“We are very accustomed to impersonating others and eventually we become impersonators.” ~ François de La Rochefoucauld
“So in your relationship, does your partner’s needs always determine how things work?”
My therapist looked at me, wondering after I had just shared with him that our dinner plan had suddenly changed last night because my partner was tired from work all day and I just did what he needed to do.
He started out one night, I got dressed and prepared for dinner at the restaurant, and when I got to his place he was tired and decided he wanted to stay and do something instead. At that time I said,I do not care – enjoy doing what you want. “ And I mean. I really mean it.
Except later, as I recounted the story of sitting in a medical chair and on the other side of my therapist’s question, I observed myself defending him and defending my position. As a self-healer, I know that when I defend something, something is wrong.
As I sat with myself, I realized that the last thing I really wanted that night was defrosted food.
I have been a breeder all my life, even though I do not always have the word for it. I just think that I am easy-going, flexible, adaptable and very understanding of the people around me.
I always thought that my flexibility was a virtue and that my sensitivity to others was a gift and that in many ways that was true. They develop great skills as healers.
What I have not yet seen is that under those qualities that are so deeply ingrained in my personality that they are almost indistinguishable from those whom I believe to be, are the pattern of complex and refined self-abandonment for decades that they no longer feel like a role model. They just feel like me.
That is why fawning can be so difficult to recognize. It does not feel like an injury. It feels like thinking, adjusting, feeling smart and adapting deeply to the people around you.
You are appreciated for it. You become easygoing, you love people who keep everything harmonious and communicative.
It can really feel good to need it this way, and when you get external validation for it as well, it will be a reinforcing loop that keeps you loved from the outside. But eventually your body and relationships start to pay for everything that the personality has learned not to feel.
The larger the visual expression and the more visible the pattern, the easier it is to capture over time. Awareness creators feel that they manifest in your body before they hold and learn to respond differently.
But sensitive people… they have secretly become part of your identity. Incorporate into the way you view yourself and the way you live your life. The easiest and most reliable way I want to say “I do not care you chooseAnd I believe in it and praise myself for it. After all, I am flexible.
It really makes sense because parenting is ultimately about one thing, the fear of breaking up.
In intimate relationships, especially where connection is the anchor of your security, cracks can feel like real terror.
The fear is that if I am too much, not enough, or myself uncomfortable… you will leave and I will be alone. So I lean in to read your temperature and adjust myself accordingly and give you what you need, because as long as I do that, the connection stays.
From the outside, the peacock seems to be in agreement. But the body always says no.
As a feeder of my sense of security, live completely outside of yourself in your temperature. As a result, I have excellent skills in reading that temperature. I know that before you say a word, whether you are okay or not, present or absent, open or closed, I set myself accordingly. We are great transformers.
Who do I have to be to be safe?
That question lurks beneath the surface of so many interactions, so long ago, that I stopped listening and just became who I was.
And to take care of all that, I have to leave myself. I have to deny my body, my personal feelings, my instincts and my needs, and I do it automatically and completely, after a long time it no longer registers as an option. This is just me.
Until a life event arrives and hits the cage.
To be clear, raising is not the model I want to be a monster. It is an incredibly smart security strategy. It is the nervous system that seeks the path to safety by connecting and staying when fighting, leaving or closing does not feel possible.
The problem is not self-response, but when it becomes chronic and too embedded, we lose touch with the real person under it.
The cost of this disconnect always comes. Often with disconnection with the body. We can not snore unconsciously and are also connected to our physiology at the same time.
It also comes with a feeling of resentment that builds up in the background with no clear place to snap it because you were not allowed to have it in the first place.
Maybe with an intimate relationship, but somehow not because you are acting inside rather than living in it. Maybe it comes from a persistent feeling that people really do not know you, understand you, or value you. Feelings of invisibility, inaudibility, and worthlessness are common. Maybe the cost is in your health. After decades of oppression, who you are, the body begins to scream with symptoms that you can not ignore.
Underneath all the accommodation there is a part of you that is always waiting.
Maybe if I did enough, you would eventually see me.
Maybe if I give you what you need you will be who I want you to be.
Maybe if I was good you would be good to me.
The hope that someone will eventually see you, eventually retaliate, finally show the way you continue to show them is something that keeps the model alive and breathing.
Hope for breeders keeps you waiting and waiting for the last thing to change. It is what keeps the loop open.
And when a relationship shifts or breaks, when silence or distance shows up or uncertainty settles between two people in the middle of a conflict, we can immediately find ourselves drifting. I felt it many times and the feeling of swimming in the open water without the ground beneath me did not know how I was feeling, where I was or what happened next, reaching for something to put me in place.
At that time, my mind was very busy. If the thing that makes me anchor – the warmth of the relationship, the feeling of well-being in your eyes – suddenly disappears, then the mind will grip and reach for everything.
Sometimes it goes to repair. Sometimes to the imagination of different lives, different futures, different partners. Sometimes to find fault, build a convincing case why I would be better off without them. And when you look closely, you begin to see the same thrust that passes through each, i.e. the nervous system reaches the steering wheel, which can restore a sense of control or safety.
It’s a beautiful, exhausting illusion. A cycle of awareness that keeps you active and stressed and away from you.
What we really need to feel in that moment is baseless. This is the gateway.
Unstable land is the gateway to our inner land. To feel the loss of a relationship, the emptiness and loneliness that comes in its absence, is something that can survive something that does not need to be fixed immediately or escaped or explained away. And to know that in this baselessness and in this loneliness you are not only here but you are really at home. That is something in your body that is strong even when the outer anchor is gone.
Only from here can real things become possible. Including things that scare most breeders more than secession.
Speaking.
When we try to speak up, fear can be real. Something in the body contracts and shuts down, the sound is suppressed or disappears completely, the mouth is dry and the body may tremble. All because the nervous system has studied for a long time that conflict, rejection and criticism are not very safe. And it will not let you forget, no matter how many times you tell yourself that then and things are different now.
The body continues to protect you in the only way it ever knew how.
Breaking this pattern is ultimately about learning to feel again.
Under the performance and all the years of preparing yourself to the needs of others, there is a whole world of emotions waiting.
In many of the people I work with, we encounter wells of fear that are not allowed to feel, loaded with rage that has nowhere to go, and a deep sorrow for what is lost or impossible, and a tenderness for yourself that no one may ever follow your example.
Getting back to yourself means increasing 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 it.
We hurt in relationships and we heal in relationships.
If you are a breeder, do not be hard on yourself. This pattern is woven into the identity of your contacts and the way you move across the world. Threatening your nervous system when you consider speaking up to upset or risk losing someone is very real.
It is a response to survival that embodies all aspects of culture, sex, religion, family system – and it requires patience and compassion, not self-criticism. Whatever the origin of the special taste of your peacock, it makes enormous meaning given to the world you are exploring. It keeps you safe.
So be kind to yourself. Be kind and honest.
The exit must not be tighter. It is to learn to stay with open water. To cultivate slowly and with immense patience, the inner foundation is truly rooted and truly yours, that external uncertainty loses the power to deal with you.
It took years of in-depth practice, a lot of time in my company, a medical relationship that I was kept safe enough to try something else and a close relationship that we both named our model and agreed to keep a place for each other to go through them. Where I can practice telling stories that I once swallowed and met with awareness rather than reaction.
All that can be done is safety. Inside myself, in the treatment room and inside my close relationships.
And what I do know is that when you build enough internally, when you are not really afraid of being alone, not afraid of conflict or rift or frustration, something changes dramatically. Life begins to reorganize around your reality. Things to go. What that really means for residents. And finally you enter yourself.
There is almost certainly a loss. People who need your modesty and quietness will struggle with your change, but that breakup is a pattern breaker. And what is possible on the other side – the relationship of life and the version of yourself that is, of course, you fully – is worth every moment that is not easy to get there.
About Maraya Rodostianos
Maraya is an integrated somatic therapist offering live sessions in Melbourne and online worldwide. Combining modern nerves on injuries and the nervous system with psychotherapy and traditional wisdom, she uses a holistic approach that combines mind, body, spirit and nervous system. She works at the intersection of injury, accuracy, spirituality and well-being, guiding clients to unleash what prevents them from living as real people as a whole and as their representatives. You can find her at http://marayarae.com. Facebook / Substrate / Instagram
