Grey’s Reflections Week 197
Disattach Series
Siena came in today.
She looked like someone who had cried herself to sleep and then tried to pretend she hadn’t. Hair pulled back too tight. A sweater too warm for the weather. Her voice? Floaty. Just above her body.
Half the session was spent bringing her back.
There are days when therapy feels like tracking smoke—trying to follow a person’s pulse through all the places they’ve left themselves. Today was that kind of day.
She mentioned seeing Nico the day before. “Bumped into him,” she said, like she tripped on a crack in the pavement. But her nervous system told me otherwise. The way her leg bounced. The way her shoulders kept shifting. The way her eyes flicked away every time we got close to the center of the feeling.
She wasn’t fully here. But something in her wanted to be.
I asked her what she remembered about the moment. She said it felt like standing inside a void. Like all the noise went out of the world. Like her body moved but her brain stayed behind.
I knew that feeling. I lived there once, too.
Classic trauma time warp. Present-day body. Old wiring.
And I get it. Because bumping into someone you once loved—someone you maybe still do in ways you haven’t admitted—doesn’t just take you back. It pulls you under.
She kept saying, “It wasn’t even a big deal. We just said hi.”
But her body said otherwise. The flushed cheeks. The scattered pacing of her words. Her left hand rubbing the side of her neck the entire time. When I asked her what she felt afterward, she looked at me and said:
“Like something cracked open, and I don’t know if I want it to close again.”
I wrote that one down.
Sometimes clients bring you the thesis before they even know the chapters.
We spent the rest of the session grounding. Palms on thighs. Feet on floor. Noticing sounds in the room. I didn’t ask for more of the story. Sometimes the nervous system speaks loud enough without needing translation.
She drifted in and out, but she stayed.
That matters.
And when the session ended, she paused before walking out. She looked at the chair where she’d sat, then back at me.
“Thank you,” she said. Voice low. Almost like she didn’t trust it yet.
I said, “You came back.”
She nodded. Small, but solid.
I watched her leave, and I stayed there a few minutes longer.
Not because I didn’t have notes to write. But because I felt something heavy settle inside me. Something I hadn’t thought about in years.
Mika.
And suddenly, I was 29 again.
It’s been years since I said his name out loud.
Mika.
We were together for three years. I was 40—professionally steady, emotionally starving. And somehow, I convinced myself that he was it.
He didn’t want marriage. I said I didn’t mind.
He wasn’t sure about kids. I said me neither.
He needed space. I gave him oceans.
He needed me. I ran.
I revolved my life around his orbit—cancelled dinners, skipped holidays, rearranged weekends like I was still twenty-five and love was a fire worth burning yourself for.
We never fought dramatically. That was the thing.
He just… pulled away quietly, and I learned how to reach without seeming needy. I’d text less, pretend I was busy, mirror his tone. I became an expert at not being too much. At making my needs disappear before they were even formed.
We had good days. Tender ones. But I was always watching him. Reading the room. Sensing the shift before he even made it. It was codependence, sure. But it was also something deeper—a kind of identity leak. The way you start becoming a version of yourself that fits the relationship more than it fits you.
I thought I was evolving. I called it compromise. Maturity. The ability to adapt.
But what I was really doing was abandoning myself in slow motion.
I see that now.
I see that in Siena too. The way her voice tightens when she talks about what Nico might be thinking. The way she shrinks her needs so she can stay close to someone else’s nervous system. The way she thinks closeness means losing herself. That’s not love. That’s a trauma echo.
And still—I get it. God, I do.
It took me years to come back to myself. And even longer to admit that the reason I lost my way wasn’t because I loved someone too much—it was because I didn’t know how to love myself without first earning it.
Mika left. Said he couldn’t give me what I wanted. But didn’t I bend myself into every shape he asked for?
And when it ended, I sat in my flat with a bottle of wine and went through every text message. Every photo. Every plan we’d half-made.
I didn’t cry loudly. Not at first. I dissociated. Worked harder. Cleaned the house obsessively. Bought new sheets. Told my friends I was fine.
But I wasn’t fine.
I was shattered and still smiling.
I didn’t go back to therapy right away. I thought I could logic my way through it. Therapists can be the worst clients sometimes. I remember sitting in supervision, nodding along to someone else’s insight, while part of me was crumbling.
And one night—months later—I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and whispered,
“What do you want?”
Not who. Not when.
Just that: What do you want?
It took weeks to answer. And even longer to say it out loud. To scream without guilt.
I wanted someone who chose me without negotiation.
I wanted to be a mother.
I wanted to be met fully, not halfway.
I wanted to stop shape-shifting to be lovable.
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever admitted. Not to anyone else—but to the woman in the mirror who’d spent years being accommodating instead of authentic.
More than 100 boxes of Kleenex hard.
And I would never have done it differently.
Because somewhere along the way, I found my way back.
And nearly a decade later, I’m married. I have children. I get to be a “good enough” therapist, a mother, and—most days—still myself.
Not perfectly. Not all the time. But enough.
I tell my clients that healing isn’t linear. And it’s not.
But sometimes we mistake looping for failure, when really, it’s deepening. Returning to a wound with a wiser heart.
That’s what I hope for Siena.
That she keeps walking—not to Nico, not away from him—but toward herself.
That she doesn’t shrink again.
That she learns, as I had to, that being loved and being chosen are not the same thing.
And being chosen by someone else will never mean anything until we’ve learned how to choose ourselves.
But that’s a story for another day.
—Grey, Week 197
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This is what it looks like to search for safety—with other people.
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