“That’s just how I am.” It’s one of the phrases I hear most often in session: I’m independent, I don’t trust people, I’m not a relationship person. Very often it’s true that the person works that way. What isn’t always true is that it’s their personality.
Diego, 34
Diego is 34 and runs a logistics company he built from scratch on his own. He works twelve hours a day, solves problems before his team even sees them, and almost never asks for help. He comes to therapy for insomnia. He says it’s the stress of the business.
By the third session, another topic comes up. Diego has had several relationships that start out great: the first months are intense, he feels comfortable, he enjoys it. But when the relationship gets serious, when she suggests he meet her parents or they start talking about moving in together, something changes. He buries himself in work, replies less, starts finding flaws in her. A few weeks later, he ends the relationship.
“I don’t know why, but that’s how I am. I’m not into long relationships, I’m very independent.” He says it calmly, like someone describing their favorite color.
What happens right before he pulls away
Instead of debating whether Diego is or isn’t “a relationship person,” I ask him something else: what do you feel right before you start pulling away? At first he doesn’t know what to say. With practice, he starts to notice it: a knot in his chest, shorter breaths, an overwhelming urge to be alone. And when he finally pulls away, relief. That no longer sounds like personality, it sounds like an alarm.
So the next question is: when was the first time you felt that? It takes him several sessions to get there. His dad was in and out of the house. He’d leave for months, come back with gifts and promises, and Diego would get his hopes up every time. And every time, his dad would leave again.
At some point, without ever deciding to, Diego learned something: if you don’t expect anything from anyone, no one can let you down.
A strategy that worked at the time
As I explain in Does Trauma Live Only in Your Mind?, Janina Fisher proposes that implicit memory is often experienced not as a memory, but as the present. When someone gets close to Diego, his body isn’t reacting to the woman in front of him. It’s reacting to what getting close meant when he was nine years old.
And because he doesn’t recognize it as a memory, he absorbs it as identity: “I’m independent.” That’s the tricky part. That independence is real and it has served him enormously, it’s how he built his company on his own. The same strategy that protects him at work is the one that leaves him alone in his relationships.
That’s why it’s important to validate before questioning. Pulling away was the best option a nine-year-old had to keep from breaking further. If Diego feels judged in session, shame will make him hide things, and that doesn’t help at all. Validating also doesn’t mean telling him it’s fine to end every relationship. It means understanding what pulling away did for him before looking for another way.
What changes when you see it as a memory
When Diego stops saying “that’s how I am” and starts saying “this gets activated when someone gets close,” something shifts. He’s no longer fighting against who he is. He’s learning to recognize an old alarm.
In therapy, this is worked through in stages. First, we go deeper into his history and what he feels. Then we map which situations activate him, what happens in his body, and what he does next. After that, he practices in session how to regulate himself when the knot in his chest shows up, without having to run. And finally, he tests it in real life, with a real partner, where the alarm is going to go off again.
It’s not an immediate change. The alarm doesn’t turn off just because Diego understands it. But there’s a huge difference between feeling the knot and ending the relationship the next day, and feeling the knot and being able to say “I’m getting scared.”
What you call your way of being isn’t always who you are. Sometimes it’s what you had to learn to survive, and that no one helped you let go of.
What part of “that’s just how I am” did you learn before you were able to choose it?
References
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.