The Empowered Therapist

TL;DR: Many people learn to remain in relationships, jobs, family systems, or communities long after they have become painful, restrictive, or misaligned. Discernment begins when we stop over-focusing on the other person or circumstance and return to ourselves: our body, values, needs, desires, and capacity for honesty, repair, and growth.

Some of us learned to call endurance love.

We learned to stay, to tolerate, to explain, to wait, to give another chance, to understand where the other person was coming from, to consider their pain, to accommodate their limitations, and to keep going even when something inside of us was telling us that something was off. We learned that being loyal meant self-sacrificing. We learned that leaving might mean we were selfish, reactive, unkind, dramatic, or unwilling to try hard enough. So we tried harder,  adapted more, and continued to stay.

And sure, there can be beauty in commitment. There can be wisdom in not making life-altering decisions from one difficult moment. There can be deep maturity in allowing relationships, jobs, families, and communities to move through hard seasons without immediately deciding they are no longer worth our care. The concern comes when endurance becomes self-abandonment. The concern comes when we are so focused on maintaining connection, belonging, stability, or approval that we stop noticing what it is costing us to remain.

This is where discernment becomes essential.

Many people stay in circumstances that keep them stuck because they are over-focused on the other person, the organization, the family system, or the story they have built around why staying makes sense. They may know every reason the other person behaves the way they do. They may know all the ways the job is stressful but secure. They may know why the family member struggles, why the friend is not available, why the partner can’t show up differently, or why the community has limitations. All of that information may be true, and it may still be incomplete.

The missing information we need is not only found in understanding the other person or circumstance. It is also found in how our bodies, values, and sense of self respond while we are there.

Alignment is not found through analyzing another person’s intentions. Someone may not mean to hurt us, and the dynamic may still be painful. A workplace may have good people in it, and the role may still be unsustainable. A friendship may have history, affection, and meaningful memories, and still no longer have enough reciprocity to support the people in it now. A family system may be doing the best it knows how to do, and still, we’ll be expected to become a smaller version of ourselves in order to belong.

Discernment requires us to consider our own experience when we are trying to understand whether something still fits.

How do I feel about myself when I am connected to this person? Do I feel more grounded, more honest, more expansive, more able to be who I am? Or do I feel anxious, diminished, overly responsible, resentful, guarded, or chronically unsure of myself? Am I able to tell the truth here? Can I give feedback? Can this person hear me without immediately becoming defensive, dismissive, or punishing? When rupture happens, is repair possible? When I name a need, is there room for it to matter?

These questions help us move out of proving and into noticing. They bring our attention back to what the relationship feels like, what it requires of us, and whether there is enough room for repair. They help us notice whether we are participating in something that has enough honesty, engagement, and attunement to keep growing. These curiosities also help us notice when we’re investing enormous energy into something that continues to keep us braced, silenced, confused, or stuck.

Our bodies often know before our minds are ready to speak our truth outloud.

Our nervous systems give us information, and that information becomes most useful when we approach it with curiosity instead of urgency. Anxiety, activation, tension, or discomfort may be asking us to slow down and listen more closely before deciding what comes next. 

Discomfort does not always mean danger. Activation does not always mean misalignment. If we are constantly tense before seeing someone, exhausted after every interaction, unable to sleep before work, flooded when a certain name appears on our phone, or finding ourselves rehearsing conversations that never lead to change, those cues deserve attention. The body may be showing us where something has become too costly to continue ignoring.

Values can also inform these situations.

We may say we value reciprocity, but remain in relationships where we do nearly all of the emotional labor. We may say we value honesty, but stay connected to people with whom we cannot safely tell the truth. We may say we value creativity, rest, family, health, or freedom, but continue organizing our lives around roles that require us to betray those values in order to function. When our choices repeatedly move us away from what matters most to us, we may begin to feel disoriented, resentful, or disconnected from ourselves.

Desire gives us information too.

Many of us were taught to distrust desire because desire can be inconvenient. Desire may disrupt the plan. Desire may ask us to admit that something we worked hard for no longer fits. Desire may ask us to grieve an identity, a relationship, a role, or a future we imagined. But our desires can reveal where life is still moving in us. They can show us where we want more honesty, more aliveness, more mutuality, more rest, more dignity, or more space to become who we are.

And y’all, this is where alignment asks us to come home to ourselves.

We can gather support. We can talk to trusted people. We can listen to wise perspectives. We can take time, slow down, and consider the impact of our choices. But at some point, we have to be willing to tell the truth about our own experience. We have to stop treating our inner knowing like it is unreliable simply because someone else might disagree with it. We have to become honest about what staying is requiring from us.

The next right step may be more nuanced than immediately leaving. Sometimes the aligned next step is a conversation. Sometimes it is a boundary. Sometimes it is working towards repair. Sometimes it is renegotiating the role we have been playing. Sometimes it is giving the other person clearer information about what is no longer working. Sometimes it is noticing that there is still enough responsiveness, care, accountability, and willingness present to try something new.

And sometimes our next move is to stop extending ourselves toward something that has repeatedly shown us it can’t meet us.

This kind of clarity can be painful, and it may  bring grief, guilt, fear, sadness, relief, or all of those at once. We may grieve what we hoped the relationship, job, family, friendship, or community could become. We may feel guilty for no longer being able to keep carrying what we once carried. We may feel afraid of what life looks like on the other side of a decision. We may feel relief before we feel certainty. None of that means we are making the wrong choice. It means we are human, and change touches many parts of us.

The answers we are looking for often exist within us, but they may be buried under fear, obligation, conditioning, trauma responses, attachment adaptations, and the pressure to be understood by everyone else. Returning to ourselves is the practice of listening beneath all of that. It is asking what we know when we are not trying to convince, defend, justify, or perform. It is noticing what remains true when we stop organizing our lives around keeping something intact at any cost.

Dear one, if you have been enduring misalignment for a long time, I hope you approach yourself with gentleness. You do not have to make a dramatic decision today, you can begin by telling the truth to yourself. You can begin by noticing where you feel stuck, where you feel small, where you feel alive, and where your body seems to exhale. You can ask what your values are trying to show you. You can ask what your desire is trying to say. You can ask whether repair is possible, whether honesty has room, and whether staying continues to require you to abandon too much of yourself.

Often, the first step isn’t leaving.

Rather,  the first step is deciding that you will listen to yourself. 

Thank you for letting me see you,