.
You learned the exits, learned how love escaped,
And learned to name the shape of what you froze.
The child adapts to weather, not to blame,
It builds a coat from whatever it is shown.
If warmth was rare, it learns to guard the flame;
If love was loud, it learns to sit alone.
So do not scold the self that stayed alive
By softening its need into a hush.
The strategies that helped a child survive
Were not a flaw — they were a careful trust.
But somewhere past the harm, the years arrive,
And ask a quieter, more grown-up thing:
Do you still need the walls you built to thrive,
Or have they turned the summer into spring?
Because the wound explains, it does not excuse,
And knowing why is only half the road.
The other half is what you choose to lose —
The armor, the rehearsal, the old code.
There is a difference, small and yet immense,
Between the reason and the resting place.
One is a map that helps the past make sense,
One is a house you build inside your face.
I know the pull to keep the distance clean,
To disappear before the ache can land.
I know the ache that lives behind the screen,
The reaching palm, the never-taken hand.
I have been both — the one who leaned too near,
The one who let his want become a weight.
And I have watched a loved one held by fear
Retreat behind the drawbridge and the gate.
So I stopped pulling. Not to punish, no —
But so the room could hold a softer air.
And something strange began to shift and show:
The closer that I got by being there
Without the grip, without the silent plea,
The safer every honest thing became.
The one who fled began to sit with me,
Because I did not need her to be tame.
This is the quiet revolution now:
Not fixing anyone, not keeping score,
But learning how to stay, and learning how
To love without demanding any more.
The pen is in your hand. The past is ink.
The chapters that were written were not yours.
But what comes next is closer than you think —

It waits behind the unlocked, easy doors.

RSP

…

DCG

Regardless of how you were raised, it’s your job to grow up. There comes a point in your life when you have to stop saying, well, this is just how I am because of how I was raised. No. That might be why you became this way, but it doesn’t have to be who you stay. If nobody taught you how to communicate, then learn. If nobody showed you healthy love, then learn. If your family avoided hard conversations, have them. If anger was the only emotion you ever saw, learn another way. If you were taught to keep everyone happy while abandoning yourself, stop doing that. Because growing older happens automatically. Growing up doesn’t, though. Growing up is looking at the parts of yourself that were created in survival and asking, do I still need to live this way? To realizing that some of the things that you call your personality are actually patterns you learn to survive in your environment. And once you recognize that pattern, you have a responsibility to decide whether it ends with you.

You can spend your entire life blaming people who handed you the wounds, or you can become the person who finally heals them, because eventually, the question isn’t who hurt to? The question is, how much longer are you going to let what they did decide who you become? Your childhood wrote the first few chapters, but the pen is in your hands now. This right here is one of the most important distinctions we can make in all relationships. There’s a huge difference between understanding why you are the way you are and using it as an excuse to stay that way. Maybe nobody modeled healthy conflict for you. Maybe vulnerability wasn’t safe in your family. Maybe you learn to shut down people, please, explode, avoid, control, or protect yourself. Understanding where those patterns came from can give you a lot of compassion for yourself. But eventually, awareness has to turn into accountability, because your spouse didn’t create those survival strategies, but they may be living with the consequences of them. And I think one of the most loving things we can say in a marriage, this may not be my fault, but it is my responsibility. You can learn to communicate. You can learn to regulate yourself. You can learn to stay in hard conversations. You can learn a healthier way to love. Your childhood may have written the 1st few chapters, but you gets to decide what is written into your happily ever after love story, and maybe even more importantly, what gets passed down to the next generation.

— attribution, possibly Jimmy Knight 

Between what was said 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Between the words we chose to keep
and those we buried deep in doubt,
lies half of love we let go cheap —
the half we never spoke about.
Gibran once wrote that love goes missing
not in silence, but in sound —
in every word we kept from saying,
and everything we never found.
I built a quiet page of thought,
a small blog no one thought to find,
and pressed there every love I sought
in ink too honest to unwind.
You kept your distance like a shore
that watches waves but never wades,
and I kept reaching, wanting more,
while you retreated into shades.
Not every heart that turns away
is cold or careless in its flight —
some fear the nearness of the day,
and choose the safety of the night.
I chased what pulled itself apart,
mistaking longing for a sign,
and gave the whole of my own heart
for just a half of what was mine.
I’ve learned that love is not the ache
of chasing what will never stay,
but knowing when it’s time to break
the silence, or to walk away.
So here’s the truth I never sent,
a folded letter, left unread —
a thousand words I could have meant
now settle where the quiet’s spread.
Between the meant and never said,
between the said and never true,
is where most love is quietly bled —
I lost my share of it to you.
And yet I don’t regret the silence,
nor curse the quiet we became —
some loves are built to test our patience,
and teach us how to hold our name.
So let this be the closing line,
the space where all the silence ends —
what wasn’t said is still love’s sign,

and in that hush, my heart still mends.

RSP

…

DCG

Written for the Hungarian gypsy 

Khalil Gibran once said, ‘Between what is said and what is not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost.’
Love doesn’t always leave because the feelings fade. Sometimes it leaves between the words we never meant and the ones we never found the courage to say.”

I need you in my life 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Need You in My Life
Distance never stops the ones who care,
it only proves how deep the roots can grow.
Busy days can’t dim what we still share,
effort finds a way when hearts still glow.
Pride may raise its quiet walls of stone,
but real devotion climbs past every ledge.
I choose to meet you where you stand alone,
not to push you, just to hold the edge.
Excuses live where exits feel like peace,
but effort stays when reasons beg to run.
I’m not here searching for a quick release,
I’m here because this bond has just begun.
Two guarded hearts once learned to lock their gate,
one built a wall, the other learned to chase.
We didn’t pick the timing or the fate,
but still we chose to stay and hold this space.
I know the shadows hiding in your past,
I know the silence that can feel so loud.
I won’t demand a bond that has to last,
I’ll simply stand here, steady, calm, and proud.
Remember Catalina, dim and warm,
two glasses clinking soft beneath low light,
we talked of ink that marks a lasting form,
a promise pressed in skin to hold us tight.
That night we laughed about the marks we’d wear,
small proof that this connection found its place,
not tattoos born from moments light and rare,
but from a bond too real to ever erase.
I see the armor built from old alarms,
and understand why reaching brings you fear.
I’m not asking you to fall in my arms,
just asking you to know that I am here.
We are not perfect, we are not the same,
two different rhythms learning how to blend.
But side by side we learn to write our name,
across a story neither wants to end.
Your quiet distance is not my defeat,
it’s just a rhythm I have learned to trust.
I’ll meet you halfway, steady on my feet,
because two weathered souls can rise from dust.
So here’s my truth, spoken plain and clear,
despite the odds, despite the storms we’ve crossed,
I choose this bond, I choose to keep you near,
because I need you in my life, whatever the cost.

RSP

…

DCG

Distance never stops someone who truly cares. Busy days never stop genuine effort. Pride never stops real love. When someone wants you in their life, they’ll find a way to stay connected. Excuses belong to people looking for a reason to leave. Effort belongs to people looking for a reason to stay.

The empty room was shouting all along 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

We thought the needle told the tale
but the empty room was shouting all along
We watched a rat alone in steel
two bottles waiting, one soft, one strong
We said, “It chose the poisoned glass.”
and missed the silence gnawing at its bone
We named it weakness, called it sin
and never saw it dying there alone
Then came a cage with light and play
tunnels, colors, food, and other eyes
The same small body breathed again
and turned away from chemical disguise
In Rat Park, laughter filled the air
the drug grew dull beside the living sound
From near‑certain overdose in a void
to almost none when friendship wrapped it round
What if the hook is not the heart
what if the cage is twisting what we crave?
What if addiction is not pure rot
but a bruised bond seeking something brave?
We are built to cling, to reach, to hold
to find a hand when night is low and black
When no one answers, we still reach
for anything that swears it has our back
Some cling to dice and glowing screens
some to bodies, some to powdered light
We do not stop wanting when we hurt
we only grasp what stands within our sight
The opposite of addiction is not “clean”
it is a voice that says, “You’re welcome here.”
It is a table with one spare chair
a listening face that will not disappear
Yet we curse the bottle, not the bars
we blame the wound and miss the hidden frame
We point at “them” to dodge the truth
that we build cages and then rename them “shame.”
The cage can look like praise and wealth
or quiet rooms where no one knows your name
It can be trauma buried deep
or slow forgetting of your living flame
I, DC Gunnersen, stand and see
a small experiment become a burning sign
It speaks like prophecy to our age:
change the cage, and watch the soul realign
The message cuts through blame and fear:
connection is the medicine we lack
We are the builders of our parks
and we can tear the isolating rack
In simple terms, the warning’s clear:
the way we live will shape the way we fall
If we sow distance, numb and cold
we’ll reap addictions answering our call
But if we craft kind, human space
where stories breathe and no one stands erased
We may discover, one by one,
the cages fade, and chains come loose, unlaced
The power was never in the drug alone
it lived in whether we were held or thrown aside
So let us name our cages now
and choose connection as our quiet guide

…

DCG

Screenshot

Almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong. You get a rat and you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. In the 70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he notices something. He said, “Ah, we’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let’s try something a bit different.” So, Professor Alexander built a cage that he called Rat Park. They’ve got loads of cheese, they’ve got loads of colored balls, they’ve got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they’ve got loads of friends. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drug water. You go from almost 100% overdose when they’re isolated to 0% overdose when they have happy and connected lives. What if addiction isn’t about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment? Maybe we shouldn’t even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond. And when we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each other. But if you can’t do that because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s our nature. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.

A recovery from the cycle of trauma 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

What I have learned

From my time spent with you

My strategy going forward

I present for your review

I have come to the precipice of truth 

The strength of your faith and the error of your convictions will entangle

You are the medicine for my soul

Yet over this cliff I dangle 

I forge through the pain

I stumble, but still, I fight

To resolve and reach a triumph

I now learn what I know is right

I stop and pause

I identify my state

I convey and communicate

I seek to co-regulate

See it, own it, solve it, do it

This is the mantra I make 

Learn it, master it, embrace it, teach it

This is now the path that I take 

Overtime with discipline

Laughter  and positive energy divides the drama

To allow the gateway for a healing

A recovery from the cycle of trauma

RSP

…

DCG

Screenshot

Stop and pause if you have a conversation like this…

Unknown Speaker A] It’s not my responsibility to teach you how to be in a relationship with me.
[Unknown Speaker B] What? Your emotions are none of my responsibility. Go see a therapist.
[Unknown Speaker A] I’m not your parent.
[Unknown Speaker B] I don’t have time for any of this.
[Unknown Speaker A] It’s not my job to teach you how to communicate.
[Unknown Speaker B] Be an adult.
[Unknown Speaker A] It’s not on me to help you heal in our relationship. That’s on you.
[Unknown Speaker B] Not a mind reader. I shouldn’t have to deal with this. Like I’m not here to raise you. Be whole or be gone.
[Unknown Speaker A] I have zero tolerance for this.
[Unknown Speaker B] This is a hard no.
[Unknown Speaker A] You know what? I’m just going to leave.
[Unknown Speaker B] Good. Do it.
[Unknown Speaker A] Me too.

Retrain your communication to sound more like this…

[Unknown Speaker B] what can I do to help you?
[Unknown Speaker A] What do you need right now?
[Unknown Speaker B] How can I help you feel loved?
[Unknown Speaker A] What does this mean to you?
[Unknown Speaker B] What are you struggling with that I’m not seeing?
[Unknown Speaker A] What triggers are coming up for you that I can help understand and be there for you?
[Unknown Speaker B] How can I help you feel safe right now?
[Unknown Speaker A] How can I help you feel loved right now?
[Unknown Speaker B] I’m at my capacity, but I love you. I’m going to take a break, but I’d love to talk about this once I regulate my nervous system.
[Unknown Speaker A] I love you. I don’t love this behavior, but I do love you and I do believe we can work through this.
[Unknown Speaker B] I love you, but this behavior has this effect on me and unfortunately it hurts our relationship, but I want to work it out because I want to stay close to you.
[Unknown Speaker A] Are you willing to work on this?
[Unknown Speaker B] Are you willing to work on this?
[Unknown Speaker A] I am willing to work on this.
[Unknown Speaker B] I am willing to work on this.
[Unknown Speaker A] I am so sorry for hurting you and I’m going to do better in the future.
[Unknown Speaker B] I’m sorry that my trauma is getting in the way of our healthy relationship. I want to heal this.
[Unknown Speaker A] I love you.
[Unknown Speaker B] I love you.
[Unknown Speaker A] I choose this relationship.
[Unknown Speaker B] I choose this relationship.
[Unknown Speaker A] I choose you.
[Unknown Speaker B] I choose you.
[Unknown Speaker A] We can do this.
[Unknown Speaker B] We can do this

if there is the thought that you are never going to have hard times in a relationship, no one would ever stay in any long-term relationship if you had to be perfect and you could never have a mistake or do anything hurtful. That is an impossible expectation.[Attachment]
[Unknown Speaker B] We have both hurt each other so much out of unawareness, ignorance, toxic patterns.


[Unknown Speaker A] So many chapters of life that bring out the worst in you, stress. There’s so many unforeseen things that can happen in a lifetime with someone that you have to be willing to go through the highs and lows. But I’ll tell you what, the highs have been epic, of course. But then of course there are the low times too. The healthiest relationships are not relations that have not been through challenges. It’s that they’ve been through challenges and they learn how to show up for each other, forgive, have compassion and love each other through those challenges. That’s what makes the strongest relationships.

Intermittent light

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

keep asking how I could be the one who will not stay inside
When every cell in me is begging you, please don’t run, please don’t hide.
I say I want a gentle love that meets me where I stand
But I only start to feel alive when you slip out of my hand.
I swear I’m hunting tenderness, a heart that shows me through
Yet my body lights up like a storm when I am chasing after you.
The steady ones feel colorless, like rooms without a sound
I crave the door that slams on me, then creaks and swings back round.
I learned this dance in childhood, where comfort came then froze
Where warmth would turn to distance, like a door that never chose.
Sometimes my needs were tended to, then suddenly withdrawn
That rhythm carved my nervous system, dusk tied tight to dawn.
Now intermittent kindness is the only song I know
I wait for love, then brace for loss, then beg you not to go.
In conflict I start shrinking first, I drop my fragile claim
I fold my truth into an apology, take all the blame.
I tell you, “You are right, not me, I should not feel this way”
Because the thought of losing you still terrifies me more than what I say.
I offer you my open throat and call it being kind
While quietly I walk away from pieces of my mind.
My boundaries blur to watercolor, soaking in your mood
I call it love while swallowing my own unspoken food.
I’ve been a lifelong strategist at not becoming left
I trade my needs for borrowed peace, a quiet kind of theft.
The spark I feel when I’m not enough is chemically precise
It tastes like terror mixed with hope, the sweetest poison ice.
My shadow loves this hunger, it mistakes it all for fate
It thinks that burning in your orbit is the highest state.
But every time I disappear to keep you from the door
I’m teaching my abandoned self that she is less and less and more.
More desperate and more silent, more hollow and more small
Less worthy of a steady hand that doesn’t make her crawl.
To heal, I must betray the script that kept me safe but tight
I have to risk you walking out to stand inside my light.
I have to name the pattern clear, the hook, the chase, the fear
And treat my shaking honesty as something you must hear.
Recovery is not romantic, it’s the slow unlearning of the chase
It’s sitting with my lonely self, and letting stillness touch my face.
It’s choosing those who show up close, not only when I bleed
It’s reaching out with steady hands, not weapons of my need.
My testimony isn’t clean; it’s ink and ash and bone
But if you recognize this war, you don’t have to fight alone.
We were not born to orbit hurt, or beg and call that care
We’re meant to turn and face ourselves, and find someone still there.

RSP

…

DCG

Screenshot

Anxious preoccupied is actually very emotionally unavailable. According to Dr. Sarah Hensley-

Since I am an AP, I can testify to these statements when examining my behavior.

“I know the APs out there, you sweet, precious, warm, empathetic, loving APs, you’re like, how could I be emotionally unavailable? All I want from my avoidant partner is emotional vulnerability.
No, you don’t. You think you do, but you are fundamentally not attracted to people who are emotionally available. In fact, they give you the ick. You’re not attracted to that. You are only attracted to people who give you the intermittent reinforcement, which is sometimes your emotional needs are met, then it pulls away, then sometimes they’re met, then it pulls away. That intermittent reinforcement is what you got in childhood. It is what creates your attachment anxiety and it is what keeps it flowing, okay? And you don’t know anything different than that.
If they don’t give you a push–pull or if you don’t have to chase them and convince them that you are worthy of not abandoning, then you are not attracted to them. And then inside of conflict, sweet AP, you tend to fawn. You tend to give up on your own needs, abandon them, become boundaryless, become doormats, and hang on to whatever breadcrumbs you’re getting, okay? In conflict, you just go, you know, I’m sorry, you’re right. I’m sorry. Totally, you’re right. I shouldn’t have never brought that up. I shouldn’t have ever brought that up. You’re right, I’m wrong. Please don’t be mad at me because if conflict starts going sideways, that fear of abandonment pops up and it’s easier to just apologize and make it go away than actually stand strong in your own needs.
It’s hard for you to speak up when things hurt you because, again, you are afraid of conflict because conflict could lead to abandonment. If you’re not being made to feel not good enough and working harder to be good enough in the relationship, you don’t feel that chemistry, you don’t feel that spark. And so, you’ve never really been attracted to people that could give you true emotional availability consistently inside relationships, and that has to do with your own deep fear of vulnerability yourself. But your superpower is your warmth and your kindness.
Sometimes you can be a people pleaser—let’s face it, a lot of the time. You can be a people pleaser and whenever you’re people pleasing and you’re codependent and you’re boundaryless, you’re abandoning yourself. And I know that it’s hard to understand that what you’ve been doing most of your life is self‑abandonment, but it is. And earning your attachment security means that you get to finally stop abandoning yourself and finally give and receive true emotional vulnerability and emotional nurturing and co‑regulation inside of a relationship.
You may be able to give some of it, but only to the person that makes you chase them to give it.”

Meet Jane Doe 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

You didn’t choose this emptiness; you chose to stay alive.
You built a quiet fortress just to help your heart survive.
You learned that tears meant trouble or no one came at all.
So numbness made more sense than letting your defenses fall.
You say your childhood “was fine,” but the story’s cut short.
No one wrote the scenes where comfort showed up as support.
What never came can’t haunt you in the way a blow would bruise.
You only feel the echo of a language you never used.
From far away, it looks simple: just someone who won’t stay.
Up close, it’s misfired sirens driving you away.
You shut down mid-argument, call them “too intense.”
But “too much” hides a flood you never learned to sense.
You disappear in duties, in screens, in one more task.
Your heart pounds in the hallway, but it doesn’t dare ask.
You don’t hate love; you fear it like an unlocked door.
You remember open rooms as hurt you couldn’t store.
It’s tragic and it’s simple, nothing epic or wild.
Just a grown body moving with the reflex of a child.
The world calls you “distant,” and sometimes you agree.
But you’re flooded, not empty; it’s a storm no one can see.
Partners love you harder, hoping walls might melt.
But love can’t pry the hinges on the armor you were dealt.
The lock is always inward, where your younger self resides.
The key is in the hand that’s stayed hidden in your sides.
To heal, you must step backward from the heat of fear.
You have to see the pattern like a map drawn clear.
From far enough away, the pieces start to show.
The child, the silent promise, and the cost of “never know.”
You question quiet laws like “needing someone is weak.”
You let the words “I’m scared” rise trembling to your cheek.
You sit inside your feelings, even when they feel wrong.
You hear that numbness humming a very old, soft song.
Mercy here is honest: you did what children do.
You hid what hurt so deeply it split your heart in two.
But mercy isn’t a blanket; it’s a lantern in your hand.
It lights the path where you stand up and finally understand.
You will not heal by waiting for another soul to start.
Responsibility is welded to the edges of your heart.
So you speak in rough sentences that shake but stay.
You name the fear inside you and you don’t run away.
You watch defenses rising like familiar walls.
And gently, without hatred, you hear their ancient calls.
You tell them, “You kept me safe, but now you keep me torn.”
You honor the old shelter and still step out, worn.
This isn’t clean redemption; it’s one breath at a time.
It’s learning how to feel as if the summit you can climb.
Irony cuts quietly, but it’s strangely kind.
You escaped your pain by splitting from your mind.
To heal what you’ve been dodging, you walk through your own flame.
You take ownership of the pattern and dare to give it a name.
And when you finally see yourself, not from hiding but from grace,
Intimacy stops being a threat and becomes a lived place.
You, once the constant runner, become the one who stays—
Not by killing off your fear, but by walking through its maze.

RSP

…

DCG

Screenshot

An avoidant can heal. They can learn to love deeply, stay when things get hard, and finally let someone in without running away. But before any of that happens, there’s one step they cannot skip, and it’s the one thing almost nobody ever tells them. So here’s what actually heals an avoidant and why so many never make it there.[Attachment]
First, you have to understand what avoidant attachment really is. It’s not someone who doesn’t want love. It’s someone who learned very early that shutting down their emotions was the safest way to survive. As a child, their feelings weren’t welcomed. Maybe they were ignored for crying, maybe they were shamed for being vulnerable. Maybe every time they reached out, no one came. So their brain made a silent promise: ‘If emotions only lead to pain, I’ll stop feeling them altogether.’[Attachment]
That strategy worked. It protected them. But it came with a hidden price they carried into every relationship afterward, because the emotions they buried never disappeared. They simply went underground. And buried emotions don’t stay quiet forever. They become emptiness, restlessness, emotional numbness, a constant feeling that something is missing, even when life looks fine from the outside.[Attachment]
And because they’ve disconnected from their own emotional world, they struggle to truly connect with someone else’s. They can’t fully meet another person because they’ve never fully met themselves.[Attachment]
Here’s what most people completely misunderstand. When an avoidant shuts down during conflict, goes cold, calls you too emotional, or disappears into work and distractions, it’s not because they feel nothing. It’s because they feel too much and were never taught how to handle it. Their distance isn’t the absence of emotion. It’s a shield protecting emotions they were trained to fear.[Attachment]
And here’s the heartbreaking part. Most avoidants don’t even remember why they became this way. Many will say they had a great childhood, not because it was perfect, but because emotional neglect is defined by what never happened. You can’t remember comfort you never received. You can’t miss a language nobody ever taught you to speak.[Attachment]
And here’s the truth every anxious partner needs to hear. You cannot heal an avoidant by loving them harder. You cannot reassure them into feeling safe. You cannot prove your way through walls they built long before you arrived. Their healing has almost nothing to do with you. It’s work only they can choose to do.[Attachment]
And that healing follows a path. It begins with awareness. An avoidant has to recognize that their attachment style is costing them real intimacy, real connection, and real love. They also have to realize it isn’t permanent. They weren’t born this way and they don’t have to stay this way. Without that realization, nothing changes, because people don’t fix what they don’t believe is broken.[Attachment]
Then comes the hardest part. They have to challenge the beliefs that shape their entire identity. Beliefs like, ‘I only have value if I’m independent. Needing people makes me weak. If I let someone too close, I’ll lose myself. Love means never asking for too much.’ Those beliefs protected them as children. As adults, they become the bars of an invisible cage.[Attachment]
Then comes the work they’ve spent their entire life avoiding. They have to feel. They have to slow down, check in with themselves, and allow buried emotions to rise instead of pushing them back down. Even when it’s uncomfortable, even when their first response is, ‘I don’t know what I’m feeling,’ because often, they genuinely don’t.[Attachment]
This process is slow, it’s messy, it’s uncomfortable. And it’s the part most people never have the courage to begin. Only after learning to face their own emotions can they finally face someone else’s. They learn to hear the fear beneath anger. They learn to express what they feel instead of shutting down. They learn that closeness isn’t a threat. It’s what they’ve quietly wanted all along.[Attachment]
So if you love an avoidant, understand this. Their healing is absolutely possible, but it isn’t your responsibility and it won’t happen on your timeline. You can offer patience, you can create safety, but you cannot do the healing for them. And if they refuse to face themselves, no amount of your love will ever be enough. Not because your love wasn’t real, but because the lock was always on the inside.[Attachment]
And if you’re the avoidant hearing this, remember something important. You were never broken because you wanted closeness while fearing it at the same time. You were a child who learned that emotions weren’t safe, but what was learned can be unlearned. The walls that protected you were never your identity. The real you is the part that still longs for connection, despite everything you’ve been through.[Attachment]
The moment you stop running from your emotions and finally turn toward them is the moment you stop merely surviving love and finally allow yourself to receive it, because before an avoidant can truly meet their partner emotionally, they first have to meet themselves.”[Attachment]

I turned my needs into polite, half whispers 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

I called it progress when they pulled away
and named the distance mercy for my pain.
I lowered my voice so they wouldn’t leave
and praised myself for learning to stay small.
I felt a drip of warmth and called it love
though it came once a month like broken rain.
I saw their silence, thought it meant I failed
and offered my heart as proof I could improve.
I turned my needs into polite half‑whispers
and said, “This is what grown‑up love must be.”
I swallowed every warning from my gut
and dressed my fear in words like empathy.
They ran from touch with a practiced casual shrug
and I chased the shrug like it was oxygen.
Their calm looked holy next to my shaking hands
so I wore my shaking as hidden sin.
I told myself, “They’re deep, they just need space,”
then waited at the border of their skin.
I fought for them like love was a war to win
but all I wanted was to feel I mattered.
I thought if I could read their every mood
I’d rewrite childhood, stitch my heart unshattered.
I called my panic “passion,” like a spell,
and their retreat “maturity” and “control.”
We danced a loop: they vanished, I became a void
trying to be the room that felt like home.
Every time they left, my chest became a courtroom
where I put myself on trial for wanting more.
I did not see they feared the weight of closeness,
I only saw a mirror of my old familiar hurt.
I kept auditioning for the role of “worthy”
before a judge who never showed up for the case.
I confused their relief with real connection,
their brief return with promises they never made.
Then one night my nervous system snapped
and asked, “Why do we call this love and stay?”
I saw my heart kneeling at a locked‑up door
with flowers made of apologies and doubt.
I heard my younger self crying, “Don’t leave me,”
and realized I’d been holding out my past.
I turned around and faced the life behind me,
a world not built on waiting for their text.
I felt the terror of walking out of orbit
and named it truth instead of fatal loss.
I stopped rehearsing speeches that might save us
and started learning how to speak to me.
I took the love I begged from their absence
and poured it in the cracks inside my ribs.
I stopped calling bare minimum a blessing
and let my standards rise like honest dawn.
I let the word “enough” sit in my mouth
until it tasted more like spine than shame.
I saw the avoidant as a human storm
not as the sculptor of my worth or fate.
Their work is theirs: to face the flood of closeness
or keep outrunning what they fear to feel.
My work is mine: to soothe the shaking child
and teach my body safety that is real.
I learned that leaving isn’t proof I’m broken
and staying isn’t proof that they are whole.
I let my nervous system unhook from their distance
and stop mistaking chasing for connection.
I built a self that doesn’t beg for rescue
from someone swimming hard away from shore.
Now if they run, I do not follow bleeding;
I walk the other way and call it love.
Because the brutal truth is simple, sharp, and clean:
I heal the part of me that still wants what won’t stay.

RSP

…

DCG

Screenshot


If You Want Your Avoidant Ex Back, Heal the Part of You That Wants Them
Subtitle:

How chasing intimacy with the avoidant turns into a fight for validation—and how to reclaim yourself

You convince yourself that it’s progress.
You tolerate emotional distance and call it understanding or empathy.
You mistake relief for compatibility and then feel oddly grateful when the bare minimum finally shows up.
Somewhere in that chaos, in order to keep the connection alive, your needs get quieter, your boundaries get softer, and your intuition—that gut feeling—gets ignored. All because you’re holding on to someone who is terrified of actually being held.
So how do you get your avoidant ex back?
You don’t.
You get yourself back.
You take the energy you were pouring into understanding and analyzing their behavior, and you pour it back into yourself. You rebuild your confidence—or build it for the first time. You rebuild your self‑esteem and your sense of worth.
You take the love you kept trying to earn from them and pour it back into yourself without conditions. You take the silence you once experienced as punishment and you start to use that space to rise.
Here’s a truth most people don’t want to admit:
When you’re focused on an avoidant, you’re not really fighting for love.
You are fighting for validation.
The moment you turn your focus back to yourself—your identity, your clarity, your confidence, your intentions—the avoidant either steps up or becomes irrelevant.
I want you to hear this:
Do not chase someone who runs from intimacy.
Instead, become the person who does not tolerate running in the first place.
If you want guidance from someone who has been there—through the avoidant dynamic, through the breakup, through the chaos, the silent treatment, the hurt, the pain, and the recovery, the breakthrough—here is my best advice:
If you want your avoidant ex back,
heal the part of you that wants them.
So often people ask, “How do I get my avoidant ex back?”
Simple:
If you want them back, you stop trying.
You stop bargaining with your own worth.
You stop auditioning for the bare minimum.
You stop confusing their relief with your compatibility.
And you start doing the work of becoming someone whose nervous system no longer confuses anxiety with attraction, inconsistency with chemistry, and emotional distance with safety.
You stop chasing them,

and you start choosing you.

Brief Psychological Breakdown (Note for Substack)
This piece speaks directly to the dynamic between an anxious attachment style and an avoidant attachment style, where the anxious partner often turns the relationship into a quest for validation rather than mutual intimacy. It highlights how an avoidant partner’s distance can activate the anxious partner’s fear of abandonment, leading them to soften boundaries, mute their own needs, and over-function emotionally in order to “keep the connection alive.”
The central reframe is that focusing on “getting the avoidant ex back” keeps the anxious partner locked in a validation loop that reinforces low self‑worth and relational insecurity. The invitation is to redirect that energy into self‑reconstruction: rebuilding confidence, self‑esteem, and a secure sense of identity that no longer depends on the avoidant partner’s intermittent approval.
Psychologically, “heal the part of you that wants them” means working with the underlying patterns—early attachment wounds, learned associations between inconsistency and love, and the tendency to interpret emotional relief as compatibility. The goal is not to fix the avoidant partner, but to transform the internal landscape that finds emotional unavailability familiar and compelling, so that intimacy with emotionally available others begins to feel not only possible, but natural.