Love and acceptance

Which child were you?

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

I wrote this poem for my brother!

Which Child Were You?


A letter to my brother, in nine quatrains
Same house, same table, same hard rules,
one father’s word, one mother’s hand —
and still no two of us grew up
inside the same small patch of land.
A stranger put it into words
this week, in language plain and low:
the one who shines, the one who’s blamed,
the one who fades so none will know.
I know which one of those was me.
I asked for nothing. I stayed small.
I learned that needing was a risk
and silence was the safest wall.
No hand was raised at me, no praise,
no punishment, no word, no name —
a boy who stood inside a doorway
hoping to be seen. I’m still the same.
And you — you took the harder start,
the word he used when you’d done no wrong,
the page that would not hold its letters.
I watched. I stayed quiet. All along.
Then something shifted. Years went on.
He made you room. He said your name.
The son who fought the page he’d fought —
and I stood outside, watching, again.
And Mother loved us. I believe it.
She also turned and looked away.
She never stood between us and him.
That is the hardest thing to say.
Our parents both are gone. The roles
they wrote have no one left to keep.
I love you, brother. We don’t talk.
The house is empty now. It sleeps.
So ask yourself — not me, yourself —
which of those children did you know?
And if you ever want to tell me,
I’m here. I have been. I won’t go.

CLG

…
DCG

No Child Ever Grows Up In The Same Home
The Narcissistic Family System, and Why You and Your Siblings See the World So Differently

No Child Ever Grows Up In The Same Home
The Narcissistic Family System, and Why You and Your Siblings See the World So Differently

I’ve been wondering for years why two people can grow up in the same house and turn out as completely different people. So I decided to do some research on narcissistic family systems to understand what’s actually going on here.
You and your siblings grew up in the same house. Same parents. Same dinner table. Same rules. So why do you see the world so differently?
That’s because no child ever grows up in the same house.
Psychologist Judith Rich Harris found that no two children in the same family actually grow up in the same environment. Birth order, economic changes, and the age of the parents at different points in their lives means completely different childhoods can happen under one roof.
But in a narcissistic authoritarian household, something else also happens.
A narcissistic authoritarian parent is not just difficult or selfish. They’re someone who rules the family through fear, control, and punishment. Their word is law. Questioning them is not allowed. Disagreeing with them is dangerous.
The family learns one rule above all else: go along to get along, or you’re going to face the consequences.
Love in this household is conditional. It is a reward for compliance. Obedience buys you safety. Disobedience gets you punished. And the punishment is not just from the parent — the whole family learns to enforce the punishment, because they don’t want to become the next target.
The parent does not raise children. They manage them. Each child gets assigned a role based on one thing: how useful they are to that parent’s ego and control. And once that role is assigned, the entire family system works to enforce it forever.
Here are the three childhood roles a narcissistic authoritarian family needs in order to function.
One: The Golden Child
The golden child is the one who always seemed to have it easier. More praise, more protection, more forgiveness when things went wrong. Every achievement got celebrated. Every failure got explained away.
From the outside it looks like love. From the inside it was a transaction.
Psychologist Karyl McBride, author of the book Will I Ever Be Good Enough?, spent decades studying narcissistic family systems. She called this the golden child dynamic. The child is not loved for who they are. They are loved for what they perform — for how well they make the parent look good.
So they learn the game early. Stay close to power. Follow the rules. Report back to the parent. And when someone steps out of line, make sure the parent knows about it.
They are the hallway monitors. The ones who tell the teacher when someone is running in the hallway, and then smile when the kid gets in trouble.
At first they do it to survive. Siding with the authority figure means safety. Enforcing the rules means approval. Watching someone else get punished means they’re not the one getting punished.
What starts as survival becomes their identity. They stop just enforcing the rules to stay safe. They start enjoying it. They learn to love watching people get punished. They get a rush from being on the side doing the hurting. They become the bully — not just the bully’s assistant.
Dr. Ramani Durvasula, clinical psychologist and professor at California State University, Los Angeles, found that golden children frequently develop narcissistic traits as adults. Entitled, unable to empathize, convinced the rules exist for everyone but them. They grow up becoming the abuser, the controlling partner, the abusive boss — the parent who starts the whole cycle over again with their own children.

And because cruelty feels like safety in that house, cruelty feels like safety everywhere they go. When a powerful person mocks someone, humiliates someone, punishes someone who stepped out of line, their brain does not feel disgust. It feels comfort. It feels familiar. It feels like home.
That is why they’re drawn to bullies. That is why they become the bully’s most loyal defender. When someone powerful mocks a weaker person or humiliates an opponent, they don’t look away. They cheer. Because their childhood taught them that this is what power looks like — and power is the only thing that ever kept them safe.
They are the most susceptible people in the family to any authoritarian figure who comes along. And the cycle continues through them into the next generation.
Two: The Forgotten Child
The forgotten child never got targeted. They got something worse. They got ignored.
No praise. No punishment. No attention of any kind. They were simply not useful enough to bother with. The parent was too busy performing for the golden child and punishing the black sheep to notice them at all.
Not consciously, but systematically, they made themselves invisible. They stopped asking for things, stopped making noise, stopped having needs that might draw attention. They faded into the walls of the house and learned to survive on nothing.
Psychologist Karyl McBride identified the lost child as the most neglected and overlooked role in the family. By the time these children are adults, they often cannot tell what they want, what they feel, or what they need — because nobody ever asked them.
That type of neglect hollows a person out. They grow up believing that they don’t matter, that their needs are inconvenient, that wanting things is selfish, that the safest version of themselves is the smallest one.
As adults, forgotten children gravitate toward partners who ignore them. Bosses who overlook them. Friendships where they give everything and receive nothing back. Not because they enjoy it, but because it feels like the only kind of relationship they know how to be in.
They are the ones who checked out entirely. Not because they don’t care, but because they learned that engaging with anything powerful gets you noticed — and getting noticed was always dangerous.
What they want most in the world is for someone to finally notice them. And they’re still waiting.
Three: The Black Sheep
If you grew up in a toxic household, you know what this means. You were the target. The scapegoat.
Authoritarian family systems require three roles. The enforcer, which is the authoritarian parent. The loyalists, which are the golden children — they conform and are trained to be instantly obedient. And the scapegoat: someone to blame when things go wrong.
The black sheep was the one they picked on. The one who was always wrong. The one who was always too sensitive, always the problem.
The psychiatrist Murray Bowen at Georgetown University spent decades studying how families assign roles to maintain their dysfunction. He found that authoritarian households need a scapegoat to function. They need someone to dump all their dysfunction onto so everyone else can pretend that everything is fine.
So you become the person who is blamed for everything. The parent trained other family members that if you got punished, it was acceptable for them to join in. They ganged up on you. They learned that hurting you got rewarded.
So you were not just dealing with one toxic parent. At times it was the whole family. Because if they didn’t join in, they became the target as well. Nobody wants to get hurt. Nobody wants to feel like they don’t belong. So they participated. They became complicit. The loyalty test got enforced on everyone in that house.
And they didn’t pick you because you were weak. They picked you because you had things that threatened their system. The empathy for others, which they saw as weakness. Curiosity that threatened their control. The ability to question things they needed to crush.

They tried to hurt you until you complied. Till they broke you. But you never did.
Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades studying what happens to children who grow up in threatening environments. They develop a trauma response where their brain never stops scanning for threats, lies, and manipulation. He called it hypervigilance.
Hypervigilant people watch for inconsistencies. They look for real motives behind what people say. Because when you were a kid, if you didn’t, you got hurt. Hypervigilant people learned that lesson before they were old enough to understand what was happening.
So when someone like that turns up in your adult life — a boss, a partner, a person with a platform — you recognize them immediately. Not as a leader, but as an abuser. The gaslighting, the lying, the cruelty, the need to dominate and humiliate. The demand for unconditional loyalty. It was your family all over again. The black sheep already learned how to survive people just like that.
Some black sheep do not make it out. The weight of being hated by the people who are supposed to love you is not a small thing. It breaks most people. Some spend a lifetime being called weak by the parent who assigned them the role, mocked in public, with the rest of the family joining in. Some drink themselves to death long before old age.
This is what happens when a black sheep never escapes the family system. When they stay close to the family that’s abusing them, the abuse follows them everywhere they go, and they never find their way out.
But some black sheep do escape. And the black sheep who make it through carry something no one else in the family has. That hypervigilance. The brain that never stops scanning, never stops watching, never stops looking for the gap between what someone says and what they actually mean.
It’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s exhausting to live with, but it makes the person impossible to manipulate.
The black sheep was not the problem in the house. They were the only one telling the truth.
Three Children, Three Different Childhoods
The golden child is still performing. Still siding with whoever promises to protect them from the people they were taught to fear. Still becoming the abuser in every room they walk into.
The forgotten child is still disappearing. Still waiting for someone to finally notice them. Still accepting less than they deserve.
And the black sheep is still being told they are the problem — and they’re still the most impossible person in the room to manipulate.
Three children. Same house. Same parents. Three completely different childhoods. Three completely different adults.
The narcissistic parent spent years trying to break the black sheep. Instead, they created the one person in the family who will never be controlled again.

And that’s how the cycle ends. 

—

Source

Source
This transcript comes from a video monologue by writer Lucas Bean, published May 23, 2026:
• Video: Did You Grow Up In A Narcissistic Family? (9:53)
• Written version: No Child Ever Grows Up In The Same Home, Lucas Bean Daily on Substack
The works Bean cites in his written version:
• Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (Free Press, 1998)
• Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979)
• Karyl McBride, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers (Free Press, 2008)
• Ramani Durvasula, Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist (Post Hill Press, 2015)
• Murray Bowen, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (Jason Aronson, 1978)
• Robin Stern, The Gaslight Effect (Morgan Road Books, 2007)
• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014)
Editor’s note on the attributions
Three corrections, made silently in the transcript above or noted here, for anyone who wants to follow the research:
Judith Rich Harris was not at Rutgers University. The spoken version of this monologue credits her to Rutgers. She held no academic post at all — she was an independent researcher who wrote The Nurture Assumption from her home in New Jersey after being dismissed from Harvard’s psychology PhD program decades earlier. That is part of what made the book notorious. The affiliation has been dropped from the transcript above; Bean’s own written version makes no such claim.
The author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough? is Karyl McBride, not “Carol.” Spoken as “Carol” twice in the video; corrected above to match Bean’s own citation.

Van der Kolk did not coin “hypervigilance.” The monologue says “he called it hypervigilance,” but the term was established clinical vocabulary long before The Body Keeps the Score — it appears in the PTSD criteria of the DSM-III in 1980. Van der Kolk popularized the trauma framework the clip describes; he did not name the symptom.
The remaining affiliations check out: Ramani Durvasula is a professor at California State University, Los Angeles; Murray Bowen founded the family systems program at Georgetown; Bessel van der Kolk is a professor of psychiatry at Boston University.

The Razor’s Inner Edge 

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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 Quiet Work of Surviving

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The Quiet Work of Surviving 


I have learned that pain does not always shout,
Sometimes it sits beside the bed at night,
And asks what all this living was about,
While I keep watch for one remaining light.
I once believed each insult needed war,
Each careless word required my reply,
But storms will gladly rattle every door,
And wisdom knows which windows to walk by.
The tongue can strike, the stranger can condemn,
The crowd can turn a small wound into flame,
Yet I have spent enough of life with them
To know that noise is seldom worth my name.
I do not say this from a mountain’s height,
I have been thin-skinned, angry, lost, and vain,
I have confused my hunger with a right,
And made a private weather out of pain.
There was a time I begged the world to see,
To name me good, to tell me I belonged,
As if applause could make a self of me,
As if the loudest chorus could be strong.
But praise is wind; it comes and goes at will,
And criticism has its hungry art,
So I have tried to stand a little still,
And keep a quieter census of the heart.
I know the mind can build a courtroom cell,
Then call its old accusers back to speak,
And I have played both judge and prisoner well,
Inventing laws for every human weak.
Still, I have found no healing in contempt,
No victory in growing hard and cold,
The wounded soul is not made whole by hate,
Nor does revenge redeem the wounds of old.
I carry faults I cannot quite dismiss,
The anxious mind, the hunger to be known,
Yet there is grace in seeing what is this—
A flawed man learning how to walk alone.
Not lonely, then, but honest with the scar,
A little less compelled to prove I’m brave,
The wave may doubt the vastness where we are,
But still belongs to ocean, tide, and wave.
So if I move, I move by inches now,
No trumpet call, no grand heroic art,
Just one more breath, one more unbroken vow,
To leave some room for mercy in the heart.
I have not conquered life; I only know
The soul grows stronger when it will not flee,
And peace is not a prize the proud can show—
It is the strength to let oneself still be.
…

DCG

The chapters in your hand

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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 

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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.

I held your shadow like a gospel in the rain 

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I held your shadow like a gospel in the rain,
while you kept circling exits in your mind.
I called it love, a holy, aching stain,
you called it “too much,” “heavy,” “misaligned.”
I memorized your silence like a hymn,
you memorized the map back to your door.
I begged for scraps of presence, loud and thin,
you starved the flame, then said I asked for more.
I named the rush between us “destiny,”
that lightning in the chest that feels like fate.
But it was limerence dressed up as divinity,
a fever dream that taught my heart to wait.
I carved your absence into sacred art,
framing every withdrawal as a test.
You called my longing “clinging, torn apart,”
then wore my devotion like a tightened vest.
I stalked your moods like weather on a screen,
reading clouds for proof that you still cared.
You stood half-in, half-out, politely mean,
terrified of depth, of being bared.
I made excuses for your vanishing acts,
“they’re just afraid, they love me but can’t stay.”
I bent my spine around your missing facts,
choosing the fantasy over what you’d say.
I called this chaos “soulmate, twin-flame fire,”
because the burn felt too intense to be untrue.
But pain is not a compass, not a choir,
it’s often just my nervous system screaming you.
True love is quieter than my shaking hands,
it doesn’t thrive on begging or on chase.
It meets me in the open, where I stand,
and doesn’t flinch when I show all my face.
True love says, “Rest,” not, “Earn another day,”
it doesn’t vanish when I finally fall apart.
It holds, not hooks; it doesn’t make me pay,
and doesn’t weaponize a tender, open heart.
I used to think that needing you was proof,
that the more I ached, the deeper it must be.
But love is not the chain, it is the roof,
a shelter where both souls walk in free.
So if you feel this storm inside your chest,
and call it love while losing who you are,
Ask if your devotion ever gets to rest,
or only circles ’round a distant star.
Because limerence will tell you this is fate,
while you bleed out beneath a borrowed name.
And true love waits beyond that anxious gate,

the kind that stays without demanding pain as proof of flame.

RSP

DCG

Screenshot

How do you know if you actually love somebody, or if you’re just attached to them?


Love, in its most healthy and mature form, is a decision. It’s an intentional, consistent choice to nurture the growth, well-being, and soul of another person because of who they are, not because of what they do for you or what they give to you. You look at this person and you respect them, you admire them, you trust them, and you see them as your equal.


Love creates a space where both people can be fully themselves, can feel safe, and can evolve and grow.


But attachment, on the other hand—attachment is based on need or emotional gratification. It’s about how the other person makes you feel: safe, desired, validated, important, or not alone. And while that’s not inherently bad—we all have needs—unhealthy or anxious attachment is self-focused. It clings out of fear of loss, loneliness, or abandonment, rather than genuine appreciation for who that person is.


So, to recap:
• Love says, “I love them for who they are.”
• Attachment says, “I need them to be around because of what they do for me—how they make me feel.”


Make sure the person you’re with is someone you’re truly in love with, and not just someone you’re toxically attached to.

“The strongest, kind of love“

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

Poem: “The Strongest Kind of Love”


How do you walk away while your heart still stays?
I ask it softly, on my knees, in ordinary days.
You still love them, but you know you can’t remain.
Your chest is full of oceans, your mind is split with pain.
They say “move on” like feelings have a switch.
You search your skin for buttons, but there’s only an old itch.
This isn’t about pretending that you’re done.
It’s choosing your own pulse while you still miss someone.
You, the anxious soul who waits for every sign,
Count the minutes, read the silence, call it “love” and call it “mine.”
You think if you can just hold tighter, they won’t flee.
But their avoidant bones are built for running free.
You don’t have to wait until your heart is clean.
You can walk out of the fire while your love is still unseen.
You don’t have to hate them just to leave.
You can carry what was holy and still let yourself grieve.
Love doesn’t vanish simply because you’re done.
It lingers like faint daylight after the setting sun.
Sometimes you leave while the love is still alive.
That isn’t failure; it’s the way your truth survives.
You can adore them and still see you’re misaligned.
Emotion in your chest, but broken structure in your mind.
Anxious hearts beg, “Tell me I am enough.”
Avoidant hearts flinch, “You are close, this is too much.”
Love is the burning, compatibility is the frame.
If trust and steady effort crack, the house won’t stay the same.
Missing them doesn’t prove you chose it wrong.
It proves you’re human, and your feelings still are strong.
Your mind replays the highlight reel at night.
Soft hands, warm laughter, bodies framed in golden light.
Healing asks you not to edit out the grey.
Remember the stone-cold mornings when they pulled themselves away.
Remember the unanswered messages on your phone.
The way you twisted loneliness into “this is being grown.”
Missing someone should not bleach the facts you know.
You left because your nervous system couldn’t take the blow.
Closure, you thought, would come wrapped in a perfect speech.
One last talk, one clean reason you could finally reach.
But avoidant hearts slip out the backdoor in the dark.
They fear the very flame that lit your anxious spark.
Real closure isn’t something they can send.
It’s the moment you decide that this is truly the end.
Grieve as if your whole sky split in two.
Cry in your parked car, write what they once meant to you.
Talk it through with someone who can hear.
Feel the full weight of the love and of the fear.
But don’t set up your furniture inside the pain.
Grief is a passing storm, not your lifelong name.
You are not the breakup, not the night you bled.
You are the person standing, still alive, still being led.
So cut the secret strings that keep you near.
No more scrolling their feed when you drown in fear.
No more old messages like scripture on your phone.
No more songs that resurrect what should be left alone.
Distance isn’t punishment for what they didn’t give.
It’s the fence you build so your own heart can live.
Rebuild your mornings without their face.
New coffee cups, new routes, a quieter kind of grace.
Create small rituals that don’t depend on “us.”
New pages, long walks, a life that doesn’t rust.
Your anxious system learns a different sound.
Not panic, not pursuit, but steady, sacred ground.
Then forgive yourself for staying long in that storm.
For believing love could change what was never fully warm.
You held on because you hoped they’d meet you there.
Because you saw their potential through the fog of your despair.
That doesn’t mean that you were naive or small.
It means you cared enough to give your heart in full.
Release the shame that says you should have known.
You did the best you could with the tools you were shown.
Here is the truth that hits the deepest bone:
Moving on isn’t betrayal of the love you’d grown.
You are not turning on the past with cold disdain.
You are blessing what it taught you and stepping out of pain.
One day this impossible love will lose its knife.
It will soften into story instead of running your whole life.
It will be a chapter, not the book you clutch at night.
You will sleep without their shadow blocking out your light.
You can love someone and still choose your peace.
You can miss someone and still let the chase decrease.
You can cry over someone and still move on.
Because the strongest kind of love is knowing when it’s gone.
And gently, in a voice that finally sounds like you,
You say, “I release you, and I stay with what is true.”

RSP

…

DCG

Screenshot

How to move on when you still love someone? If you still love them, but you know you can’t stay, this is the part nobody prepares you for. Because moving on isn’t about turning your feelings off. It’s about choosing yourself while your heart is still attached.
Number one, stop waiting to not feel it anymore. You don’t have to hate them to leave. You don’t have to be over them to move forward. Love doesn’t disappear on command. Sometimes you move on while still loving them, and that doesn’t make you weak. It makes you emotionally honest.
Number two, separate love from compatibility. You can love someone deeply and still not be aligned. Love is emotion, compatibility is structure. If the structure is broken—trust, effort, timing, maturity—love alone cannot hold it together. Missing them doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It means you’re human.
Number three, stop romanticizing the highlights. Your mind will replay the best moments, the laughter, the intimacy, the comfort. But healing requires balance. Remember the confusion, too. The nights you felt anxious, the times you felt unheard. Missing someone should not erase the reasons you had to let go.
Number four, accept that closure is often internal. You may never get the perfect apology, the perfect explanation, the perfect goodbye. Waiting for closure from someone else keeps you emotionally tied. Real closure happens when you decide that what you experienced was enough information.
Number five, grieve fully, but don’t unpack permanently. Cry, journal, talk it out, feel it, but don’t build a home inside the pain. Grief is a season, not an identity. You are not the breakup, you are the person surviving it.
Number six, remove silent access. Stop checking their page, stop rereading old messages, stop playing songs that reopen the wound. Healing cannot happen while you’re secretly feeding the attachment. Distance is not about punishment, it’s about protection.
Number seven, rebuild your routine without them. Love weaves people into your daily life: good morning texts, shared habits, weekend rituals. When it ends, the emptiness feels loud. So create new rhythms, new habits, new small joys. Your nervous system needs fresh stability.
Number eight, forgive yourself for staying as long as you did. Sometimes we hold on because we hoped it would change, because we saw potential, because we believed in love. That doesn’t make you foolish, it means you cared. Release the shame. You did the best you could with the version of yourself you were.
And here’s what hits the deepest. Moving on isn’t betrayal. You’re not betraying the memories, you’re not betraying the love you felt, you’re not betraying the version of you that wanted it to work. You’re honoring your future. And one day, the love that feels impossible to release right now will soften. It won’t sting the same. It won’t control your thoughts. It will become a chapter, not the whole story. You can love someone and still choose peace. You can miss someone and still choose growth. You can cry over someone and still walk forward. Because sometimes the strongest kind of love is the one where you let go gently.

— Jordan Peterson 

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.”