Under the Surface · Rule 8 of 9 · Strong
“If they see me struggle, I lose them.”
If you've typed am I emotionally unavailable, hyper-independence, or emotional numbing, this is the page.
Do you recognize these
Three or more and it's worth taking seriously. One is a Tuesday.
What it's for
Being left the moment you stop being useful. Strong was the version of you that got kept. Somewhere you worked out that the struggling version was more than people wanted, so you retired her and never told anyone.
It worked. That's the problem. A strategy that pays just enough never gets questioned.
What it costs
The people closest to you are in a relationship with a version. They'd carry it if you let them, and they've never been given the chance — so the loneliness you feel in a full house is accurate, not irrational.
Before you decide
Strong gets mistaken for Burden constantly. They look identical from the outside and they come from opposite places, and working the wrong one is how two years disappear.
Strong or Burden
Someone helped and nobody would ever know. Would you accept? Strong says yes — the problem was being seen. Burden still says no, because the debt exists either way.
Strong or Output
Is it that they'd think less of you, or that you'd have produced less? Produced less points to Output.
And it might be none of the nine. If none of this is you, that's an answer too. An instrument that always has an answer is a horoscope.
What changes
A real healing process is never an addition. It's a subtraction. You weren't born with this. It got added, and the work is taking it off.
The part nobody warns you about: when you stop doing the thing that kept you safe, there's a hole where it used to be. Plenty of people put the old thing back, because the hole feels worse than the pattern did. So you don't leave a hole — that's the logotherapy half, and it's the half that makes it hold.
Someone was angry at you when you were nine and you decided it meant something about you. The anger was real. The meaning was yours. A meaning you assigned is a meaning you can take back.
If you're tired of working it out on your own, I'll do it with you in one sitting. Ninety minutes, the whole thing written up three days later, $500.
If you don't come away knowing what you keep doing and what it's for, I keep working with you until you do.
Book a 90-minute call — $500 →
Twenty-six things that are either true about you or they aren't. Check the true ones and nine narrow to two in about ninety seconds.
The other eight