“We are so used to disguising ourselves in front of others that we end up disguising ourselves.” ~François de La Rochefoucauld
“So your partner’s needs always determine the course of things in your relationship?”
My therapist looked at me questioningly after I had just shared with her that our dinner plans had suddenly changed the night before because my partner was tired from a long day at work and I was only doing what he needed.
He initiated a night out, I got dressed and prepared for a restaurant meal, and when I arrived at his place, he was exhausted and decided he wanted to stay in and defrost something. The moment I saidI don’t mind – I’m happy to do whatever you want.” and I meant it. Honestly, I was totally serious.
Except that later, when I told the story while sitting in the therapy chair and on the other side of my therapist’s question, I found myself defending her and defending my position. Being a therapist myself, I know that when I defend anything, something is wrong.
As I sat to myself, I realized that the truth was that the last thing I wanted that night was a thawed meal.
I’ve been pale for most of my life, although I haven’t always called it that. I just thought I was light, flexible, adaptable, and deeply attuned to the people around me.
I have always believed that my flexibility is a virtue and my sensitivity to others is a gift, and in many ways this is true. They enable great therapist skills.
What I hadn’t seen was that beneath these traits, so deeply woven into my personality as to be almost indistinguishable from who I thought I was, were patterns of self-surrender so subtle and refined over the decades that they no longer felt like patterns at all. They just felt like I did.
Part of this is why it can be so difficult to spot a moose. It doesn’t feel like trauma. It feels like being thoughtful, adaptable, emotionally intelligent, and deeply attuned to the people around you.
They praise you for it. You will be the easy person, the lover, the person who keeps everything harmonious and connected.
It can feel really good to be needed in this way, and when you get external validation as well, it becomes a reinforcement loop that loves you externally. But eventually the body and your relationships begin to take the toll of everything the personality has learned not to feel.
Larger and more visible expressions of the pattern become easier to grasp over time. You build awareness, feel them appear in your body before they take over, and learn to react differently.
But the subtle ones… become part of your identity very insidiously. It’s built into the way you view yourself and the way you live life. In the super simple, totally convincing way, I’d say:I don’t mind, you choose” and I believed it and praised myself for it. After all, I was flexible.
Which really makes sense, because the rant is ultimately about one thing, the terror of separation.
Especially in intimate relationships, where the relationship is the anchor of your security, separation can be felt as a real terror.
The fear that if I’m too much, not enough, or uncomfortable being myself… then you’ll leave and I’ll be alone. So I lean in, take her temperature, and adjust accordingly, tune in and give her what she needs, because as long as I do that, the connection will last.
From the outside, the nod looks like consent. But the body always says no.
As a deer, my sense of security lives completely outside my own body, at the temperature of yours. As a result, I have become extremely adept at reading this temperature. I know before you have even said a word whether you are well or not, present or absent, open or closed, and I shape myself accordingly. We are master shapeshifters.
Who do I have to be to keep this safe?
This question hums beneath the surface of so many interactions, so subtly and for so long that I don’t hear it and I simply become who I am meant to be.
And in order to draw this attention to you, I must abandon myself. I have to overwrite my own body, feelings, instincts, and needs, and I do it so automatically and completely that after a long enough time it no longer manifests itself as a choice. It’s just me.
Until, of course, a life event comes along and rattles the cage.
To be clear, snoring is not a pattern I want to demonize. This is an incredibly smart security strategy; the nervous system finds its way to safety through connection and adaptation when fighting, leaving, or stopping seems impossible.
The problem is not the response itself, but when it becomes so chronic and so embedded that we lose touch with who we really are underneath.
There is always a price for this interruption. Often by disconnecting from the body. We cannot unconsciously fade away and connect to our physiology at the same time.
There’s also a kind of resentment that builds in the background, and there’s no clear place to pin it because it was never allowed in the first place.
Maybe with a relationship that feels close but somehow isn’t because you’re fulfilling in it rather than living in it. Maybe it’s the constant feeling that people don’t really know you, don’t understand you, or don’t appreciate you. Feeling invisible, unheard and worthless is commonplace. Maybe the price is in your health. After decades of suppressing who you are, your body begins to scream with symptoms you can no longer ignore.
Beneath all accommodation there is a part of you that is always waiting.
Maybe if I comply, you’ll finally see me.
Maybe if I give you what you need, you’ll be what I need you to be.
Maybe if I’m really, really good, you’ll be good to me.
The hope that someone will finally see you, finally reciprocate, finally show you the way you keep showing up to them, that’s what keeps the pattern alive and breathing.
Hope for a Deer makes you wait and wait for something to finally change. This is what keeps the loop open.
And the moment a relationship falters or breaks, when silence or distance emerges, or uncertainty settles between two people in the midst of conflict, we can suddenly find ourselves adrift. So many times I’ve had that feeling of swimming in open water, no ground beneath me, not knowing what I’m feeling, where I am, or what’s coming next, reaching for something, anything, to hold me in place.
In those moments, the mind becomes very, very busy. When that thing that anchored you—the warmth of the connection, the good feeling in your eyes—suddenly disappears, the mind grabs, grasps, and reaches for anything and everything.
Sometimes the repair works. Sometimes for a fantasy about a different life, a different future, a different partner. Sometimes for faultfinding, for a very convincing justification as to why I am better off without them. And if you look closely at it all, you begin to see the same impulse moving through them all—the nervous system reaching for any lever that might restore a sense of control or safety.
It’s a beautiful, exhausting illusion. A cognitive loop that keeps you active and stressed and at a distance from yourself.
What we really need to feel in these moments is groundlessness itself. This is the gateway.
Uncertain ground is the passage to our own inner ground. To feel the loss of connection, the emptiness and loneliness that comes with its absence, as something that can be survived, something that does not need to be immediately fixed, escaped or explained. And to discover that in this groundlessness and this loneliness you are not only still here, but you are actually home. That something inside you that holds you strong, even when the external anchor is gone.
Only from here does anything real become possible. Including the thing that scares most dims more than the disconnect itself.
Speaking.
When we try to speak, the terror can be truly visceral. Something in the body contracts and stops, the voice becomes crackling or disappears completely, the mouth becomes dry and the body may tremble. This is because the nervous system has learned over a very long time that conflict, rejection and criticism are all deeply unsafe. And he won’t let you forget that, no matter how many times you tell yourself that was then and things are different now.
Your body will continue to protect you in the only way it knows how.
Breaking this pattern is ultimately about learning to feel again.
During the years of performing and shaping ourselves to the needs of others, a whole emotional world awaited.
In many of the people I work with, we encounter wells of fear that were never allowed to be felt, reservoirs of anger that had nowhere to go and were clogged, deep sorrow for all that was lost or was never possible, and a tenderness for yourself that perhaps no one has ever developed for themselves.
Coming back to yourself means growing the ability to feel it all – slowly and at a pace that feels safe, in the body and in the presence of someone safe enough to hold you.
We hurt in relationships and we heal in relationships.
If it’s cold, please don’t be hard on yourself. This pattern is woven into your identity, your relationships, and your movement in the world. The threat your nervous system feels when you consider speaking up, disappointing someone, or risking a loss is very, very real.
It’s a deeply embodied survival response shaped by everything—culture, gender, religion, family systems—that calls for patience and compassion, not self-criticism. Whatever the flavor of your romp came from, it made a ton of sense given the world you were navigating. It kept him safe.
So be kind to yourself. Be honest, tenderly kind.
The way out is to not hold on tighter. You have to learn to be near open water. Cultivating slowly and with great patience an inner soil that is so rooted and so truly yours that external uncertainty loses its power to uproot.
It took years, a deeply embodied practice, a lot of time in my own company, therapeutic relationships where I was kept safe enough to try something different, and an intimate relationship where we both named our patterns and agreed to hold space for each other to move through them. Where I can practice saying what I once would have swallowed whole and be met with understanding rather than reaction.
What made all this possible was security. In myself, in the therapy room and in my intimate relationship.
And what I know to be true is that when you build enough inner ground, when you are truly unafraid of being alone, unafraid of conflict, rift, or disappointing someone, then something changes profoundly. Life begins to rearrange itself around the truth about you. What has to go, goes. What was truly meant for you remains. And finally you land in yourself.
There will almost certainly be losses. People who needed your smallness and quietness will struggle with your change, but this disintegration is a pattern break. And what becomes possible on the other side—relationships, life, and the version of yourself that is really, truly, fully you—is worth every uncomfortable moment we get there.
About Maraja Rodostianosz
Maraya is an integrative somatic therapist offering face-to-face sessions in Melbourne and online worldwide. Combining modern trauma and neuroscience with psychotherapeutic tools and ancient wisdom traditions, she uses a holistic approach that integrates the mind, body, spirit and nervous system. Working at the intersection of trauma, authenticity, embodied spirituality, and well-being, she guides clients to release what is holding them back from living as their most authentic, complete, and embodied selves. You can find it at http://marayarae.com. Facebook / Substack / Instagram
