If you identify as someone anxiously or disorganised attached, who repeatedly loses themselves in situationships, relationships, or one-date-obsession (limerent) connections, I wanted to write this today as a warning. Building a stable and comfortable foundation in your Self is incredibly helpful, but if your goal is to sustain love, you’ll have to give up some control so you don't become hyper-independent.

As a recovering disorganised/anxiously attached person, I used to have a real big problem with losing myself in others when it came to relationships. Romantic validation was my source of self-worth, and I distinctly remember, aged 20, believing that the fact I hadn’t had a relationship yet meant there was something critically wrong with me.

I went into dating and then my relationships with an almost desperate need to be liked. This meant I would chase, put up with hot/cold behaviours, and pedestal men who, quite frankly, weren’t all that great to begin with (or at least, weren’t that great for or to me).

When things went sour (which they always did), it would take me years to recover. If I wasn’t ruminating on where I went wrong, I was holding out hope they’d eventually choose me, which led to numerous further rejections. Through it all, I’d rant and rave to my friends and family about hopeless love, with them not understanding why I was so hung up on someone I’d only dated a few times or for a few months — at most.

Eventually, I realised I was part of the problem. I was losing myself in others because I wasn’t comfortable on my own — and that journey led me to self-help and the building of my independence. I learned about boundaries, I found my passions and built self-care practices.

This was all good: it stopped me from tying my self-worth to others, helped me spot red flags and make better choices, and life genuinely got better.

But I fear I’ve swung too far in this direction.

Just as I was attached to others, I’ve become overtly attached to my own world.

When Self-Sufficiency Becomes A Barrier To Intimacy

After being burned and bruised by relationships where you’ve in some way lost yourself, independence can feel liberating. I love my own company now, which is a stark contrast to the person I was 10 years ago.

I did much of this work alone, too. I read the books, listened to the podcasts, invested in therapy (on and off). It’s been lonely at times, but I guess I found a way to manage myself alone.

Which again, has been good, but it’s also brought a bit of a problem.

I’ve become almost controlling in my need to fix everything myself.

And I worry about letting others in to the emotional world I’ve finally got some sort of grip of.

This was evident most in my last relationship. As my ex and I grew closer, I began worrying over our compatibility and in true Joe fashion, the mere fact I was doubting the relationship made me even more stressed. I didn’t want to doubt the relationship, but I did, and rather than share those feelings I tried fixing them alone, as had been the case when I was single. Lost in my own confusing emotional world, I became colder; I’d stonewall and act out as my emotions leaked.

In the wreckage that followed, I finally shared the feelings I’d been having on the day we broke up.

The worst part was him saying:

“You should have told me about this; we could have spoken about it”.

And in that moment, my stomach dropped and a part of me broke.

It sounded so easy. Letting someone in and sharing how I’d been feeling.

There, I realised the limits of my self-sufficiency.

Had I let him in, we might have worked through it.

Isn’t that what a relationship is for?

Co-Regulation and a Life of Balance

In psychology, co-regulation, the ability for two partners to come together and soothe each other’s nervous systems when distressed, is an integral part of any healthy relationship.

Co-regulation doesn’t mean that we rely on our partners to fix us, nor does it mean losing ourselves. What it does mean is letting our significant other in and accepting help.

If we haven’t experienced healthy co-regulation before or have previously handed too much responsibility to others to fix us, the concept of co-regulation may conflict with the beliefs we’ve grown around self-sufficiency.

I think this topic is not spoken about enough in the self-improvement space. A lot of self-help guidance that I, too, have preached over the years has focused on learning to be alone, taking responsibility for your own emotions, and protecting inner peace. So focused on WE, we forget that there is another. And if someone care about us, they’ll want to be let in.

They’ll want to help.

So there’s a middle ground.

There is balance to be had here.

It’s funny to me that we can go from one extreme to another: I went from a compulsive oversharer who wanted others to fix him to a brick wall who believed that to have a relationship he needed to fix all his problems himself, only showing up to his significant other when he felt “fine”.

I’m learning that next time I find myself in a relationship, I need to share more of what I’m going through. As someone who fears intimacy and suffers from insecure tendencies, I find that relationships trigger me, and going at it alone doesn’t work.

Not if you want lasting love.

Thank you for reading.

I’ve written a lot over the years about dating and relationships, but not so much about gay relationships — and there is much to say.

Because the dating scene for gays is a dumpster fire, truly. It’s rough out there, and it’s part of the reason I haven’t dated for two years. I’m not sure if it’s entirely a gay thing, because my straight friends talk about it, too, but as gay people, we struggle with turning attraction into action and specifically with arranging first dates.

For example, I have an Instagram inbox full of guys I speak to sporadically, where we discuss meeting up but never do. We’ll circle around each other every few months and repeat our desire to connect soon, but soon never comes.

And just this morning, someone I knew (also one of these “Let’s meet up” guys I’ve spoken with in the past) matched with me on Hinge, complimented my photos and said we should “finally” meet. I responded, “We definitely should”.

But will we?

I’m not so sure.

I know life gets busy, and I’m not blaming these guys (entirely). I am part of the problem. I do this, too.

But I think there’s something deeper going on than “I can’t be bothered scheduling this into my diary”.

And, spoiler, I think it’s trauma.

A Bit of Background — The Gay Conditioning: Desire and Intimacy

There is a great risk of trauma growing up gay. Unless you have a really supportive family around you (and even then, cultural conditioning and community judgement might strike you), there is a high risk of internalisation: where the recognition of one’s sexuality becomes a shameful mark on the person’s sense of self.

So whilst our school friends are out there hooking up and having their first loves, intimacy for LGBTQ+ young gay kids and teenagers is something we can learn to fear. This is especially true if we are in denial, as we will deliberately avoid and suppress our need for intimacy, save our fragile identity from dissolving before us.

In addition, it’s not uncommon for gay teenagers to explore their sexual desires through fleeting, physical exchanges. The version of intimacy I learned about did not involve any emotional expression. They were instead brief, momentary experiences of sexual desire, done in secret and bookended by a horrible feeling of shame (something I wrote more about below).

As our childhood experiences are integral for ingraining later habits, fear and shame can alter our approach towards dating in later life. This is the basis of attachment theory.

Approach and Avoidance Behaviours in Dating

The problem with hot/cold dating in the gay scene, I believe, isn’t for the lack of a genuine desire to date but because, in many cases, actioning a date triggers our learned response towards potential intimacy: Fear, and avoidance.

The idea that we can both want something and fear it exists because our unconscious mind, trained by experience, reacts instinctively to our environment, regardless of what our conscious mind says.

The body Keeps the Score, as Bessel Van Der Kolk says. Texting on a phone is relatively low-risk when you barely know someone, but arranging a date with the underlying intention of investing emotionally? It’s a different beast.

This could explain why we leave people hanging in a perpetual grey zone.

Add to this the sexual component, and some gay men— myself included — will find it easier to just pursue the connection sexually, rather than in a place where emotions might deepen.

This makes for a messy dating pool, especially if we are unaware of these patterns — which I think many people are.

Moving Beyond Our Learned Patterns

Dating requires commitment, not just towards meeting someone but also towards challenging our learned beliefs and conditioned responses.

The two are synonymous. You can say you want to date, but unless you’re querying the resistance that’s arising and choosing to move against it, you’re at risk of running on autopilot and confusing emotional avoidance with your genuine interest in dating.

And for the sake of nuance, there may be perfectly non-traumatic reasons for resistance to dating. Maybe you think you want to date, but you’re not quite ready yet — and that’s fine, but maybe it’s time to delete the apps.

But if you are thinking, no I really want to date, then consider biting the bullet and doing it — in spite of the discomfort you might initially feel.

And regarding the sex point, be wary. If you want something more but are finding yourself engaging in surface-level sexual encounters that lead nowhere, maybe there’s something to look at there, too.

Sexual connections can develop into emotional ones but in my case, I’ve found it very rare - maybe because I’m afraid of being really seen and so will dissipate into an ether the moment I sense it going any further.

Right now I’m evaluating my relationship to sex, porn and intimacy. I want to rewire that part of my brain that fears emotional intimacy, and prefers momentary sexual connection.

Much to think (and write about), so expect more on this topic soon.

Thank you for reading and supporting my work!

Over the years, I’ve noticed a correlation I can’t ignore.

Almost always, I find a sense of pride, satisfaction and happiness when I take steps to actualise my authentic desires. When I get one step closer to being the person I know in my heart I’m meant to be.

On the contrary, when I live in fear and suppress my desires, I become cynical and frustrated, torn between who I am on the outside and who I imagine myself to be, inside.

I think my life’s journey is bridging the gap I feel between the two. Of becoming the person inside, I know I am.

I think you deserve to be the person you want to be, too.

Which is what we’re talking about today.

When Our Imaginations Become Alternate Realities for Our True Self

When you’ve been conditioned to live life in the shadows, contorting yourself to other people or to society's ideals out of fear or trauma, your authentic desires are suppressed, and your self-trust is hindered.

But in my experience, these desires are not completely dissolved; they find ways to express themselves more subtly, through our imagination.

And so in my daydreams, I’ll imagine all the ways my life could be. In them, I’m a writer who travels, makes a living off his creativity, and leaves behind the corporate nonsense they feel constrained by in reality.

These daydreams can be fantastical and whimsical, but they’re mostly me doing normal things. Saying things I wish I could say, working towards goals I’m too afraid to start, and being a version of me that looks a lot like I do now, but is not bound by fear or shame.

They feel good.

They’re a source of escapism.

And so for much of my life, my imagination has become Universe that gives my True self free-reign.

I can visit him, but he can’t get out.

Psychologists might call my disposition to daydream a form of maladaptive daydreaming: a coping mechanism I developed to escape a dysfunctional outer world. They’d argue that I have too much attachment to thought, and need to appreciate my present more.

All this could be true, but as I’ve become more aware, I don’t see my daydreams as something I should brush off and ignore; I see them as guides towards what I know is true.

Because in truth, I’ve spent my life rejecting my imagination and creative parts, and I’ve felt the brunt of it in reduced satisfaction and a sense of feeling trapped.

I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe the daydreamer doesn’t need to reject his/her imagination in favour of a more “realistic” reality; maybe they need to slowly but surely turn those daydreams into action, so that their True self is finally set free.

My Ahah! Moment Of Self-Realisation

The power of actualising my daydreams came for me when I decided to start writing again. For a while, I had this intuitive nudge to start a blog. I was an avid reader on Medium, and I wanted to be like the people whose creative work I admired.

But I was scared of what people would think of me, and I think, also afraid of what might come out. I was completely emotionally suppressed, and speaking up publicly about my emotions felt like rubbing up against all my wounds.

Whilst I juggled my fear of expressing myself with my intuitive desire to start, I began to notice more and more how, despite my challenges with self-expression, I’d return to the same daydreams time after time. In them, I was free to be creative, speak my mind, and pursue my passions.

And feeling into these daydreams brought me a sense of liberation.

I think anyone who struggles with self-expression reaches a point where they realise the cost of staying silent isn’t worth the cost of continuing to reject themselves. As the quote by Anais An goes:

Following my desire and starting to write after years of suppression has been one was the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Not because I’m this amazing writer who suddenly achieved remarkable success (I have not), but because I finally remembered how good it feels to do what you want.

Inside, I knew what was good for me — I’d pictured it a million times — and to then feel that, through action, dissolved so much of the shame and anxiety that had been holding me back.

In actualising my imagination, I finally started to believe in myself.

Your Imagination as Vessel for Growth

When I first went to therapy, I remember telling my therapist at the time that I didn’t know who Joe was. I’d strayed so far away from myself that I’d lost touch with my ability to even know what I wanted - and I certainly didn’t trust my instincts.

But by going inwards and looking more closely at my imagination, I’ve begun to realise there is a lot I want to do and be, and when I exercise courage to overcome my fears of self-expression, I feel more whole.

More like me.

This is therefore your invitation to think about what secrets your imagination might hold about you. What are you deeply wanting, and is there a way for you to start actualising your dreams? You don’t need to make big changes; start small. Piece by piece, you can learn to trust that your inner world is not lying to you.

Finally, the ability to carve your life comes with time and courage and is independent of what we have learned “success” to be.

In my world, success is not measured by a metric, a follower count, or a financial reward; it’s measured by asking myself,

“Am I becoming more like myself?”

And I think that’s a beautiful way to move through life.

Carl Jung would call this process individuation.

Than you for reading.

“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” — Einstein.

To live in active resistance to what we feel is true about us is to live below our potential. We may obtain material things, move up the ranks at work or achieve relationship milestones, but we’ll feel disconnected, as if there’s more to who we are than what we present to the outside world.

But some of us are trained from a young age to suppress our authentic parts. We learned to hide them out of shame and fear. Eventually, we realise that the life we’re living is incongruent with the person underneath, and then — maybe — we wake up.

It’s the journey, sometimes, of a lifetime.

An Identity Crisis of an Identity Not Fully Formed

I love writing; it’s where I feel most alive and most uninhibited. When I open my laptop and write, like I’m doing something good — for myself, and for others, too — .

Yet, honouring my desire to make this the focal point of my life is a challenge I’m still grappling with, 6 years on from starting my growth journey.

And truthfully, I hold a lot of resistance towards this part of myself, despite the awareness I’ve built and the hundreds of articles I’ve written.

I think a part of me doesn’t want to believe that this part of me exists: that I am a creative who feels deeply and thinks even more deeply. I hide it, instead of being proud.

I’d even go so far as to say that I dislike this part of myself. I have this urge, this intuitive nudge, that tells me to reorient my life, leave my job, express more, and I find that voice annoying.

Why can’t I be like everyone else? Why can’t I be content with how things are? Why am I saving what could be a house deposit for a future plan where I sustain myself creatively?

I know the answer — greater life satisfaction, more authentic connections, a sense of pride in who I am — so why aren’t I listening?

With my True self knocking on the door of the life I’ve built, I’m faced with the reality of who I’m becoming.

And I need to surrender.

Growing Up In Self-Rejection and A Need for Control

I’ve always wanted to fit in. As a closeted gay kid who feared anyone finding out who he was, I learned to reject myself from a very young age. My life became a constant battle to suppress and adapt, and shame and anxiety-tinged negative self-talk became the tools I used to stay silent and remain in denial.

Everything became about staying in control, and I did pretty well at it until my dissatisfaction and mental health reached a boiling point. Then I realised the cost of staying silent outweighed the fears and shame I had around self-expression.

I thought coming out would solve my problems, but I’ve come to realise self-rejection is an ingrained habit that takes years to unravel.

It’s pesky, too. I still fear being different. I still worry about what others think of me.

Only now, it’s my creative parts that get the beating.

And so I’m faced with a similar conundrum to the one I faced when I was 19.

Can I let go?

Can I surrender?

Surrendering Means You Stop Fighting

To surrender means to stop fighting.

It means to let go of anxious and shameful thoughts when they arise. To see them not as truths but as defensive strategies that once kept us safe and may not be serving their purpose now.

This doesn’t mean we reject these thoughts and emotions. I can let them have their place in my mind without pushing them away or allowing them to suppress my authentic desires.

If I did, I’d still be fighting.

And of course, there’s nuance to this. I know some of my fears are valid. Leaving my job will bring a period of uncertainty. I’ll lose structure, financial certainty, and I won’t know how things will turn out, but what good is a life lived when your heart’s not in it?

The truth is, we will never know what’s around the corner, no matter how hard we try to white-knuckle it and cling to control. You can try all you want to people-please others, and still not be liked. You can find a stable job with a stable income, and lose it tomorrow. You can have what appears to be the perfect family, and still be unhappy.

Surrendering means letting go of control and, at times, having blind faith that things will work out in your favour.

Or maybe they won’t, but at least you can say you didn’t reject yourself in the process. I can guarantee that if you’re pursuing an authentic truth, you’ll benefit from the process. There is always pride to be found in choosing the Self over fear or shame that has kept you small.

When some wars end, concessions are often made as part of the negotiation. Surrendering could mean accepting that things can’t change right now or that some short-term sacrifices must be made. For the sake of peace, hard conversations might need to be had.

Whatever the case, when I surrender to the present moment or when I choose not to fight against an inner truth, a weight falls from my shoulders, and I feel lighter. I become more optimistic, more open-minded to potential and less driven by shame and anxiety.

So next time you catch yourself arguing with yourself or the world, tell yourself to surrender. Whatever it is, spot the uncertainties you’re fighting.

Become aware of your need to control, and ask yourself if you can surrender.

If you’ve found this story helpful, then consider subscribing to Above the Middle. Your support means the world.

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When a bad bout of mental health propelled me on my personal growth journey 6 years ago, I was an avid researcher of all things self-improvement. I read all the must-reads, fan-boyed over Eckhart Tolle as his take on spirituality opened my mind, and I was churning out articles like my life depended on it. I’ve written 654 to date, which I’m astonished at.

I was a student, eager to learn, and eager to implement, and that I did; for the most part, I did feel better.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped acting like a student. I stopped reading the books, engaging with the community here on Medium & Substack, and my self-care practices dwindled into nothing.

I started to become complacent and frustrated.

My daily meditation practice stopped, I stopped journaling, and I wrote less and less. I was also frustrated if I came across a principle or concept I’d read or heard before. “I know this”, I’d say to myself, with an eye roll like a kid who wonders why he needs to hear the fundamentals again.

Subtly, I began to lose my faith in personal growth.

When Setbacks Derail Our Faith

A student, passionate about his subject, will come into lessons wide-eyed, ready to put in the work. They’ll soak up the content and, believing in their ability to progress, will transmute those learnings into actions.

For a while, I did just that. A big part of my self-improvement work has been around relationships. Stuck on unavailable, half-hearted men with complicated patterns that got in the way of healthier connections, I was ready to be a student of love. My aim was to work through this stuff, and I’ll secure a relationship.

I researched my attachment style, I practiced making better choices around who and who not to date, and I improved my self-esteem. I was ecstatic when I started dating someone I genuinely felt connected with, and it soon led to a relationship.

I thought that this was it, my work had brought me here, and my work would see me through, but I ran into trouble. My disorganised patterns reared their ugly head again, and I sabotaged.

The demise of the relationship, given that I was at the helm, was a difficult reality for me to reconcile with.

How had I ended up here, and what had all my work been for?

In my eyes, I had failed, and the processes I followed had failed me, too. The proof — in my eyes — was in the pudding.

Now, I feel I’m waking up from that spell.

I’m beginning to realise my focus has been all wrong.

Process over Destination and Realigning Expectations

I’m actively trying to reorient my view towards personal growth and the relationship I once had towards it.

As children, it’s hammered home to us that to be a good student and succeed, we must work hard and will be rewarded. Exams are our testing ground, and we either pass or we fail. We are taught our outcomes are correlated with efforts, and I looked at my quest for healthier relationships this way, too.

But the real-world — the Universe — is inherently unpredictable. We can work to improve ourselves and still face challenges. We can unravel patterns and still find ourselves triggered. Relationships will end, geopolitical crises will impact us and our plans, and your own ideas may well change.

This doesn’t mean our efforts won’t pay off. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have goals, either; what matters is not taking our perceived failings to mean the work we did was for nothing.

I’m slowly rebuilding my faith in this work and in myself. Part of it is lowering my need to control or predict outcomes based on what I believe I give, and another part is appreciating the work for what it really is — a means to navigate life more efficiently, with our health and wellbeing prioritised.

That’s what being a student of life means to me.

If you’ve found this story helpful, then consider subscribing to Above the Middle. Your support means the world.

I know, I’ve been quiet lately. I wrote in my last newsletter that my break was an intentional move into the present and to stop self-analysing so much, but in truth, I’ve found writing hard.

I think I’ve lost faith a little bit in personal growth. Not because I don’t think writing or reading about it is not helpful, but that it can only do so much when your life is structured a certain way.

It’s been tiring to show up and write about how to unstuck your life, or rise “above the middle” when you’re working a job that drains you and takes up all your time. I remember the first year of COVID, calling up my doctor and asking to go back on my antidepressants. I told him it just wasn’t feasible for me to work on myself to the level I knew I needed to be mentally healthy, whilst under the constraints of my job.

And 6 years on, it’s frustrating for me to continue writing about ways to reach your potential whilst my external world looks largely the same. Same job, same relationship problems, same personal strife, same medication.

I’m beginning to believe that the structures we live inside either support or undermine the person we’re trying to become.

And whilst writing helps, oh my gosh, it does, you can’t rely on it to change you. Not when your outer world is pressuring you to stay the same. Every time I write an article on stress management, my sales role finds a way to overwhelm me and gnaw at my sense of purpose.

And despite my troubles with disorganised attachment, not much has changed on that front, either. I still traverse the same dating apps, looking for quick dopamine hits in the form of validation. I also haven’t dated in 2 years. Not because a part of me doesn’t want to, I just don’t see where I can muster the energy.

So I’ve grown a little helpless and frustrated with my journey. I cycle through periods of wellness followed by periods engaging in behaviours that set me back. Partying too much, hookups, overworking, doom scrolling my phone into an abyss — sources of escapism and short-term stress relief that feed into one another.

It’s been tiring, but there is some light to share, at least.

Feeling deflated and beaten down by the world and the structures around me, I took some much-needed time off and went to the Canaries for 8 nights to disconnect (and reconnect).

There, I restarted my journaling practice — which has been great. It was the outlet I needed to release mental tension, without getting caught up in what I wrote, how I wrote it, or what people might think. I remembered this space was safe for a stream of consciousness that I, and only I, have privy to.

I also did a lot of walking and took moments to pull out my headphones and just observe life:

I smiled, watching what I thought was a mother and daughter, laughing as the younger one jumped out of their dingy white camper van to check the engine for any trouble on their road trip to wherever they were headed.

I’d beam at the beach as a dog gleefully barked and skipped around a twig, waiting for his/her owner to throw it into the ocean again.

I swam in the sea, my mind quiet as I focused on gently falling into each wave, saving them from sending me into a tailspin (the waves in Fueterventura are pretty big, and they’ll exert their strength on you if you let them).

It was all really, really great. I’ve been so caught up in other people’s expectations of me, and my own endless mental stories, that I forgot the beauty all around me. I forgot what it was like to just be an observer. So peaceful.

Coming back, I felt a familiar tinge of frustration at the idea that life may return me to how I felt on the day I left: beaten down, helpless, and frankly, depressed. I wasn’t even excited to go on holiday that day. A part of me wanted to climb back into bed.

My body reacts to the idea of going back to work as it does to the idea of drinking Sambuka, now almost 30, after a horrible night I had at a friend’s party when I was 18. I feel an instinctive need to pull away, as if my body and mind have learned, “This place isn’t good for you, stay away”; but push through I must. At least, for now.

Having reconnected with myself, I’m going to do my best to upkeep a daily meditation and journalling practice. I’m also going to make an effort to be more conscious of the practices, behaviours, and substances that provide me with short-term relief at the cost of my long-term health.

I won’t say I’ll be perfect, but I’ll do better. Journaling will help me keep this accountability.

I also want to write where I can, but if it takes a few weeks for me to get something out, know I am always thinking about how great it is that I have this space, and for you, the reader, for sticking by me as I traverse the not-so-simple world of self-improvement. Change takes time.

See you soon!

To be disorganised is to live between opposing internal forces: the desire to connect, and the fear of connection. Whilst one impulse may temporarily override the other, I’ve come to learn that the other isn’t far behind.

In my day-to-day life, I feel this tension when I text a friend to ask them to hang out. Almost immediately, my desire turns to doubt. A part of me wants to revoke the message and retreat into myself.

It can feel like we’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. If we don’t reach out, desire lives on; if we do, avoidance rises.

In my early 20s, this pattern would wreak havoc. In romantic relationships, I’d follow my opposing impulses and contradict myself, to the confusion of everyone and myself. At its worst, I broke up with an ex and made up several times in one afternoon.

Now I’m older, and have cultivated greater awareness, I can hover above the potential contradiction and in the case of texting a friend, I ask myself:

What am I searching for, and why am I so conflicted?

Indecision Is A Disorganised Person’s Trauma Response

What on the surface looks like indecision to hang out is actually a trauma response that says, “I don’t know if I’ll be safer on my own or in connection”.

It’s difficult for us to connect when we spent our childhoods unsure whether the ones we love would support or harm us. Rather than grow confident that we can feel safe and cared for, we were left fractured and afraid. Afraid that if we reached out, we’d be rejected, or harmed, and afraid that if we were left alone, we’d suffer.

And growing up, this indecision was likely chronic. I spent my younger years totally consumed by fear. Struggling on my own, afraid of those around me seeing me. When faced with connection, I was left afraid, and then, confused by my conflicting emotions.

Side note: Mary Ainsworth’s strange experiments were the first to show disorganised attachment in action. Caregivers and their infants were observed to see their reactions when their caregiver left the room and returned. Upon returned disorganised infants would show clear signs of indecision: walking up to their caregivers, stopping and freezing. Their nervous system, overwhelmed, shut down.

When activated, I see myself in the disorganised infants of the Strange Experiments. Sometimes I’ll approach and then flee, other times I’ll freeze up, locked in a state of uncertainty, overthinking what I should do next, all the while doing nothing at all.

How I Manage Indecision

We may know, on a logical, rational level, that we have nothing to fear hanging out with a friend, but trauma defies logic, initially. Feelings can feel real and distort our understanding of reality.

Whilst I’m getting better at managing my disorganised patterns, I still struggle. Sometimes I’ll hover around a potential plan for days, uncomfortable and procrastinating on it, unaware that my trauma has been activated.

Our feelings drive much of our behaviour. Under normal circumstances, we use them as guides, but when disorganised attachment styles are triggered, the past can blur the present. This is especially true for disorganised people. Our emotions are strong and contradictory, which naturally brings confusion.

So when I’m faced with a decision, like whether to see a friend, it’s really important that I allow myself time before deciding. I don’t want to overextend myself if I need time alone, and I don’t want to avoid connecting because, on some deeper level, a part of me is afraid of being seen.

I also anticipate that I might feel a tinge of avoidance come through when I do reach out to connect. I don’t excuse these feelings, but I try not to allow them to dictate my actions immediately. I can wait to see if they are speaking true, and it’s genuinely ok to change your mind — so long as you feel you’re doing it because you really want to.

Importantly, I try not to judge myself for being this way.

Self-judgement compounds the stress response, and in the past, has led me to overwhelm and breakdowns.

Thank you for reading.

Managing attachment trauma is difficult, confusing, but writing and reading about this stuff helps. If you want to read some more, consider subscribing to my newsletter to be notified of future updates.

Do you ever feel like you’re perpetuating a certain feeling, that the habits you engage in reinforce a sense of continuous sadness, moodiness, or anger?

It’s been on my mind this week since Spotify released its users' 100 most-listened-to songs of all time. I am an avid music fan and do believe that the genres, sounds and lyrics we enjoy can and do influence us.

Which is why I was initially taken aback when I saw my top 5 songs (of all time) were melancholic and mid-tempo. The top song, “Time is Dancing” by Ben Howard, is a moody, atmospheric track about the fleeting passage of time and connection. The other 4 address existentialism and longing.

Not the type of songs you’d listen to if you’re having a great time, let’s say.

I don’t dislike the fact that I like this music, these are my favourite songs, and I actually think they track with who I’ve been these pa. I have pondered my existence (at times, obsessively), and I am someone who has struggled with longing vs the experience of genuine connection - romantic, or otherwise. I’ve felt both hopeless and hopeful of change, and have often drifted into alternate realities, unlike the one I live in now.

I use music as a form of catharsis, but I think there is a fine line between catharsis and perpetuation.

Have I moved beyond the struggles these songs speak to? Have I made my bed in melancholia?

The Comfort of Discomfort

I’ll relax to these songs and some days even nap to them. The sounds soothe me, and the lyrics do, too. They hug me in the places I feel most conflicted. That can be the power of music.

This said, I know I have an attachment to these songs because the idea of leaving them behind or not listening to them one day makes me uncomfortable. Do I not want to listen to happier music and, more importantly, do I not want to move beyond the lyrics that I relate to so much?

You may think I’m thinking too deeply about this, but I regularly top 100,000 listening minutes a year. That is 1666 hours, and put together, 69 days of continuous listening, day and night. Anything, a job, a friendship, or even music, will influence us when we engage with it that much.

And when I look at how my life has been these past 4 years, it’s been well, the same. I listen to existential songs that ponder meaning, and I haven’t acted on the change I know could bring purpose. Like, for example, making writing and creativity a career.

We’ll often choose familiar hells over unfamiliar heavens, and our music may reflect that.

Happiness, Hope, Flourishing

I’ve saved my year-end lists for the past 6 years, and 2020 stands out as a good year because of the music I listened to the most. Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, a bright, summery album about the beauty of life and love, and my favourite band, Odesza, known for their spiritual, high-vibe, electronic music, took the top spots.

And I know why. Despite the onset of COVID and lockdowns, I was coming out of a debilitating OCD episode and breakup, and had finally started to find my feet again. I fell back in love with life and myself, and I felt it all through music.

The subsequent years have been more melancholic, in part, I believe, because I’ve felt stuck. I’ve sat between hopelessness and hope, daydreaming of a better life and not taking action.

Life will bring challenges, and our taste in music will reflect that, but I hope I can take the necessary steps to move beyond the music that has dominated my ears of late.

I want to be happier.

And my taste in music indicates there is more to do.

This post isn’t a caution about listening to sad music or a disregard for certain types of music. It’s not to say we have to abandon our favourite songs: there will always be a time and place for them. I just don’t want them to be my soundtrack for the next 10 years.

This has been an inquiry into our listening habits and what they might say about who we are, where we’re going, and what we might not be doing.

I find it super interesting, and hope this has spurred you to query your own habits, music or otherwise.

Recently I’ve been trying something different. I’m trying not to write as much.

Not out of self-avoidance, necessarily — though I’m sure some of that comes into this — but because I have a habit of getting lost in self-analysis, which is a problem when your blog is built on psychologically inclined essays.

I like knowing things, and when it comes to my health and psychology, I will deep dive into hard topics and search the nooks and crannies of my own experiences (and pain) for clarity.

And sometimes I like the conclusions I come to. I feel at peace, like I’ve acknowledged something that I previously couldn’t put words to, or have simply ignored, or suppressed. It’s cathartic.

Other times, I feel icky. Like I’m trudging through a swamp of my own creation. If writing the way I do is a magnifying glass to the Self, too much of it jaggers the edges of my identity and I come away dazed, with more questions than I do answers about who I am, what I want, and where I want to go.

I guess lately I’ve fallen into the latter camp. Winter was a rough time. Dark nights, short days, and daylight spent mainly in an office left me with a lot of time to ruminate and “figure things out”.

I’d write when I was meant to be working, and read Psychology Today articles to pass the time.

Now it’s Spring, I wonder to myself: what did I solve? Did I fix myself?

Did I ever need fixing?

In psychology there’s a term called intellectualisation, where trauma sufferers utilise self-analysis as a means to feel in control. Whilst self-analysis is important, it can also become a defense mechanism, tricking us into thinking we’re making progress when in reality, we’re avoiding feelings and action.

Ruminating/overthinking is a form intellectualisation and writing can be an extension of that, depending on how and why we’re writing. I’ve always felt something is wrong with me and writing scratches - and sometimes perpetuates - that itch.

I can recognise when my relationship to writing becomes unhealthy when I struggle resting on days I haven’t written. It’s as if a part of me is saying, “You need write for reassurance that you’re ok”, turning a sacred practice into an exhausting and frustrating test of will.

This pull inwards can be so strong that I struggle being present. Friendships require commitment, there are tasks to be done at work or at home, and rest isn’t rest if there’s an underlying sense of guilt for not doing “the work”.

I guess I have a habit of fixating on things believing they can fix me. I believed the same with self-help books, with a bookshelf of them that say the same thing and promise the same enlightenment in different ways. I’ve done the same in relationships, too, placing excessive worth on the value of a partner.

All these fixations and the ways they manifest - excessive reading, overthinking your love interest’s interest in you and compulsive writing - are but manifestations of our need to intellectualise, often driven by a core fear that something is wrong.

Which is why I’ve taken a conscious break from writing, to re-evaluate and focus my energy elsewhere.

Spring Is Here, and I’m Be Practicing Presence

As I’ve intentionally distanced myself from writing, I’ve focused on being present.

I recently moved in with a group of people who are now becoming close friends. It’s been a challenge (the anxiety of letting new people in), but it’s also been lovely and heartwarming. I spend evenings watching movies and socialising, whereas before I’d be holed up in my room, thinking—and writing—my way through the latest strife I’d uncovered, or was yet to uncover.

I often feel an urge to get my laptop out and write, but I resist it. I sense a tinge of guilt that tells me I’m self-neglecting, but I’m beginning to recognise that voice as the “fix me” voice, which I don’t always need to listen to.

If an emotion does come up, I’m practising feeling into it. Yesterday evening I felt sad, but couldn’t pinpoint why. Rather than picking up my laptop and going into fix-it mode, I lay on my bed, put on some music, and simply felt into the experience. This meant sitting with the discomfort, rather than trying to solve or make sense of it. That’s the difference.

Of course, there’s nuance. I’m not saying we shouldn’t write, nor that I don’t have struggles that need to be addressed. It’s just important to have balance, and to notice when our drive to rationalise and think something through is actually a covert way of avoiding feelings and action—especially when that drive impacts our ability to rest, connect, and engage in other forms of wellbeing.

It’s also important to recognise the limits of our practices. Are we expecting them to transform us? Have we become over-reliant on them? I struggle with perfectionism and am prone to all-or-nothing thinking.

This Spring I want to explore other ways of nourishing myself, to include:

• Time with friends and building new connections.

• Dating after an 18-month romantic ice age.

• Meditation and Yoga.

• Conscious rest leisure time not to be filled with self-inquiry.

• A holiday (yes please).

I’ll still be writing, of course, but I want to write inspired.

I’ve been feeling genuinely more well having taken a step back.

Hopefully, that explains it all.

Thanks as always and catch you for the next one :)

Joe

There’s a game some of us play in dynamics where commitment isn’t reciprocated: We assume if we’re nice enough, if we don’t disagree or voice our desire for more, eventually we’ll be rewarded. In time, in commitment, in love.

Usually, this silent game runs unconsciously beneath our fear of rejection. Only, the intuitive sense we have that this person isn’t really into us — at least as anything more substantial — is often true. We may not this, but our silence says otherwise, and the dynamic continues.

And so time goes on, and so does our hope. When reality continues to misalign with our expectations, frustration starts to bubble. First as quiet resentment, and then into a rage.

Indignation: the anger or annoyance provoked by what is perceived as unfair treatment.

He Didn’t Want Me — But I Stayed Anyway

I remember being hung up on years ago by my next-door neighbour. I was friends with his flatmate, and I’d met him at one of his parties and instantly hit it off. We slept together the first night we met, and from then on, I was hooked.

But he wasn’t looking for more, and how we started was a good representation of how it would continue. Short flings, mostly on his terms, that I was happy to abide with. At least at first.

From time to time, I’d express my hope of commitment, which was usually met with resistance. I was being too much, he’d say, and he didn’t have the time — or patience — to listen to my feelings.

I should have realised then and there that he wasn’t someone I would date, but it wasn’t like we weren’t interacting. The sex kept the promise of more alive and fuelled my wild imagination with thoughts about what we could be. I was living on this hope, it’s what kept me engaged.

It didn’t take long for my discontent with the status quo to fester into resentment, and then indignation, until one night I exploded. He’d brought me back after a night in a club. We had sex, and then he asked me to leave.

I couldn’t believe it. Is this what he thought of me? Someone he could have sex with and then kick out? Had he not noticed all I’d done?

I’m not a confrontation person, but I’ve never shouted like I did that night, through tears. I’d self-abandoned for this connection, and allowed myself to be mistreated, only to be paid in dust. I didn’t get what I wanted, and I made myself a fool in the process.

I Handed Him A Covert Contract

Looking back, I have sympathy and compassion for the boy who thought he could appease his way to connection. I was playing the role of the nice guy, hiding his true feelings as a means to appease him and get to the outcome I wanted — commitment.

Dr Robert Glover calls these types of silent agreements covert contracts in his book, “No More Mr Nice Guy”, acting as a substitute for the boundaries we’re too afraid to set.

Had I spoken up and set a boundary (“I have feelings for you and can’t keep doing this unless something changes”), I’d have had to be OK with the very real (and likely) possibility he would reject me. Instead, I (unconsciously) chose to keep it going, growing ever more frustrated and resentful as reality didn’t align with my expectations.

I then blamed him and victimised myself when it all went south. Sure, he could have been more honest with his feelings and recognised that I was being strung along, but I wasn’t honest with mine, either.

Both of us were willing to keep the dynamic going as it was, and so it did.

In dating, especially if you learn anxiously attached, we make the mistake of assuming that other people know what we want. We expect that other people know how we feel or will have our best interest at heart, but unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Covert contracts almost always fail because we can’t predict the future. As Byron Katie says, there are 3 types of business in the world: Your own, other people’s and God’s (the Universe).

Had I chosen to speak up and state my worth, I likely would have been rejected, and that would have sucked, but at least I could have walked away with a sense of dignity for sticking up for myself. Instead, I self-abandoned, became a victim, and then WAS rejected, anyway.

Boundaries are expressions of worth, and they also give others a chance to step up or step out. If you wait for other people to notice your worth, you could be waiting around forever.

Thank you for reading.

I often forget I have the power to choose. I forget that the thoughts I choose to follow, the feelings I choose to indulge, and the actions I take all influence the state of my mind, my sense of hope or despair, and my motivation to write or succumb to the day’s melancholy.

And that wouldn’t be a problem if my mind, left to its own devices, weren’t skewed. Without conscious effort, it will churn out worries and critical remarks that darken my mood and stunt my sense of purpose and motivation. I could spend days on my own in my bed, scrolling the hours away or napping or just lying with my eyes closed listening to music, if I allowed myself to.

And whilst I do get frustrated, and feel the brunt of this in periods of anxiety or depression, I also find comfort in this space. It feels familiar to me, probably because I spent most of my childhood and teenage years living through this mindset.

Now, as an adult, it takes conscious effort for me to resist the urge to laze a day away, ignore my needs, and be productive.

I’m used to feeling helpless.

Helplessness in Childhood Becomes a Lifestyle in Adulthood

We adapt to what we know. In the face of persistent challenge — be it mental or physical — the question isn’t “How can I overcome this?”; it becomes “How can I cope?”

Psychologists call this mental adaptation learned helplessness, something we can adopt in childhood under persistently adverse or challenging environments.

When we don’t believe there is a way out, or lack external support and help, learned helplessness can leave us with little option but to give in to the mental and physical stress and develop coping strategies to self-soothe.

For me, as a child who was in denial over my identity, in an environment that I felt would not be supportive, this looked like disconnecting. I’d lie in my bed for hours, daydreaming the day away and listening to sad music that soothed me but also reinforced the identity I was growing into.

The more time I spent away from myself, the better.

The Pervasiveness of Learned Helplessness

The thing about learned helplessness is that it is a pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that doesn’t go away when your environment changes. Not at first, anyway.

In the cruel studies that originated and highlighted the concept of learned helplessness, dogs were placed in an electrified box with no escape and shocked repeatedly. With time, the dogs began to show depressed-like qualities and learned that there was no point expressing emotion — even pain — or searching for a way out. They just lay there in apathy.

And importantly, once this state of helplessness had been conditioned in the dogs, it didn’t matter if the researchers moved them to another box with an obvious escape route; subsequent shocks failed to prompt them to escape their pain.

They’d lost their will to try.

This makes me think about how many of us, despite being adults with autonomy, struggle to enact change.

I know that my coping mechanisms aren’t productive. I know they’re holding me back, but their roots are deep, and they’ll entice me, especially when stressed.

The work here, then, involves rebuilding the self-belief that was conditioned out of us in childhood. We must consciously switch back on our awareness and make lasting changes that save us from looping through the same patterns that may feel comfortable in the moment but slowly drain our satisfaction and vitality.

The Power of Awareness and Choice.

We all know that it’s important to have awareness. It’s one of the first things you read about if you’ve ever read anything on personal growth. So I’ll side-step the cliche and speak to why you might be having difficulty seeing long-term change.

And this might bring some rude awakenings for you.

In my own life, I’ve found that I can make strides towards a better lifestyle: I give meditation a good go, I sit down on the weekend and write, and I’ve been to therapy. Yet, I feel I’m going around in circles. I take a step forward only to be knocked back. I then doubt my abilities: why can’t I change?

The answer, I’ve come to realise, is that micro-changes aren’t enough anymore.

I think many of us — myself included — are trying to optimise ourselves through better routines and self-care rituals in the face of significant forces that trigger our sense of helplessness and mirror the environments we grew up in.

For example, I work an intense job that isn’t aligned with who I am. I feel like I’m playing a role, rather than leading with my passions and strengths. I can self-care my way through Saturday and Sunday, but 5 days of living unaligned, and I begin to feel helpless- because, in a way, I am.

It’s no wonder I want and do disconnect, and I have a bucketload of strategies I can turn to for comfort.

So I say, we need big, structural changes to see real transformation. If we tune into our intuition and it says this job is not right for us, we need to get up and get out of there. Maybe not immediately — because big changes take time — but eventually.

So, to end this, to you I say: pay attention to the ways your life is making you feel hopeless. Be aware of the stress that is turning you to your coping strategies. If you’re tired of trying to implement micro-habits and failing, consider what needs to be done on a larger scale to make a difference.

It’s what I’m doing.

As a deep-thinker and a creative, I often wonder if I am too much for someone else. Am I too emotional? Too existential? Too quirky? Would they like my hobbies, or my writings, or would they find them self-indulgent and isolated?

In the past, I’ve given in to these concerns and distilled what I’ve come to see as my true, or real self, down into bite-sized, acceptable traits. The people-pleaser, you could say, I refrained from speaking about my authentic desires, passions and goals in order to appease, please, and in romance, attract.

And that is ironic, because I have always wanted a deep, meaningful connection and yet my unwillingness to share has often resulted in the opposite.

I’d just circle the drain of the same limerent/anxious dynamic, chasing someone who was clearly not interested in me out of a need to be liked.

That approval was like a drug, and my self-worth depended on it. Same case, different face.

It was only when I became more comfortable with who I was and felt more ready to express myself (the good and the bad) that my connections began to change.

I realised the power of expression in dating during my last relationship. I wasn’t actively dating when I met him, but I’d done a lot of work to unravel my chameleon patterns and acknowledge that if I wanted to build something with someone, I had to begin opening up.

So I went in open-minded and open-hearted. I was more ready to show the parts of me that I hadn’t shown people before: my love of writing, my dreams of being a coach/therapist, my desires to travel, and, importantly, the not-so-glamorous stuff, too: My traumas.

There was one instance where I shared with him my fears around intimacy and my past struggles with OCD. I didn’t want to, but my therapist suggested it might be good for us. My stuck emotions, the ones I was choosing not to share, were coming up in inadvertent ways, like stonewalling, which was blocking our connection.

Even with these reprecussions I wondered about speaking up: What if he judged me? What if he thought I was broken?

To my surprise, I wasn’t rejected. Instead, I was met with compassion. I remember sitting across from him, feeling a sense of cognitive dissonance as reality didn’t align with my expectations, but afterwards, I felt our connection deepen.

My (and his) willingness to show up to the dating process with transparency and curiosity laid the foundation for a relationship that felt more real than any with my previous partners (or people I had wished were my partners).

It’s something I’ll always remember.

To be clear: We don’t commit self-expression to get people to like us. This isn’t a “how to get that person you want to like you” dating tip masquerading as manipulation.

We express ourselves to give other people the chance to get to know us, because we want a prospective partner to see who we are, and us, them. That’s how we test compatibility.

And more importantly, you should want to pursue a path of authentic self-expression because self-expression is self-love in action. In dating, we shouldn’t pursue others as a means to an end — the label of a relationship, the pleasure of being chosen, or the fulfilment of societal expectations. We should date as an extension of ourselves. Isn’t that what dating is all about? Expanding our world, not looking for someone else to inhabit because we dislike our own.

Having not dated for 18 months, I wanted to write this because I’m thinking of dating again, but I’m brushing up against those old beliefs that tell me to hide away. It’s been a tough past year. I haven’t been championing myself or my creative instincts so much, and I’ve been moving through a period of burnout as I work my final few months in corporate before I go travelling.

I don’t necessarily feel good in myself, or my abilities, and that, I know, isn’t a good space for me to date from.

This isn’t to say we need to be perfect in order to date. I don’t think “healed” is a state of mind we can necessarily attain before dating — a lot of healing comes in relationship to the Other.

But there’s something to be said about being ready to express yourself to someone else. Otherwise, we risk handing our worth over to someone else’s opinion, we will fear rejection (because, on some level, we’re rejecting ourselves), and we will not find the people who are right for us when we don’t let them in.

When we think of perfectionists, we think of people holding high standards in their work or relationships, but there’s a more subtle, hidden form of perfectionism we should be aware of: emotional perfectionism.

If perfectionists have high — and often unrealistic — standards, emotional perfectionists have high — and often unrealistic — standards for how they should feel.

For example, an emotional perfectionist may struggle allowing themselves to feel what they see as “bad” or “negative” emotions like fear, sadness or anger.

Should these emotions show up — as they inevitably do — they will judge themselves for having them and for the role they believe they played in their origination.

Inevitably, this self-judgement only makes things worse, creating a hostile internal world that prioritises certain emotions over others.

In a world that requires us to be in tune with the full spectrum of human emotion, it’s ineffective and will hinder your ability to feel happiness, satisfaction, and acknowledge and process your inevitable hardships.

Today, we’re talking about emotional perfectionism.

The Enemy Within

I was first introduced to the concept of emotional perfectionism by my therapist. She had noticed a pattern of harsh self-judgement on my part towards uncomfortable emotions and the situations that brought them on.

When we have a harsh inner critic who berates us for messing up or feeling a certain way, we learn to live in fear of that critic. For example, I sometimes avoid approaching situations that I know will make me uncomfortable because I fear the criticism, rather than the emotion itself.

This critic is often harsh and wild, and it knows where to hit me so it hurts, through self-judgement and self-blame. In the past, it’s led to bad bouts of OCD and depression, which have only reinforced my need to avoid myself.

There’s little acceptance or compassion for the emotions the emotional perfectionist has coded as “negative”. Secondary shame, placed onto our experience of primary emotions like fear and sadness, only leads to more discomfort - and in the case of the emotional perfectionist, more avoidance.

What materialises is a self-fulfilling prophecy laced with self-sabotage.

Hypervigilance and Self-Sabotage

It’s not every day I wake up calm and clear-headed, but today I did. I went to the gym and took a walk around town, but despite my good mood, I struggled to be present with my good feelings. Instead, I felt a sense of unease that something might come and derail my mood.

You see, a person who believes their negative emotions will derail them or threaten their safety has an amygdala (the brain’s threat-response system) that remains on high alert at all times.

Like with all perfectionists, the emotional perfectionist finds safety in their illusion of control. If they are diligent enough and on constant alert, maybe they can predict when a negative emotion might arise. Here, we can plan our avoidance or how we might ‘fix’ the situation before we even feel it.

Of course, this constant churn of thought prevents us from living in the moment, which is exactly what happened to me this morning. I sabotaged my good mood because I was too worried about a threat that wasn’t even there.

Hypervigilance Sabotages Emotional Regulation

Additionally, our chronic “background anxiety”, as I like to call hypervigilance, sabotages our ability to regulate uncomfortable emotions when they arise.

Our mind and body, exhausted by the secretion of stress hormones, will struggle to ward off threats when they do inevitably arise. This is partly why the emotional perfectionist feels helpless in the face of their negative emotions when they arise.

They’re tired.

Hypervigilance Leads to Escapism

Furthermore, the constant churn of anxious thoughts that comes with emotional perfectionism can lead us towards destructive behaviours that offer momentary relief.

For example, I say I hate drinking (because of how bad I feel after), but in the moment, it offers a needed respite from my overthinking mind. It feels good to detach, and I wonder how many of us seek out unhealthy relationships or become workaholics for this same reason.

These are just some of the ways emotional perfectionism and hypervigilance can lead to problems.

To understand emotional perfectionism and therefore manage it, we must look at its origins. Managing doesn’t come from trying to control the world around us — that is why emotional perfectionism causes problems. We must address our frayed relationship with Self.

Where it comes from

None of us comes to this Earth believing there is a right or wrong way to feel. Babies cry when they need to cry, they laugh when they’re humoured, and they seek comfort when they need it.

They are fully expressed in their human experience, and whilst we grow to understand that it isn’t appropriate to express ourselves the way we want in every situation, some of us take this to the extreme.

In my case, I learned early on that there were some emotions I should not feel, and certainly not express. Growing up, I felt my emotionality burdened my mum, who had had her own problems, and so I kept emotions like sadness and fear to myself.

Gay and in denial, I also harboured deep judgment towards emotions like sexual desire, which I still struggle with today.

Any child who tries to manage their pain alone will likely fail or develop maladaptive coping strategies as a result. Without our caregivers' help, we will struggle to rationalise and manage uncomfortable emotions. This can lead to the development of the harsh inner critic whose purpose is to suppress these emotional states.

At worst, our pain can lead to suffering in the form of mental health problems. I believe my own struggles with OCD and depression were a result of prolonged attempts at self-suppression. Eventually, the emotions couldn’t be suppressed, and they ruptured through my psyche. These experiences only reinforced my belief that I should avoid uncomfortable emotions.

The evidence was clear: I couldn’t handle them. They had overwhelmed me in the past, and there was a risk they could again.

You can see here why a child can become hypervigilant and perfectionistic in their attempts to remain emotionally stable. The inner critic uses shame and self-blame to silence difficult emotions, and a fear of oneself can trigger panic that turns small emotional turbulence into a major disruption.

It’s difficult to let an uncomfortable emotion have its moment, be felt and pass when the infrastructure of one’s mind has adapted to react so strongly towards it.

How I Manage Emotional Perfectionism

Over the years, I’ve worked hard to be more compassionate towards myself, especially during times of hardship or when I’ve made a mistake. To make a mistake isn’t a moral failing, as my emotional perfectionism would have me believe. It’s being human.

Self-compassion doesn’t mean I absolve myself of responsibility, either. Self-judgement can be healthy, but you can’t grow with a gun filled with self-criticism to your head

This is all about reorienting my relationship to your inner critic. Whilst we can paint our inner critic as bad for suppressing negative emotions, ultimately, it learns to do so to protect us. Can we acknowledge its role in keeping us safe whilst also recognising that we can choose differently now?

It’s what I try to do.

Sometimes I do fall into spirals of overthinking and rumination, propped up by self-blame and judgment. In these moments, I muster up what energy I can to get up a move.

Most problems aren’t solved in your head; intellectualisation — the idea that we can think our way out of something — is just one of the coping mechanisms we can adopt.

Get up, move around, speak with someone. Get out of your head.

Finally, I believe our perceived weaknesses can become strengths when properly harnessed. My inner critic is strong, often to a fault, but I can channel this voice and turn it outward through my advocacy work, speaking up on topics related to living authentically, mental health, and relationships.

By reorienting my relationship to our inner critic, we can harness its power in healthier, more productive ways.

Thank you for reading!

What are your thoughts?

Are you an emotional perfectionist?

Do you struggle feeling into uncomfortable emotions?

How do you view this work?

Let me know your thoughts and you can subscribe for future updates, below.

Hello, welcome back to the newsletter, and it’s been a hot minute. Since I last posted, new wars have broken out around the world, and I watched that Morgan Freeman documentary about the rise (and fall) of the dinosaurs on Netflix. I guess you could say I was feeling apocalyptic (aren’t all of us deep feelers?). To stay up to date on future posts, consider subscribing.

A new study in the Journal of Psychology highlights a common belief in Americans that the world will end in their lifetime. 1/3 to be precise, which is quite a high margin.

Some believe the end will come from religious causes, a purge by Christ, perhaps, whilst others believe we hold the power in our destiny (and demise).

Which, given the current world climate, makes doomsday feel more like an inevitability than a chance. The doomsday clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 as a measure of how close we are to a civilisation-ending catastrophe, is currently set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.

With a constant influx of doomsday content, all of this can feel pretty heavy and anxiety-inducing.

If you’re feeling this way, firstly, you’re not alone.

Today, we’re going to be talking about managing doomsday anxiety. With the world seemingly circling a drain, it’s needed, and I hope I can give you some comfort, albeit a reality check on the way.

The Illusion of Control

Our brains love to chew on a problem and seek solutions. It’s why humans are so successful (and dangerous) as a species. With the world seemingly becoming more and more out of control, threats to our sense of stability can spur us into anxious-relief seeking behaviours that look like:

• Endless news watching or podcast listening.

• Engaging with online discourses and arguments.

“Doom scrolling”, in other words.

99% of the time, this stuff isn’t helpful and only leads to more anxiety. For every vote for doomsday, you can bet you’ll find another 3 if you go searching.

And you might not have to: with algorithms tailored to show you content that will keep you engaged and headlines chosen to grab your attention, the media is designed to play into your fears and suck you in.

As a rule of thumb, trying to control an emotion through external means is almost always going to fail, because at any point, your fears could be reinforced. Your news feed is only as reassuring as the latest post.

Beyond being aware of our doomsday reassurance-seeking habits, we have to ask ourselves: are we seeking certainty where certainty can’t be found?

When I was in my early 20s, I suffered from a really bad bout of OCD that centred on existentialism. I was obsessed with questions like: what is the meaning of life, why are we here, and importantly, what if all this is for nothing?

These thoughts triggered chronic worry and panic that consumed my everyday life and, at one point, had me questioning if I was a real human being or part of a simulation (!).

It was pretty horrible, but I mention it because I only got past and healed this worry when I faced it head-on and made peace with the fact that I might never know the answer.

Maybe all this is for nothing.

Maybe there is no life after death.

And unless I was going to have a religious or spiritual awakening that proved me otherwise, I needed to be OK with not knowing the answers to the big questions. I needed to relinquish my need for control over the uncontrollable.

The same applies here. We can’t predict if the world will end in some nuclear apocalypse or if a Chinese invasion of Taiwan will trigger a world war. We can’t say if our children will grow up in a world much worse than ours, or if our down payment on that house will all be for nothing if we’re called up for conscription. Think pieces on the internet and user 96 on X may think so, but world politics is much more complex.

Not knowing doesn’t need to stop us from living or making long-term decisions, no matter how convincing the media is, or isn’t. There’s a lyric by Florence + the Machine from their song Free which I think about all the time when contemplating this:

“Is this how it is?
Is this how it’s always been?
To exist in the face of suffering and death
And somehow still keep singing”.

You can experience uncertainty and be happy. You can still authentically choose what you want, despite external tensions.

When caught in the throes and worry of “What If”, ask yourself, am I trying to find peace in an answer I can’t know?

A Needed Bit of Nuance: Pressure and Advocacy.

Of course, the difference between an existential “why are we here?” worry and a doomsday one is that we can play our part in the direction of our society, without assuming we can solve the world’s problems.

As an existential, hypersensitive feeler, I do feel a great amount of pressure from the outside world right now. Some of this pressure is self-inflicted, my own perception of what is or isn’t imminent, but other pressures feel true.

The world is more dangerous than it was 15 years ago.

There is an increase in discrimination towards — frankly, anyone who isn’t a non-white heterosexual male.

And as a person looking to exercise his right to self-expression (whilst those in his community are under attack), I feel a duty to speak up where I can and step into an advocacy role.

This doesn’t mean we need to join the Red Cross and become a humanitarian (though you may want to), but it can mean writing about our struggles, advocating for minority groups and mental health, voting, or just lending our voice to a growing collective.

Small acts of kindness, or “acts of service”, are known to bring benefits not just to those around us, but also to us, especially when these acts are in line with our value system, sense of purpose, and beliefs.

The moral of this story is, do what you can, if you can. Practice relinquishing control over answers that you won’t find, fill your days with soul-nourishing practices and treat yourself well, and treat others well, too.

God knows, the world needs a little less anxiety and more care.

Thank you for reading.

Lately, and by that I mean this past year, I’ve made an effort to become more aware of my relationship to sex, which is why you’ll see more sex-themed content coming your way.

For years, I viewed sex as the pinnacle of approval. If someone wanted to have sex with me, it was a badge of honour for my self-esteem. At least, for a moment, anyway.

It was a superficial way to obtain self-worth, but when it came to relationships, it was all I’d known.

Sex wasn’t the natural progression of a deepening emotional connection. It was about measuring and proving my worth: to someone else, to the community's standards, and, importantly, to myself.

In the gay community, there’s this overarching idea that to have a lot of sex is to be sexually liberated, but I wasn’t close.

I was wounded, insecure, and seeking validation.

At 29, I’m re-examining and transforming my relationship to sex and validation.

The Bottomless Well of Superficial Validation

Approaching sex to define myself was akin to filling a bottomless well. Good for a moment with diminishing returns over time.

From start to finish, from pursuit to execution, my intentions were misguided.

At the start, I’d chase out of pure anxiety. I’d measure myself up against the person I found attractive, pedestalling them, ready to test myself. Could they see me on the level I’d subscribed to them? To be chosen was to feel good; to not be chosen was painfully validating.

If they reciprocated and we had sex, my aim wasn’t so much to feel pleasure as it was to ensure I was pleasing them. Do I look hot enough? Do I sound hot enough? Do they look like they’re enjoying themselves? Performance mattered more to me than mutual satisfaction, and I was too busy observing myself to feel embodied.

Afterwards was always the real test, though. Would they come back, or was I not good enough to stay in contact with them? This bothered me for a time, and would lead me to chase, but eventually I stopped caring. I became the emotionless boy who could hide his feelings and act like a fling was just fun.

The cool boy and sex were a means to an end: a place to feel validated, but ultimately, not very satisfied.

Unconscious Wounds

None of this is to say that hookup culture can’t be something fun and harmless, where both (or more) people can express themselves and mutually experience pleasure.

But don’t be fooled by the promise of sexual liberation. If you suffer from attachment wounds and have people-pleasing tendencies as I do, it’s important to recognise that your current relationship to sex may be reinforcing your trauma.

These short-term connections served an unconscious part of me: the part that said, “make them like you but don’t let them too close”. My fear of unworthiness drove me towards them, and my fear of intimacy stopped anything more “real” from developing.

Whilst consciously I said I wanted intimacy, this setup was a perfect match for my unconscious fears.

When your behaviours aren’t aligning with what you say you want, generally, there’s something deeper at play. A wound of sorts that is unconsciously driving your behaviours.

Sex In Our Culture and Sex as Self-Harm

All of this is made worse by dating in the digital age. The one that prioritises aesthetic over substance on dating apps like Tinder or in the gay world, Grindr.

It’s fascinating to me to watch myself and my internal world whilst I’m on these apps. I can feel them playing into my worthiness wounds: each “like” or “match” is a sign that I am enough; each message left unread or unreciprocated is evidence to the contrary.

It’s an addictive cycle: one where the risk of emotional discomfort drives us to search for security.

There have been times I’ve been so driven in my anxious pursuit that by the time I’m about to have sex and the chase is over, I don’t even want it.

But by this point, our clothes are off, and I just kinda have to go along with it. It doesn’t feel good. I feel like I’m pushing myself to do something I don’t want to do, but I led this person on, so I pretend to enjoy myself.

This is where sex becomes a form of self-harm.

Sex doesn’t have to have an emotional connection for it to be pleasurable, but if your sexual encounters are consistently devoid of emotion, or if your priority is performing for approval, then you might struggle in a relationship when you’re having sex with someone who cares about you and wants you to feel good.

This can lead to confusion, anxiety and sabotage, which is why it’s an important topic for us to speak about.

For me, the process of transforming my relationship to sex has meant setting boundaries with dating apps that trigger my insecurities and drive chase behaviours (Grindr in particular). Sometimes you have to step completely outside the cycle to see it for what it is and make a change.

If I catch myself scrolling, I ask myself, “What am I searching for here?” Often I’m looking for some type of comfort, be it for anxiety, sadness or boredom. I then ask myself, “Do I want to be doing this right now?” and if the answer is no, I redirect my focus elsewhere and find something more productive and nourishing to do, like writing.

I know a big part of this work will come from being in a romantic relationship and moving through these patterns in real time, with someone I don’t need to perform for.

I don’t know all the answers, but maybe my words have resonated with you today. If you’d like to stay up to date as I continue to unravel these sexual threads, be sure to subscribe and let me know your thoughts below!

Thank you for reading.

If there’s one thing I urge you to do this year it’s to explore ways to be more yourself. This may mean taking big leaps, audacious choices, and leaving the people/places behind that are supporting an inauthentic, or “false” version of you.

With plans to do this in my own life this year, I went to the library in search of a self-help book that could help me take risks, and found “The Art of Exploration” by Levison Wood.

Wood is an Army veteran and seasoned traveler; his book aims to unravel the secrets to facing uncertainty and living a unboundaried life.

I was optimistic upon reading. However, I soon learned one of his secrets was something I never had.

Levison’s Risk-Taking Origins

Early on in the book Levison recounts a pivotal moment in his childhood where he realised the importance of taking risks. Hiking with his father, he was taken up to a short-ledge overseeing a lake and urged to jump in. He was nervous, as any young boy would be, but hand-in-hand his father urged him on.

Of course, he was fine, and with his father in the water beside him, he realised his father spoke true.

This experience was important in two ways:

• It showed him that with risk comes reward.

• It (and other experiences) acted a blueprint for Wood in adulthood. His fathers support and trust facilitated self-trust and self-support.

Our Childhoods As Blueprints

Our earliest childhood memories are important in teaching us how to navigate a world full of uncertainty and change.

Whilst Levison learned early that he could trust his fathers word, and in turn, himself, and that challenging fears could bring satisfaction and joy, many of us don’t have access to such memories.

Instead we have:

• Memories where we turned to our parents for emotional support and were rejected, ignored or dismissed.

• Memories of being told that we should fit a mould and pursue “realistic” careers over personal interests.

• Memories of being told that risk taking is bad, and shouldn’t be done if we want a) financial stability, b) to fit in, or c) to be happy.

• Memories of watching our parents suffer to a point where we shouldn’t bother them with our own troubles, save us adding to their stress. We learn that our thoughts, feelings, and desires are undeserving of attention, and should be set aside.

In my case, I watched my mum struggle day to day with just getting by. Her mental health challenges, her young family, and financial strife meant risk taking was modelled in the form of, for example, not paying bills to pay for necessities like food and fuel, or Christmas presents.

In environments where risk taking in the name of authentic express is avoided, our nervous system adapts and wires to keep us small, from fear of overwhelm. If we felt unsupported by our caregivers, or society at large, how where do we learn the tools to support ourselves with?

This is all to say, not all of us are like Levison — but it doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t follow our authentic paths.

Arrested Development & Reparenting For Personal Growth

Arrested development is a psychological term used to describe how trauma and adverse childhood experiences can stunt emotional or physical growth.

For those of us who received messages that we couldn’t or shouldn’t express ourselves, or that risks should be avoided, we’ll struggle to venture out of the tightly wound comfort zone we’ve learned is safe.

Some people spend their lives in a state of arrest, wound tight by their fears (to no fault, it’s difficult to break free).

But venture, we must. For us to grow, we must explore uncharted waters.

Reparenting is one such tool we can utilize to help pursue risk which is, essentially, personal growth.

Reparenting requires us to address psychic wounds that we have carried with us since childhood. We are extensions of our child-selves and the pain we experienced remain as frag. The boy who had a painting of a butterfly in pre-school because he wanted it, but was shamed by the class for not getting the masculine lion? He’s still inside me.

Had Levison’s father rejected his son’s fear up on the ledge rather than held his son’s hand and reassured him with compassion, the memory may have been different. Levison may recount his fear as something to feel shamed about, driving avoidance in future.

We can all be Levison’s father to ourselves. We’re no longer bound by the environment we grew up, even if our nervous system says so. When fear arises in the face of challenge, picture your inner child.

Say to them that you see them, and validate their emotions. Hold their hand as you make a leap. Risk doesn’t always come with reward, but the aim here is to be in partnership with yourself, rather than at odds.

Thank you for reading today’s article. To say up to date for future posts you can subscribe to my newsletter, Above the Middle: A home for those seeking self-expression in life.

Trauma that has infiltrated our sense of self can leave us feeling wholly inadequate and unworthy. To cope, we can become chronic self-abandoners whose brain learns to scan the world for signs that we’re accepted, appreciated, or even just adequate enough to be part of society.

In psychology, this constant “alertness” is called hypervigilance, driven by a chronic lack of trust and fear. Some of us spent our childhoods living through mild to chronic hypervigilance, overanalysing our thoughts, behaviours and actions and molding ourselves into who we think we should be - usually, to perfectionistic and unrealistic standards.

By adulthood, our people-pleasing tendencies, influenced by our hypervigilant brain, are like a pair of worn-in shoes; they’re familiar to us, albeit the soles are wearing thin, they no longer support our ankles, and we’re one rogue stone on the path of life away from a complete breakdown.

So long as we continue to not trust our ability to be enough as we are, hypervigilance will creep into every facet of our lives, driving self-abandonment and poor boundaries in work, relationships, and our hobbies/side hustles.

I wanted to write this as recently I’ve let my low-self-worth-driven hypervigilance run wild. I’ve become extremely analytical of everything I do, and every action has become a vote against my worthiness.

Whilst things like work, or relationships generally trigger my hypervigilance, recently I’ve struggled to enjoy the simple pleasures that give me release, like writing. Rather than lose myself in flow and cathartically untether some of my feelings, I’ve been overanalysing my words — questioning, “Is this good enough?”, “What will people think?”, and worryingly,

“Have I lost my ability to write?”

This vigilance blocks my ability to enter flow (you can’t lose yourself in something if you’re critically analysing everything out of fear) and I’m forced to give up in frustration. I then feel like a failure when it’s the hypervigilance that is causing the problems.

This is what happens when adaptive strategies that once kept us safe in childhood carry into adulthood: they become maladaptive, disrupting our ability to feel present and express ourselves.

Not to mention, hypervigilance is exhausting. A mind that is always on doesn’t rest. Time becomes an enemy, and life, which is inherently unpredictable, becomes a constant trigger. A hypervigilant mind is an obsessive and overly controlling one.

Countering Hypervigilance: You Are Safe, As You Are

I share my struggles with writing as my solution is one I believe can translate to other areas where hypervigilance causes problems, like relationships or work.

Once, my writing was just an outlet. I was anonymous; I just signed off my writing with “Above the Middle” - I didn’t even share my name.

But as I’ve integrated more of myself into my writings and as I’ve grown an audience, it’s become a trigger for my fears around self-expression. I feel exposed, and to young Joe who was afraid to be himself, this makes me want to run and hide.

This all said, today, I tried something different. I told myself I was safe in this space. I told myself that it didn’t matter what I wrote or who saw it; it was valuable. My worth is not dependent on what I do or what people think.

I am worthy as I am, in all areas of my life, and I don’t need to perform for this value. To perform is to say you don’t trust yourself; that you can’t feel good as you are and the more you perform, the more you reinforce a lack mindset.

Reminding myself that my self-expression is safe, lifted a weight from my shoulders. I felt I could breathe and my brain, no longer on alert for threat, sank into flow, the self-criticism absent.

Make it a daily practice to remind yourself of your wholeness.

Meditate on it — like I did, for 10 minutes before a social event, or before writing, or before going to work.

Remind yourself: I am OK regardless of how I perform. My worth is not subject to approval.

If self-trust is eroded by self-abandonment and people-pleasing, self-trust is built by doing things that allow you to authentically express and be more yourself. Your brain will let down its guard. It’ll learn to feel safe again.

Mental Health Management and Compassion

I used to see trauma and hypervigilance as something that could be “cured”, but now I see it as something to be managed.

It’s up to me to engage in the self-care I need to manage my suspicious mind. If I don’t check myself, I am prone to self-abandonment - unconsciously placing my worth in the things around me out of fear.

When I judge myself harshly for being like this - which I have been! - I only get more stressed, which leads to overwhelm. I give in to people-pleasing and I conform, or I run away.

The answer is compassion.

Compassion for the boy who learned that always being alert meant he could adapt and stay safe.

To end this post here are some action points:

• Bring awareness to where life is triggering your hypervigilance: there you will find your triggers. People, places, or expectations can all point to a wound.

• Practice mindfulness meditation, this will help you relax your mind when fear arises.

• Remind yourself of your wholeness. You can trust yourself. You are enough. It can be easy to forget this when fear is present.

• Have compassion for your struggles. Compassion heals and resistance leads to persistence.

I can’t remember a time when I felt content for an extended period. I remember itching to move out of my family home when I was 18, driven crazy by green fields, the same 4 walls and the inside of my skull.

Moving to a new city and starting university entertained me, but the discontent returned when I started my first full-time job.

“Is this it?” I remember thinking to myself when the boredom hit on my first day. I later dozed off while reading through quality assurance docs—not a great look for a new starter, but clearly my nervous system and mind had 0 interest in being there.

That was 7 years ago.

I’ve since changed jobs, fallen in love and then messily out of it (twice). I had a pretty bad OCD breakdown that put me on antidepressants, and yet, throughout the trials and tribulations of a 20-something-year-old, the feeling that I’m not living the life I want has been a constant— even if it’s now buried beneath corporate emails.

When Awareness Fails To Be Enough

“The biggest mistake you can make is confusing awareness for action”, I heard on a guest on the Mark Groves podcast years ago.

I’ve listened to countless episodes, but these words have stuck with me long after I've forgotten who the guest was or which episode I listened to.

I know what I want, and I know what I don’t want. But I’ve known this for years now. I’ve made deadlines to leave my job, and I’ve pushed them back.

Awareness of what is right or wrong is important, but awareness alone won’t change you. It seems that, as humans, we’re destined to wait for the worst-case scenario before taking action (see the growing global warming crisis, the waning of action, and rising geopolitical tensions, for reference).

For us living ordinary lives doing ordinary things, a crisis may show up as a sudden illness that makes us question our lifestyle, a broken marriage, or a lost job. These are good instigators of change; moments we finally say, “that’s enough”, — but how many people spend their entire lives in a liminal space of ok-but-barely-hanging-on because things never reached level 10 awful?

Many, I’d say.

Maybe I’m being pessimistic, or maybe I’m just frustrated with my own lack of action.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth for you:

Most of the time, life won’t force you to change, and I don’t think you should wait till your life is burning down to be forced into it, either.

Change requires planning, for sure, but beware the transformation trap.

Don’t let society or others contort you into a box that was never meant for you to live in. Don’t fall for the thoughts that say, “Maybe every day should be a struggle” or “Maybe I’m just not cut out to do what it is I really want to do”.

These are the thoughts we have from within the liminal space of change, and they will keep us small, unexpressed and dissatisfied, if we let them.

You Are Blessed With Time, For Now.

This year I’ve committed myself to big change, and by that I mean big, structural changes.

The good news is we don’t have to throw ourselves into the deep end and risk overwhelm by pursuing change this way (this is what a crisis will do to you).

You can start slowly.

Here’s what I’ve been doing:

With plans to uproot my life, leave my job, and focus on my creativity (and rest!), I’ve checked off the following:

• My tenancy ran out at Christmas, so I moved into a temporary house with no contract and flexibility, should I decide to stay a month longer (god forbid) or leave a month earlier.

• I know I need jabs, so I’ve had two rabies shots and have the rest scheduled in.

• I needed a new license because I lost mine years ago and couldn’t be bothered to get a replacement, so it’s on its way.

• I packed up a bunch of my non-essentials for my sister to get, and I’ve been looking at backpacks.

• I went back to therapy and unpacked some family trauma that was unconsciously holding me back.

• Next will be visas.

My actions are intentional.

I’m not doing too much at once, but I’m making meaningful moves. This builds my confidence, staggers costs, and reduces stress.

Recently, I’ve been coming back to some of the fundamental works that shaped my personal growth journey, and the one that feels appropriate here is one from James Clear’s Atomic Habits - “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become”.

What can you do today to get you one step closer to the life you want?

Where in your life can dissatisfaction be addressed without waiting for said problem to consume you?

I believe we all have the power to orient our lives around our truest ideals, wants and desires, and I hope my words give you support as you navigate the turbulent waters of change.

Thank you for reading.

For much of my teens, sex was something I engaged in in secret. Gay and in the closet, a romantic partnership could never have been my introduction to sex. The prospect felt like an existential threat (when I wasn’t in complete denial).

Sex was something that I’d fantasise about and later chastise myself for. It was something I’d be tempted into with others who were in the closet, representing fleeting moments where our mutual desires overrode our fears — until the deed was done and the shame returned tenfold.

The idea of sex as something intimacy-led was something I heard about in music, books, and movies, but it wasn’t something I personally experienced.

How could I associate sex with intimacy when my sexual experiences were anything but intimate?

How could I sustain a lasting relationship when my sexual desires were turned on by something I couldn’t get or something that brought risk?

Growing up gay conditioned in me a way of viewing sex, and reacting to intimacy that has made sustaining a committed relationship as an adult challenging — even if love is the thing I deeply desire.

It’s important we’re aware of the ways our historic relationship to sex can impact our relationships in adulthood. This can be true for anyone, but I think it is especially true for those of us who grew up in the queer community, where sexual explorations were often done in secret, the topic was tabboo and intimacy was potentially absent.

Sexual Conditioning: How You Learn To Relate To Sex, Sticks

Our childhood conditions our thoughts, feelings, and emotions to environmental cues. For example, if you were rejected by your caregivers for expressing negative emotions, you’ll likely struggle to express them meaningfully as an adult. Expressive thoughts are coded as dangerous, triggering fear that drives avoidance as a safety mechanism.

The same principle goes for sex (called sexual or erotic conditioning): if you grew up with your sexual desires revolving around something that was fleeting or unavailable, you might struggle feeling turned on by intimacy later on in life. Sexually, you’ll gravitate towards what is familiar - even if you’re wanting different now.

I ran into this barrier during my last relationship. 6 months in, I remember my ex saying to friends that the more he got to know me, the more he liked me. I, on the other hand, was freaking out.

My sexual desire is falling off the side of a cliff months into our relationship.

I wondered what had gone wrong:

It wasn’t that I wasn’t sexually attracted to him. It’s because I knew he liked me.

When Intimacy Triggers Anxiety

Healthy relationships won’t have you questioning your worth, and the sex won’t necessarily be presented with the same risk, uncertainty, or secrecy as it was before. Someone will care for you, and that might conflict with the very way you’ve been conditioned to relate to sex.

If you fear intimacy, this fear can derail your sex drive, too, with studies supporting the correlation between high anxiety and stress and lower sexual drive.

Here, it’s important not to take your body’s reaction to intimacy to mean you no longer love your partner or like them. I think, as emotionally sensitive individuals, we can place a lot of weight on our emotions, and immediately think they are telling truths:

Lower sex drive as intimacy develops? I must not be into them the way I was in the beginning.

Starting to doubt your feelings? A cause for concern.

Whilst a lower sex drive and doubt around feelings can certainly signal incompatibilities, it’s worth questioning the environment. Are you experiencing a fear of intimacy? Are you engaging with sex in an environment you’re not used to?

For me, I can recognise both as true. There was something about my partner really seeing me, especially when I knew he liked me, that jolted my nervous system. Suddenly, I felt very uncomfortable having sex, no longer driven by this overwhelmingly erotic desire to get someone to like me (something I recently discovered is called “spectatoring” in sexual psychology, and is linked to fears of intimacy).

Here, it’s important not to judge ourselves for the reality that we might have difficulty engaging with sex when intimacy is present. Maybe we had to engage with sex the way we did: quickly, and with as little connection as possible, as a means to minimise our psychological distress whilst meeting our needs. In this sense, it was a safety mechanism.

Whilst I know hookup culture has contributed to my problems around sexual intimacy (looking at you, Grindr), I’m careful not to shame others - or myself - who can engage with sex, non-intimately. A part of me wishes I could do both, but with the struggles I’ve had sustaining relationships, I don’t think this way of relating to sex is helping me at this time in my life.

As you can see, I don’t have the answers to this.

So I’ll leave this here, with a thought-provoking article I can return to in the future as I continue to learn about myself and my relationship to sex.

Thank you for reading, as always. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, especially as it pertains to the queer experience. Do you feel similarly? Let me know, and you can subscribe to future updates.

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This one was a difficult one to write.

Recently, I’ve been reading into ambiguous loss, a concept put forth by Dr Pauline Boss, an American psychologist and family therapist, in the 1970s to describe loss without closure or understanding, leaving the sufferer in a perpetual state of unhealed grief.

Ambiguous loss can take a couple of shapes, as described by Dr Boss:

• Physical absence with psychological presence

• Physical presence with psychological absence

I was introduced to this concept while thinking about my childhood. My mum struggled both financially and mentally, and unconsciously, I took on a lot of her pain. When I think of her life, her struggles, and what she had to sacrifice to ensure we lived well, I get upset.

She’s still alive, mind you, but in a strange way I mourn her. I mourn the life she could have had had she not struggled.

When people die, there is a sense of finality. With care and time, grief can be processed and wane, but if we have learned to grieve a concept or an identity — as I do with my mum — and that grief is left untouched — because we grow up, and move out, or push it out of our consciousness because it is painful — it leaves a psychic wound where grief persists.

Only, like any childhood trauma, it can show up inadvertently when we least expect it, impacting relationships and how we maneuver life’s obstacles.

In today’s article, we’ll discuss the phenomenon of ambiguous grief, it’s painful origins, and how it can impact our lives, despite our loved ones still being around.

Ambiguous Grief Paints The Present As The Past

Last week, my mum sent me a picture of her in a jumper I’d left when I last visited. It was sweet, but my first response was to cry. What was meant to a simple message was actually a big trigger for me.

Sometimes I feel like my ability to love has been infiltrated by grief. In one moment, I felt love towards her, but also great sadness. I looked at the picture of her and recognised how she was getting older. I felt sorry for her.

My thoughts told me that she didn’t live the life she wanted or deserved, and the feeling was visceral. I felt like I did when I was younger, watching her cry over the next obstacle life had thrown her way.

Joe’s note: This is an example of how implicit memory and trauma intersect. Our brain, through repetition, can store emotional memories and their associations deep in our unconscious. If we learned to associate relationships with pain or grief, these memories can be triggered into our awareness by our environment, unexpectedly. With trauma, these autonomous responses can bring with them disruptive feelings, invasive thoughts and impulsive drives that disrupt daily life.

A moment of realisation:

Last time I was home, I expressed to my mum some of this grief.

I said how I thought she didn’t live the life she wanted. With a sense of contentment, however, she said she had had a full life and was happy with it. This response took me back for a second and made me second-guess why I feel the way I do.

I realised that my childhood had instilled in me an idea of her that may no longer be true, or was once true but isn’t anymore — when the environment and messaging were different.

Which is important to note. The beliefs and ideas I have of my mum are frozen in trauma.

A part of me is frozen, too.

My unhealed grief, unable to integrate into the adult I am now, pervasively comes up and disrupts my life. It bleeds into my relationship with her, my romantic relationships and my pursuit of goals.

How Ambiguous Grief Disrupts Life

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t avoid speaking to my mum or going to visit her out of fear of feeling some of my unhealed grief. I often come back with emotional hangovers — if I don’t cry, I feel numb, like a black cloud has gathered over my psyche.

As children, without adequate support for what we’re going through, we can learn to avoid pain as a coping strategy. I’ve realised that by avoiding my feelings, I want to avoid her. I worry sometimes that when she dies, I’ll regret the times I held myself back from connecting with her.

Ambiguous grief doesn’t just impact the relationship I have with my mum, but romantic partnerships, too. When love starts to blossom, I get scared. I worry I’ll hurt my significant other or do something wrong.

For years, I didn’t know why I felt this way, until I realised I was reacting to the people I loved the same way I do to my mum: by being hyperattuned to their emotions, how things may go wrong, and to how they could get hurt.

Here, trauma has infiltrated my ability to feel love and hold love; unhealed grief is a big component of that.

Moreover, with plans to travel, I recently cried to my therapist about how I didn’t want to go because I felt like I was abandoning my mum. A part of me, the inner child, wants to stay and protect her and support her financially, putting off my own dreams to be with her.

She wouldn’t want this, and I know it’s irrational to think I should self-abandon, but my grief tells me otherwise. It says to close the loop and relieve this discomfort, I need to do everything I can to make sure she’s ok; to give her the life my grief says she deserves, even if it means costing my autonomy and dreams.

But that’s the problem.

My mum is human.

She isn’t the wounded, half-lived person my grief paints her as.

She is strong — an example of resilience and persistence in the face of challenge.

An idol to me, I harm myself and her when I continue to view her in this light. I risk leading a life in her shadow, rather than using her sacrifice as a foundation to do more (which is what she’d like).

So long as this grief remains unfelt, my growth is stunted (called arrested development in psychology).

I need to move beyond it.

I need to heal this part of me.

Processing Ambiguous Grief

A lightbulb went off when I realised what I’d been dealing with. Ambiguous grief felt true to me, and I could see how it was holding me back not just in my relationship to my mum, but my romantic relationships and the pursuit of goals.

Healing grief is not linear, but one thing I’ve been focusing on, as I read in an article on ambiguous grief by the Cleveland Clinic, is to move my thinking from a binary “either or” to a “both and” structure.

I don’t shame myself or my mum for the difficulties we had growing up. I try not to make absolute assumptions like “she didn’t have the life she wanted, either. She had a hard time, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t thankful or isn’t content now.

This awareness is critical. As mentioned before, children lack perspective and without support, egoic-centered beliefs like “I caused this, “I can fix this”, or “I should self-abandon and caretake” can take root.

When these beliefs are triggered, I can now identify their source. I can comfort the inner child who felt helpless watching his mum.

My grief is strong. I’m not sure I’ll get rid of it entirely, but one positive is that it made me acutely aware of other people’s struggles.

Empathetically, I am in tune — sometimes fault —, but this is also a gift.

Thank for your reading this article and I hope I have been able to help you, if you’ve seen yourself in my words. I’m sure I’ll write more about this, as I continue to move through it.

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