Reflections
Short writings on patterns, the unconscious mind, emotional cycles, and the quieter work of understanding yourself.
These are not articles or advice. They are observations, from practice, from experience, and from years of working at the level of what actually drives human behaviour.
If something resonates, it is probably relevant to you.
Attachment Styles
Anxious Attachment
If you have this pattern, your childhood home was likely an emotional casino. The slot machine paid out, but you never knew when or why. One day your mother was deeply involved in your life, asking you about your feelings, cuddling you, making you feel like the centre of the universe. The next day, she was overwhelmed by her own depression, her own marital strife, or her own unhealed trauma, and she was a million miles away. When you cried, sometimes you got a hug, and sometimes you got told to shut up because she "can't handle this right now.
Avoidant Attachment
Also known as Dismissive-Avoidant Attachment Style, this is the person the anxious individual almost always falls in love with.
If the anxious person's childhood home was an emotional casino, the avoidant person's home was a desert. It was a place where vulnerability was treated as a design flaw. If you fell and scraped your knee, you were told to wipe your face and stop crying. If you came home sad because someone bullied you at school, you were told to figure it out yourself or given a lecture on how to be tougher.
The Anxious-Avoidant Trap
There is a cruel joke embedded in the laws of human attraction: anxious people and avoidant people are drawn to each other like magnets.
Secure people are boring to the Anxious one. When they meet a secure person, their nervous system doesn't spark, there is no drama, no high-stakes chase, no mystery. The anxious person thinks, They’re nice, but there's just no chemistry.
What they call "chemistry" is usually just their trauma recognising someone else's trauma. It’s the feeling of a key slipping into a very old lock.
This is the Anxious-Avoidant Trap, and it is the most common operating system for miserable relationships on Earth, it is a machine that runs on its own friction.
Excerpt from The Ghosts In Your Living Room - How childhood attachment styles affect your adult relationships.
"Sometimes it takes someone sophisticated enough to find the real you to finally destroy you. When it collapses, it does not crumble, it detonates, and every hidden door inside you blows open all at once, every sealed room, every locked space going all the way back to the beginning, back to the first wound, back to the first time you learned to shut yourself away. The defences of a lifetime, gone in an instant and nowhere left to hide, nothing left to protect. Just you, standing in the rubble, the entire landscape of your life visible for the first time, every stark hill and hollow of it, nothing obscured, nothing softened. And that is The moment. The moment you either curl up inside the rubble and let it become your tomb, or you stand up, face the landscape, and begin walking."
What daily like looks like for the partner of a Puer Aeternus
From the outside, the Puer's household can look functional and even successful, for a surprisingly long time. He is often charming, often funny and often the most interesting person in the room at a dinner party. His partner is calm, competent and warm, the children are loved, the house is managed, the surface looks smooth and undisturbed.
But beneath the surface, the weight distribution is not what it appears and things are not undisturbed, not for his partner.
She wakes up knowing what needs to be done every day while he wakes up with ideas about what could be possible. She makes the appointments, tracks the finances, manages the correspondence, the children and schools, buys the birthday presents, remembers which child has what activity on which day, monitors the household supplies, maintains the relationships with the extended family, and performs the thousand invisible administrative acts that keep a family functioning. He helps when asked, sometimes enthusiastically, often partially, but more often not at all, because something more interesting has come up, or he loses interest, or he simply can’t be bothered with ‘mundane’ tasks.
The requests for help are themselves a weight, she has to track not only the things that need doing, but also the appropriate moment to ask, the way to ask that will not trigger defensiveness and the management of his reaction if he feels criticised (and he very often feels criticised). She becomes the project manager of the household and also the HR department, responsible for managing the emotional conditions under which the other adult in the house will function.
This is what is meant by emotional labour. It is not a metaphor, it is a second job, performed invisibly, without acknowledgment, inside the same hours as the first job. This role of surrogate parent (co-dependent relationship) to her causes her to be slowly consumed by the exhausting demands of maintaining adult responsibilities both of them.