The Writing Of Rebecca Bones

I cannot teach accountability to someone who has built their identity around avoiding it. Growth requires discomfort and you would rather sacrifice relationships than face yourself.
You built this identity around avoidance because accountability once felt unsafe. Your responsibility was met with punishment, shame, or withdrawal. You learned to survive by deflecting, passing the blame, or controlling the narrative. Avoidance in many ways became your armor. As an adult the same defenses showed up as denial, minimization, or justification. You rewrite events to stay the victim or downplay the reality that you were a villain. You try to intellectualize your feelings instead of just feeling them. You distance yourself from the impact you have had on others because facing it would unravel the idea of who you believe you actually are.
And when I’ve tried to hold you accountable these defense mechanisms activate. Because I’m empathetic, my nervous system feels that rupture immediately. I sense your discomfort and I rush to repair it. Overexplaining, softening or taking complete responsibility just to restore our connection. But every time I do this for you, I chip away at my OWN self-trust. I am teaching my body that the safety of this relationship depends on me abandoning myself. Over the past year my nervous system has become wired for imbalance, hyper attuned to your feelings, but disconnected from my own center.
Empathy without boundaries is self destruction. I can not save you by abandoning myself. I can’t love you into self-awareness. I can’t explain you into accountability. I can’t rescue you from consequences you refuse to face.
All that I can do is decide that my energy will no longer be a landing place for your avoidance. I can not invest in a relationship that is characterized by inconsistencies,  doubt, and uncertainty.
You cleverly frame staying friends with people you have been romantic with as emotional maturity or intelligence. But underneath we both know that it’s emotional management. It is a way to avoid taking responsibility for the full emotional consequences of having discarded you and accepting the natural consequence : loosing them forever. Your avoidance didn’t make our problems dissappear, it only made them mutate. It created weird boundaries and discomfort. I was never allowed to have feelings without you shutting down or shutting me out.
When I put you under pressure – to communicate, to grow, to lead, or to commit, – you didn’t rise. You retreated. You didn’t step up, you stepped out. And more often than not, you ran back to a relationship with your ex who expects less of you now.  Who challenges nothing anymore. You say that I’m being “too much.” No, I’m just to real, to honest, and to intune with what I want and need. You label my standards as pressure because you weren’t built to handle anyone that knows their own worth. I’m not mad that you weren’t ready. I’m mad because you dragged me back into something that I was trying to heal from. I’m mad because you tricked me into believing you were being real this time. I’m mad because I trusted you when I knew better. But most of all…..I’m mad because I wanted you to be different so badly but you weren’t.
I cant trade emotional presence for clever conversation anymore. I deserve to be felt and not just understood. I can’t talk to a wall instead of a heart anymore. Avoidance is what killed our relationship,  not the perceived “conflict.” You think you are keeping the peace by avoiding it but that didn’t protect our relationship,  it abandoned it. You might feel safe in this moment because that is how you have learned to remain comfortable. You will go silent, change the subject, or just not address the things that need to be addressed. Avoidance kills intimacy. So not only did you abandon the relationship and me, but you continue to abandon yourself and what you actually deserve.  I’ve learned to understand that this is a collective wound. You operate from your own shadows, your unresolved wounds, and your unprocessed trauma. If you keep avoiding what needs to be seen in your own inner world it will eventually catch up to you one way or another. What you refuse to face will always find another way out. Stop avoiding yourself. The real work for you was to stay. To sit in the fire when everything in you wanted to run. To breathe, to feel,  to meet yourself so that you could finally meet me.
Love doesn’t die from too much conflict. Love dies when a person stops showing up during that conflict. You had no room for growth or outside perspective. You had no room to love me because that would require you to feel something and risk experiencing pain. What you actually did though, was create pain and trauma for some one else.
If this hit you in the gut then good.  I lived it. I hope you figure out how to break your own cycle and mend those wounds.