So much of what goes wrong in our relationships isn’t actually all the wrong things we’re doing. It’s being in the wrong state while we’re doing it.
You could be doing all the right things, hypothetically. The right words. The calm tone. The ask you practiced in the car before you walked in. And if you’re dysregulated underneath it, if you’re scared your partner is going to leave, or you believe somewhere deep down that your needs are never actually going to get met, that’s what comes through anyway. It’s louder than the script.
Faking it until you make it isn’t dishonest
There’s a stretch of this process where you’re doing the behavior before you feel it. Before you have any real evidence that abundance is actually true. That’s normal, and it’s a big part of how anything updates. I have a ton of nervous system experiences that say there is lack, that this could never happen, that I could never have that kind of relationship. Those are programs. Changing them means acting differently while the old program is still running.
So you’ll be regulating through a lot of ooh, I’m really scared to do that. And ooh, I don’t believe it’s enough. And ooh, that didn’t feel great yet. That’s okay. You don’t have to have arrived before you arrive.
But faking it until you make it isn’t pretending. It’s the conscious choice-making you, the part with some faith, some hope, some belief in a better version of the future. That’s what gets you access to vulnerability and curiosity even when it scares you. I’m scared to do this, and this feels vulnerable, and I’m choosing it anyway, out of love. That state gets a certain kind of response. And the people who respond to it, the ones who stick around in it, tend to be people who are also trying to build hope and faith and love.
What the lizard gets
Here’s the other side of it. No matter what I do, if I do it in a dysregulated state, if the lizard in my brain is the one running things, I’m going to get what the lizard gets. Not the results of a self that’s making conscious choices and acting out of its values regardless of how it feels in the moment.
The lizard reacts out of scarcity. Out of fear. Out of self-protection. And a lot of what the lizard did in your childhood was adaptive. It made sense. It was genuinely helpful for that stretch of your life. It’s just not serving you now.
This is why we work on nervous system regulation first, before anything else. Relationship work is an inside job.
There is no one right answer
When I was in a really bad place with my own mental health, my therapist told me there were probably twenty options available to me that were the right thing to do. That made me so mad. What I had been trying to explain was that I felt stuck. Trapped. Like a tripod — three legs holding everything up in a balance that was perfect and completely unstable at the same time. Some of what I was doing was dysfunctional. Some of it compromised my values, and I didn’t want to be doing it. But it was stabilizing things just enough that I didn’t collapse and lose everything.
I understand the principle now. When you’re regulated, when you’re choosing authentically, from the part of you that’s connected to something steadier than your fear, there are endless right things you could do. Not one correct move you have to locate or you’ve blown it. A million right choices.
Because it isn’t really about the choice. It’s about the state you’re making it from. And it’s when we’re dysregulated, acting out of fear and out of scarcity, that our options get so narrow.
Related reading
- Are You Making a Request or Giving Him a Test?
- “If I Share My Needs, She Cries and I End Up Apologizing”
If you’ve been hunting for the exact right words
You can stop looking for the script. If your body is braced for the worst while you’re saying it, the script isn’t going to save the conversation. And that bracing usually started long before this relationship did. Trauma therapy is where we work on the state rather than the sentences: what your nervous system learned to expect, why it still expects it, and what it takes to update it.
You don’t have to arrive before you start.
Greater House Counseling, Arlington, TX and telehealth across Texas. Schedule an appointment.
