Inside-Out

We often try to get from others what we aren’t offering ourselves. When you feel a lack of love, attention, or safety, it’s easy to start “probing” others for reassurance—subtly testing, demanding, or chasing proof that you matter. Over time, this can feel like pull or pressure to the other person, even if you’re not consciously intending that.

Many of our attachment strategies—protesting, clinging, over-explaining on one end, or shutting down, withdrawing, going numb on the other—are biologically wired in the midbrain as survival responses. They’re not character flaws; they’re your nervous system trying to protect you the best way it knows how. Still, when two people are both in these strategies, they become entangled in cycles of pursuing and distancing, which blocks real intimacy.

In those moments of entanglement, it’s essential to lean on emotional and nervous system regulation skills so you can come back into enough steadiness to choose how you connect. That might mean pausing to breathe, feeling your feet, orienting to the room, naming what you feel, or taking a brief break and then returning. Regulation isn’t about becoming “calm” all the time; it’s about having enough internal support to communicate in ways that build co‑regulation instead of escalating each other.

The more you learn to care for and take responsibility for your own inner world—tending to your emotions, soothing your anxiety, validating your experience—the less you need another person to fix your feelings for you. From that place, you can reach out not from emptiness but from groundedness: “Here’s what’s happening inside me, and here’s what I’d love from you.” That’s where you can share more vulnerably, feel safer to be honest, and actually get to know this other person as a separate, complex human, rather than as a solution to your unmet needs.