Finding Love after Alienation Part I
How alienators interfere with romantic relationships and how you can restore love back into your life - STRT July 2025
“If I love myself, I love you.
If I love you, I love myself.”
~ Jalaluddin Rumi
Roses are Red
My first relationship was when I was 16 with a girl named Celine (anonymized for her privacy).
Celine was a girl from China who went to school in Singapore with me. She was quiet and funny, a talented artist, loved dancing, and her favorite song (at that moment) was P.S. I Love You by the Beatles.
She lived close to where I lived, so in the mornings, we would walk to school together and talk. After school, she would attend dance class, and I would go to band, then we would walk home together.
As a teenage boy, I had no idea what I was doing.
I remember trying to play it cool, acting with the kind of bravado teenage boys often mistake for confidence. But Celine wasn’t impressed by that. What drew me in was something so simple… she was kind to me. Not just friendly like my classmates were, but genuinely sweet and gentle. She wanted to know more about me and took an interest in me.
I didn’t know how much I needed that softness until I met her.
As an alienated child, I was raised under strict rules where disobedience was punished with severity. I would pretend to be cool at school to mask the feelings of inadequacy and people pleasing that were instilled in me.
When your internal thoughts are about hiding your deep sense of inadequacy, seeing someone genuinely interested in you romantically evokes surprise and confusion instead of euphoria and warmth. “What? You want to know more about me?”
As silly as it sounds, I didn’t know what to do when I realized that Celine had a crush on me. Chances are, I was confused because I was slowly realizing that I was falling in love with her as well.
At the time, it felt pretty exhilarating. Complete unknown territory. It’s funny to look back at it now after getting married and becoming a parent. Everything felt so serious when I was a teenager.
The exact details are fuzzy to me now, but I remember telling her that I had fallen in love with her, to which she responded with, “Really? Awww yay!”
I didn’t tell anyone in my family about my new relationship. My stepmother was far too controlling, and I wanted the space to explore romance on my own terms. That said, I wasn’t able to do the things that most teenagers would do in a relationship. I was required to go home immediately after school or band—so I couldn’t spend too much extra time with Celine, or I would get in trouble. Money was tight, so there was no way I could convince my stepmother to let me take Celine on a lunch date either.
Celine was my first kiss. We had walked home together one evening, and there was that awkward pause where we stared at each other, not wanting to leave just yet. She broke the silence and meekly asked me, “Can I kiss you?”
Dating Celine made me feel powerful in a way that I had never felt before. I was a bit more grounded and less cocky. I felt like I mattered to someone. Being a foreign student in Singapore made me feel isolated at times, but with her, I didn’t feel alone.
Our relationship only lasted two weeks, not because of any failing between Celine and me, but because my stepmother (the alienator) found out.
She was livid, calling Celine every derogatory slur you can imagine as she screamed that dating would somehow lead to my failing in school. It didn’t matter that I was studying dutifully at home or that I had been getting A’s and B’s in a highly rigorous curriculum. In her eyes, Celine was an affront.
When my stepmother would scream at me, I usually froze up, took whatever beatings (verbal and/or physical), and waited for the storm to pass. Fighting back never ended well. However, the things she said about Celine without ever meeting her were infuriating. So, I tried to fight back.
I really wanted to stand up for Celine, but all I ended up doing was fueling the fire. After being smacked around a bit while being screamed at, I was trapped. But then, my stepmother demanded her phone number. I used every ounce of courage to tell her no. She shouted again, “Give me her phone number right now!”
My jaw was clenched so hard my face hurt. I stared daggers at her. She smacked me in the face.
Give me your phone right now, or I will break your bloody face.
In my mind, she was too powerful and I couldn’t fight her, so I reluctantly handed her my phone. It was a small old Nokia, so there wasn’t any password protection. She looked up Celine’s phone number and called her in front of me.
For about five minutes, I watched helplessly as she berated Celine on the phone, calling her names and demanding that she break up with me. I was deflated.
There is considerable pressure on young men to assume the roles of protector and provider as they grow into men. In that moment, I felt like I was not capable of protecting anyone, even those I loved. I folded under pressure, and the girl that I claimed to love was being viciously attacked in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It hurt more than the hour of being screamed at and hit. Honestly, I would have preferred that a thousand times over. Celine didn’t deserve any of this.
When she was finished, my stepmother hung up the phone and threw my phone back at me.
“On Monday, you are going to break up with this slut and only focus on your studies. You understand? If you don’t do what I tell you, Andrew, I swear to God, I will hurt her and she will know it is because of you.”
I didn’t know exactly what her threat meant, but it scared me. I lost all faith in myself and was back to following orders. At that moment, my choices and sense of self didn’t matter. What little spark of my identity that came alive with Celine was extinguished by the shame that had flooded my entire system.
I wish I could say that I was stronger or that I had a secret relationship despite my Stepmother’s abuse. Instead, I followed orders. I figured that if I couldn’t shield Celine from my stepmother, then maybe she was better off without me.
I remember choking the words out, “Celine, I can’t protect you from her…”
Celine was a lot stronger and more resilient than I was. She was confused by the random scolding, but she didn’t let it affect her (or at least she didn’t show me if it did). She probably would have had the guts to keep going, but I was too afraid of my Stepmother.
Until I graduated, I purposely arrived at school 10 minutes later so I wouldn't have to see her in the mornings again. Some days, I would see her ahead of me. If she saw me, she would wave, and I would nod my head to acknowledge her. She may not have held the breakup against me, but I certainly did.
We would casually talk on and off every once in a while, but they were always short conversations. I couldn’t get my stepmother’s voice out of my head.
Choosing Not to Date
After Celine, I was afraid to date anyone. I ended up going through a cycle where I would meet someone I liked, flirt with them, but stop when I realized that the girl I was talking to would never be acceptable to my stepmother.
Finding a girlfriend felt like cutting my own bouquet of flowers. Beautiful at first, but I would have to watch them die after a few weeks.
In 2013, I decided to leave my abuser and go back home to the United States. At the time, I was doing this for my well-being. I knew I couldn’t be my true self if I continued living under her thumb. And if you were to ask me what the reason was for me to break away, I would say there are many reasons, and one of the big ones was the way things ended with Celine.
The shame weighed on my shoulders, and I never wanted to experience that again.
Life after leaving my alienator wasn’t easy. I was starting my life from scratch after abandoning everything I had—I had lost a full-ride engineering scholarship, left behind countless friends and family I missed, and turned away another girl I was talking to, but was too afraid to date. Moreover, I was dealing with the active alienation of my younger brother (born to my stepmother).
My father needed medical attention due to advanced MS, leading to a few different but ineffective treatments. Eventually, the neurologist suggested chemotherapy to do a hard reset of his immune system. I drove him to every chemo appointment and watched the nurse give him a drug to line his bladder with mucus so that the chemo wouldn’t corrode his bladder walls. After 20 minutes, they changed bags to drip in the chemo. Each time, I followed the little bubble down the IV, all the way until the poison entered his veins, where his whole body immediately shivered in pain.
With all this going on, dating was rarely on my mind. I often thought to myself, “I can’t get into a relationship until I get my brother back. If I had to choose between a girl and my family, I would choose my family.”
I held onto this belief for years.
Depression hit like a truck, and I lost my way. Dropped out of school because I couldn’t focus. In my mind, the only thing that mattered was fighting the alienation of my brother. I had just started my advocacy journey, and I was being invited to countless podcasts and other interviews.
If there were girls who showed interest in me, it likely went over my head. I was too on edge to be present in the moment. Even after the chemo treatments ended, I stopped believing I had the capacity to date. I kept telling myself that no sane woman would want to take on all of the baggage that I was carrying.
Occasionally, I would think of Celine and wish somehow I could go back to that feeling of bliss. But we had become different people, and while magically getting back together might make for a cute romance novel, it was not grounded in reality.
Every once in a while, I would muster up the courage to go on a date, only for it to fizzle out into nothing. Sometimes it was my fault, other times, I didn’t feel any connection. This would reinforce the message in my head:
I can’t date until I reunite with my brother.
My father saw this and warned me, “Andrew, you cannot put your life on hold just because your brother is being kept from us.”
I hated hearing it. Deep down, I wanted to believe that I was doing what needed to be done. Love can wait until reunification.
Violets are Blue
In 2017, I made major changes in my life (I discuss them in greater detail in my article, "Escaping the Prison of the Mind"). I was determined to put my life together on my terms, and I wasn’t going to let my beliefs about romance hold me back. I had been making slow progress in reconnecting with my brother, so I loosened up my no-dating rule.
Around 2018, I met June (also anonymized for her privacy). We met online through the alienation groups. She was an alienated child and partook in small amounts of advocacy for parents.
June was ethereal—fascinated by the world and all the beauty it had to hold. She loved reading about space and spirituality and would write songs and poetry in her spare time. Her prose was chaotic. It never followed a specific rhythm like Dickinson or Frost. Instead, it was a seamless blend of metaphors, each line yearning for something that I couldn’t quite place.
We would play a game where we would give each other five random words, and then we would both write a poem based on them. After a year of chatting, writing poems, and learning more about each other, I booked a flight and flew over to meet her in person.
At first, June seemed really nervous, and I empathized with her. Online friends are always safe because of the convenient barrier that the internet provides. Meeting in person would change the dynamic permanently. I gave her space, and when she felt more confident, we went out to eat.
June was living with her grandmother, who was a retired nurse. Her grandmother drove us to a Chinese buffet, and we all started chatting. My arrival was a surprise to June’s grandmother—June never mentioned that I was coming, even though I had shared my flight plans months before. She asked how June and I met, and I shared how we bonded over mutual interests like alienation advocacy, poetry, and spirituality.
Strangely, June started getting uncomfortable. She was shifting in her seat a lot, and when she could not handle it any longer, she abandoned her plate of food and said she was going to smoke in the car. I paused, wondering if I had crossed a line unintentionally.
June’s grandmother broke the silence.
“Andrew, you seem like a good kid, so I am going to tell you the truth. June has severe agoraphobia. When she was living with her mother, she was given antihistamines as a child to sedate her. June was pulled out of school in 8th grade by her mother, cannot drive, and she smokes a lot of pot [marijuana] to manage her anxiety. I have been trying to wean her off the antihistamines, but she has a serious addiction…she takes almost 40 tablets a day.”*
*I don’t know if the number of tablets a day was accurate, I am just reflecting back what I was told. Taking antihistamines like Benedryl in overdosing quantities not only induces hallucinations but also warps your neuroplasticity over time.
At that moment, I had only met June for 2 hours, and I still had four and a half days left until my flight home. At first, I wanted to see the truth for myself. After alienation, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions just because someone said something shocking and dramatic about someone else. Unfortunately, June’s condition was indeed true.
I watched her that night chain-smoke blunts to manage her anxiety. I have seen some extreme smoking from college friends. But nothing compared to what I had seen with June.
She would look at me innocently, offering me a smoke, but I gently declined. She would go on talking about an article she read about rockets, and I listened to her sultry but raspy voice.
I woke up early that next morning and stared at the wall for 2 hours, entirely at a loss. On one hand, the person I thought I was going to meet was utterly different than the person I had met. On the other hand, she was one of the most extreme victims of child abuse that I had ever witnessed in my life.
I couldn’t help but think that in another life or universe, I could have been walking in her shoes. Her behaviors made more sense to me. They were all survival reactions in a world where the person who should have loved her most, treated her as someone subhuman.
There were small moments where I would get a glimpse of who she really was—the little girl inside who had a deep curiosity about the world. Wondering who that girl could have grown into was a solemn thought.
I did my best to be supportive and kind, even when I was caught in the middle of June’s trauma responses. Most of the time, June would clash with her Grandmother, not wanting to cut down on the antihistamine use and avoiding small hygiene tasks like putting her leftover food in the fridge and then washing the plate. I could see the agony in her grandmother’s eyes. She desperately wanted June to be a normal girl with a job, who would one day fall in love and start a family.
My flight home was around 5 am, so on the night before I left, I took June out to a garden where she could feel like a person again. There were well over 50 acres of different flowers and shrubs from all over the world. June loved taking pictures.
That night, June hugged me, her face buried in my chest as she whimpered, “Don’t go… please…please, don’t go…” I stayed up all night with her and kept a strong stoic face. At the airport, I hugged her goodbye and had no idea what would come next.
As the plane took off, I broke down into an uncontrollable fit of silent crying. I usually have a strong hold on my emotions, and I rarely ever cry, but I was carrying 5 days of charged pain and emotion. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had met someone who had spiritually died a long time ago, and all that was left was her body to grow older, lost in purgatory.
I wish there were a happy ending for this story, but June later returned to her alienator. She accused her grandmother of being abusive, likely fueled by the addiction to antihistamines and the alienating behavior of her mother.
I don’t know if she will ever be rehabilitated.
Loving Yourself
I share these stories first because I want to articulate the severity of the damage that is possible to your romantic life as a result of alienation and abuse. For alienated kids, the alienator will stand in the way of your romantic life, especially if they fear your partner can hold greater sway over you than they can.
In cases like June, romance takes a backseat to issues like managing the addiction and her educational and emotional deficits. However, let’s not forget that grandparents and parents (even the alienator) inevitably grow old. Without an education, professional skills, and a family, you will likely find yourself in dangerous places alone or worse, in the company of predatory people.
Alienation robs a child of more than just a parent. It erodes their capacity for intimacy, their belief that love is safe, and their ability to trust not only others but themselves. It rewires the nervous system to flinch at affection and brace for abandonment. Some, like June, never get the chance to build themselves a foundation to stand on. Others, like me, spend years trying to rebuild one brick at a time.
For an alienated parent, there is the struggle to find the ability to trust again. After being vilified by someone you once shared a life with, and rejected by the very child you raised, every new relationship feels like walking across glass barefoot. Parents targeted by alienators will spend years questioning their ability to trust another person.
Because let’s face it.
At one point, these parents trusted them enough to believe they would build a life and family together. You question every motive and second-guess every emotion. Vulnerability becomes dangerous. Intimacy becomes a risk you calculate, not a gift you receive.
Dating feels like navigating a minefield for both the alienated parent and child. Will they understand my past? Will they think I’m too broken? Will they recoil when I tell them I haven’t spoken to my child/parent in years, not because I didn’t want to, but because I wasn’t allowed?
You might find yourself over-explaining, apologizing for things that were never your fault, or pulling away before someone can get too close. You may settle for less than you deserve because you no longer trust your gut to recognize love that’s real. Or worse, you might chase intensity that mimics your trauma, mistaking emotional chaos for passion.
While my own stories come from the perspective of a formerly alienated child, there is easily room for overlap for an alienated parent.
Alienation distorts the very framework by which love is understood. Abusers don’t need to convince you that you’re unlovable directly; they reshape your reality until you start doing the job for them.
This happens gradually. Over time, you stop recognizing what’s healthy, what’s kind, what’s real. And the more detached you become from your own internal compass, the easier it is for someone else to drive your sense of self-worth.
Here’s how that erosion usually unfolds:
Isolation disguised as protection or loyalty.
“They don’t understand you like I do.” “They just want to turn you against me.” You’re slowly distanced from friends, extended family, mentors, or even your own children. Over time, your world shrinks until their voice is the only one you hear.Reframing your strengths as threats.
Assertiveness becomes aggression. Independence becomes disloyalty. Intelligence becomes arrogance. You’re punished for outgrowing the role they assigned you until you learn to suppress your strengths to preserve the peace.Pathologizing your emotions.
If you’re sad, you’re “too sensitive.” If you’re angry, you’re “unstable.” If you’re confused, you’re “overthinking.” They turn natural emotional responses into evidence that something is wrong with you.Punishing autonomy.
Anytime you make a decision without their input, especially one that benefits your well-being, it’s met with retaliation, sabotage, or withdrawal.Withholding affection as control.
Love becomes conditional. It is only offered when you comply, and withdrawn when you express yourself. Over time, you equate affection with obedience rather than connection.Using guilt as a leash.
You’re made to feel responsible for their moods, failures, and even their abuse. “Look what you made me do.” “I wouldn’t act this way if you didn’t provoke me.” Their dysfunction becomes your fault.Shaming your past.
They dig into your vulnerabilities and use them as weapons to keep you small. Any attempt at growth is met with reminders of who you “really” are.Creating double binds.
No matter what you choose, you’re wrong. Speak up? You’re combative. Stay silent? You’re complicit. Show emotion? You’re manipulative. Stay stoic? You’re cold. These lose-lose setups wear down your internal clarity.Gaslighting your reality.
They deny obvious facts, rewrite conversations, and insist that your memory is flawed. You begin to doubt your senses, your timeline, and eventually your sanity.Weaponizing forgiveness.
They pressure you to forgive before there’s accountability. They use spiritual or moral language to silence your anger: “You need to let it go.” “A good person wouldn’t hold a grudge.” This distorts your ability to recognize injustice and enforce boundaries.Staging false redemption arcs.
Periods of kindness or affection are used to reset the cycle. They apologize, cry, or make big promises, but only as a tactic to draw you back in. Your longing for repair becomes the hook.Encouraging self-betrayal.
They pressure you to act against your values until your self-respect is compromised. Then they call you a hypocrite.Sabotaging your healing.
They mock your therapy, ridicule your self-help books, or insist that they know what’s best for you. Growth becomes something you’re punished for rather than supported in.Distorting your idea of love.
They convince you that love is supposed to hurt, that chaos is passion, that jealousy is devotion. They train you to associate intensity with intimacy, so that you chase pain while avoiding peace.
This is how abuse, especially within alienation, becomes self-sustaining. You internalize their voice. At a certain point, the abuser lives in your head, and you abandon yourself before anyone else can do it.
And that is why rebuilding real, grounded, honest self-love is necessary for you to break free from these patterns and set yourself up for your future.
Everyone has likely heard that loving yourself is the first step to building a strong and healthy relationship because if you seek someone to love you before loving yourself, you will find someone who gives you the illusion of love in exchange for control over you. But here is the rub.
How can you know if someone loves you if you don’t know what love is?
The idea of loving yourself always seems to be poorly explained. It is not as simple as looking in the mirror and repeating “I love myself” over and over again until it sticks.
Ask anyone on the street whether they have self-love, and they might pause and think, “Uhm yeah? Of course I do…” yet when you watch their actions and beliefs, you might find love for themself to be mostly absent.
At first glance, we see love as a process of acceptance and admiration. But self-love is far less glamorous than that. It’s not always about feeling good. More often, it’s about making disciplined choices that protect your long-term well-being, even when they’re painful or lonely in the short term.
To truly love yourself, you have to examine how your internal thoughts reflect your true beliefs about yourself. In other words, if you were to map out your thoughts and emotions, would you be able to say that you:
Respect yourself
Do you speak to yourself with dignity, especially when you fail or fall short? Do you honor your values in the face of pressure?Trust yourself
Do you believe your instincts are valid, or do you constantly seek external confirmation before acting? Do you back your decisions, or do you constantly second-guess yourself?Know yourself
Do you have clarity on what you want, need, and fear? Can you distinguish between what you value and what you were conditioned to value?Forgive yourself
Are you willing to let go of past mistakes, or do you weaponize them to keep yourself small?Protect yourself
Do you set and enforce boundaries when someone violates your dignity, or do you shrink and rationalize abuse?Prioritize yourself
Do your needs matter in your own life, or are they always coming after others' expectations?Believe in yourself
When an opportunity arises, is your first instinct to move forward or to disqualify yourself before trying?Speak up for yourself
Do you advocate for your truth, or do you stay quiet to avoid rocking the boat?Are honest with yourself
Do you acknowledge uncomfortable truths, even when they challenge your ego? Or do you hide behind rationalizations that keep you stuck?Show up for yourself
When life gets hard, do you abandon your well-being, or do you show yourself the same care you would give a friend?Invest in yourself
Do you put energy, time, and resources into your growth and healing, or only into what pleases others?Celebrate yourself
Can you receive compliments and feel proud of your progress, or do you dismiss your achievements as not enough?Stay with yourself
When you’re in emotional pain, do you numb, run, or blame, or can you sit with yourself in compassion?Enjoy Yourself
Do you allow joy, pleasure, and play in your life without guilt or justification? Or is your worth tied only to productivity, usefulness, or suffering?
Validate Yourself
Do you believe your emotions are real and worthy of attention, even if others don’t understand or agree with them? Or do you gaslight yourself into silence?
Define Yourself
Do you have a sense of self that isn’t defined by trauma, family roles, or relational obligations? Or is your identity still built on being someone else’s savior, scapegoat, or fixer?
Support Yourself Through Change
Can you remain loyal to yourself as you grow, evolve, and let go of old versions of you? Or do you shame yourself for not being who you used to be?
Feel Safe With Yourself
When you’re alone with your thoughts, do you feel at peace or under attack? Can you be alone without spiraling into self-hate or panic?
This list is expansive on purpose. Many people might fixate on 3-4 of these and miss the rest without even realizing that their doubts and fears are filling them with deep self-hatred. It’s easy to believe you love yourself just because you’ve stopped calling yourself names out loud, but what about the way you abandon yourself emotionally when things get hard? What about the way you tolerate mistreatment because you secretly believe it’s the best you can get?
Self-hatred doesn’t always show up as loathing. Sometimes, it disguises itself as:
Perfectionism – Believing you're only worthy if you never make a mistake.
Overachievement – Proving your value through relentless productivity or success.
Staying silent to keep the peace – Swallowing your truth to avoid conflict or abandonment.
Hyper-independence – Refusing help because you don’t believe your needs deserve attention.
The inability to receive love without suspicion – Assuming affection is manipulation in disguise.
Chronic people-pleasing – Abandoning your needs so others won’t reject you.
Self-deprecating humor – Making yourself the punchline to preempt real criticism.
Avoiding rest or play – Feeling guilty when not being "useful" or "productive."
Sabotaging relationships – Leaving before they can hurt you, because you assume they will.
Tolerating disrespect – Believing that mistreatment is normal or all you deserve.
Minimizing your pain – Saying “it wasn’t that bad” because you’ve internalized neglect.
Avoiding mirrors or photos – Not wanting to see yourself because shame runs deep.
Chronic indecision – Not trusting yourself enough to make choices.
Fear of being truly seen – Hiding your authentic self to avoid rejection.
Numbing with distractions – Avoiding inner life through food, screens, substances, or chaos.
Over-apologizing – Feeling responsible for others’ feelings, discomfort, or anger.
Romanticizing unavailability – Being drawn to people who confirm your unworthiness.
Avoiding compliments – Brushing them off because they don’t match your internal narrative.
And because these behaviors can appear functional (some even admirable), many people live for years without realizing they are rooted in feelings of unworthiness.
This is why true healing demands rigorous honesty.
You can’t just “positive think” your way out of alienation’s damage. You have to observe the ways you were taught to disconnect from your own humanity. You have to trace your relational reflexes back to the moments they were formed—when love became dangerous, or conditional, or invisible. And then you have to rebuild, one habit and boundary at a time.
“I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”
~ Brené Brown
How to learn to love yourself
Carl Rogers listed 3 key elements in his Humanistic Psychology theory:
Congruence – being authentic and transparent, rather than wearing masks or personas
Empathy – the ability to deeply understand and feel another person’s internal world
Unconditional Positive Regard – accepting someone fully, without judgment, regardless of their behavior or choices
While these principles were initially applied to therapists working with clients, Rogers later emphasized that these qualities were just as essential for self-relationship as they were for interpersonal healing. Of the three, Unconditional Positive Regard stands out as both the most radical and the most misunderstood.
Most people associate it with blind self-acceptance or a vague sense of self-esteem. But true unconditional positive regard isn’t about giving yourself a free pass or pretending you have no flaws. It’s about learning to hold space for your full humanity even when you’re ashamed, afraid, inconsistent, or lost.
That kind of self-regard is not automatic. It is built.
And for those of us who grew up under the weight of alienation, abuse, or conditional love, it may feel completely foreign. When you've spent years walking on eggshells to please a volatile parent or proving your worth to receive a tiny bit of affection, loving yourself without condition feels unnatural. Like a language you were never taught.
But here’s the truth: You can learn it. And you must.
Because your ability to love yourself is what determines how deeply and safely you will experience love, belonging, and purpose in the world. It is also the first step to helping your alienated child learn to love you and themselves.
Before we get into the how, it’s important to clear up two major myths that prevent people from developing this kind of relationship with themselves.
Myth #1: Self-love is just about being kind to yourself.
While self-compassion matters, love is not just a feeling. It’s a way of being. Real self-love includes discipline, protection, honesty, boundaries, and vision. You do not love a child by only giving them comfort. You love them by preparing them for life. The same is true for you.
Myth #2: Trauma defines who you are.
Many people wrap their entire identity around what was done to them. But self-love means deciding who you are beyond survival. You must define your character, your values, your way of being, and then step into it. Again and again. Not because it’s easy, but because you refuse to live in someone else’s shadow.
Disclaimer:
Before we begin, please note that I am not a licensed therapist. This framework shared below is not a substitute for professional mental health care. While I draw from established therapeutic models and personal experience, the content here is educational and reflective and not clinical advice.
Additionally, the exercises included in each step are optional tools meant to support your self-exploration. You are not expected to complete every one and no one is grading your homework. Choose what resonates, adapt them to your needs, and approach them at your own pace. Your likelihood of success is determined by your level of commitment to your personal growth.
If you are currently in crisis or dealing with significant trauma, I strongly encourage you to seek guidance from a qualified mental health professional.
Step 1: Recognition
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
~ Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Self-love begins with awareness, not affirmation. If you want to change your relationship with yourself, you must first learn to interrupt it—to step back from the automatic stories, reactions, and patterns that have governed your life in the background.
Most people move through their lives without pausing. A trigger appears, and the reaction follows. Criticism leads to self-hate. Rejection leads to withdrawal. A bad day leads to old coping habits. There is no space between the event and the internal collapse.
Recognition is the deliberate practice of creating that space.
It means training yourself to stop—even for a couple of seconds—before the default reaction takes over. In that pause, you gain access to a different path. You become capable of noticing:
What am I feeling?
What story am I telling myself right now?
Where did I learn to respond this way?
Is this behavior aligned with the person I want to become?
The pause is simple in theory and incredibly difficult in practice, especially if you’ve lived in fight-or-flight for years. But the more you do it, the more natural it becomes.
If you read this and do nothing with it, your nervous system will revert to its previous programming. Your day-to-day thoughts will once again be consumed by immediate emotions, external stressors, and familiar patterns. Recognition isn’t a concept—it’s a discipline. And it only works when you practice.
To recognize your patterns, you must become a student of yourself. This doesn’t mean psychoanalyzing every emotion or obsessively watching your behavior; it means noticing with curiosity instead of contempt.
You ask questions:
Why did I shrink back in that conversation?
Why did I dismiss that compliment?
What am I avoiding by staying busy?
What part of me believes I don’t deserve good things?
The goal is not to fix everything overnight. The goal is to observe. When you name a pattern, you separate from it. And once you’ve separated from it, you can change it.
One of the biggest traps in this phase is self-judgment. You start noticing your patterns, and then shame yourself for having them.
This is where the difference between judgment and evaluation becomes crucial.
Judgment is subjective and loaded with emotion. It sounds like:
“I’m so dramatic. I always ruin things. I’m pathetic.”Evaluation, by contrast, is objective. It acknowledges what’s happening without degrading the self. It sounds like:
“I noticed I raised my voice during that conversation. I was overwhelmed and trying to feel in control.”
Judgment punishes. Evaluation informs.
Judgment keeps you trapped. Evaluation creates a path forward.
A person who evaluates themselves can improve. A person who judges themselves stays stuck in shame.
Practices for Step 1
Practice the Art of the Pause:
Choose one emotional trigger you often experience (e.g., feeling ignored). For the next 7 days, your goal is to insert 5 seconds between the trigger and your usual response. That’s it. Build the muscle.
Self-Questioning Journal:
Every evening, ask:
What did I do today that didn’t feel like me?
When did I abandon my needs to avoid discomfort?
What belief drove that action?
What would I do differently if I believed I was already enough?
Judgment → Evaluation Reframe:
Take one self-critical thought you had this week. Write it down. Now rewrite it as an evaluation. Replace shame with observation. Practice this daily.
When can you expect a measurable difference?
You stop living inside your reactions. You begin to observe them with enough distance to choose differently. You stop degrading yourself and start understanding yourself. And that makes all future change possible.
Step 2: Reconnection
“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”
~ Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Once you’ve created space to observe your patterns, the next step is to turn inward—to reconnect with the parts of you you’ve been avoiding, overriding, or suppressing. Most people try to heal by analyzing their thoughts or reading more content. But true healing isn’t intellectual. It’s relational.
Reconnection is about becoming someone you’re willing to sit with. Someone you don’t abandon when emotions get uncomfortable or memories surface uninvited. It’s about feeling safe in your own presence.
Many survivors of trauma or neglect struggle to feel at home in their bodies. Sensations are dulled, or they’re overwhelming. Emotions either hijack you or feel out of reach. Your internal world becomes something to avoid, not explore. But your body isn’t the enemy. Your emotions aren’t the enemy. They’ve never been met with consistent care.
When your chest tightens, when your throat closes, when your stomach drops—don’t dismiss it. Pause and breathe with it. Ask what it’s trying to tell you. Then, instead of trying to fix it, sit with it for just a moment longer than you usually would. That moment is where safety begins.
You can also begin rebuilding emotional literacy by checking in with yourself each day.
Ask: What am I feeling right now? Where do I feel it in my body? What does this part of me need?
You don’t have to act on it. The practice is to listen without shutting it down.
Inside your internal system, you’ll start to recognize different voices—an inner critic, a perfectionist, a scared child. These are not problems to eliminate. They are parts of you that adapted to survive. Start talking to them.
Literally.
Ask what they’re afraid of. Thank them for trying to protect you. Tell them they don’t have to work so hard anymore. Over time, they’ll begin to trust you back.
Reconnection also includes offering yourself the kind of consistent care you needed but didn’t receive. This is reparenting. It might look like:
Saying no to unhealthy food
Getting enough sleep each night
Drinking water before you get a headache
Speaking kindly to yourself when you make a mistake, instead of replaying it with shame
Taking breaks when you're tired, instead of earning rest through exhaustion
Giving yourself permission to feel joy without needing to justify it with productivity
Setting a boundary with someone who drains you, even if they never notice or thank you for it
The instinct will be to skip this step. To get back to goals and “doing.” But if you keep skipping the part where you actually feel, you’ll keep circling the same emotional dead ends. You can’t outrun disconnection. You can only soften it by staying with yourself.
Practices for Step 2
Body Awareness Practice:
Each morning or evening, take 2 minutes to scan your body from head to toe. Notice any tension, numbness, or discomfort. Don’t try to change anything. Just witness it.
Daily Emotional Check-In:
Once a day, write down:What am I feeling?
Where do I feel it?
What does it need?
This builds emotional vocabulary and internal trust.
Inner Part Dialogue:
When a critical or fearful voice shows up, pause and ask:What are you trying to protect me from?
What would help you feel less afraid?
Speak to that part as if it were a child, not to silence it, but to comfort it.
Reparenting Ritual: Choose one act of care you wish someone had offered you growing up. Start doing that for yourself daily. Keep it small and consistent.
When can you expect a measurable difference?
You stop ignoring yourself during emotional pain. You begin to experience your body and emotions not as threats, but as signals that guide you. You become someone your inner world can trust again, and that trust becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
Step 3: Reclamation
"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
~ Dolly Parton
Recognition teaches you to observe your patterns. Reconnection helps you listen to what your body and emotions have been trying to say. But eventually, you reach a point where you have to stop reacting to the past and start choosing the future. That’s where reclamation begins.
Reclamation is about taking back authorship over your identity. It's about stepping out of the roles you were cast into—like the scapegoat, the fixer, the invisible one—and saying, “That’s not who I am anymore.”
It is also a place where you release the ghosts of the past that haunt you. Romances that go awry, especially if there were forces outside your control (like my relationships with Celine and June), leave you feeling a sense of nostalgic yearning, where you wish there were a better ending. You might even catch yourself lost in the moment, imagining “what if things went another way?” While the aching pain is normal, allowing it to grow and take over can be highly corrosive to your present and potential relationships.
If you were raised in an environment that was unpredictable or conditional, chances are your personality became a tool for survival. You became whatever you needed to be to stay safe. Quiet. Perfect. Helpful. Invisible. Strong. The problem is, when those traits get hardwired, you confuse who you had to be with who you actually are.
To reclaim yourself, you have to get clear on what you value, not what you were praised or punished for, or what others expect. You ask:
What do I care about?
What kind of person do I admire?
What qualities feel aligned with who I want to be, not just when I’m winning, but when I’m struggling?
You may not have answers right away. That’s okay. Reclamation isn’t about rushing. It’s about remembering.
You also begin rewriting your story. That doesn’t mean pretending the pain didn’t happen. It means refusing to let the pain be the ending. You start to shift your internal narrative from “I was broken by what happened” to “I was shaped, but not defined, by what I survived.”
One of the most powerful ways to do this is to reframe your origin story. Write it from the perspective of someone who was doing the best they could in impossible circumstances. Acknowledge the cost of survival, but also the strength.
Then ask: Who do I want to be now that I’m no longer in survival mode?
Reclamation also means resisting the urge to explain your changes to everyone. You don’t need to announce that you’re healing. You don’t need to justify your new boundaries, values, or energy. At the end of the day, it is not about what other people think. The more you embody who you are becoming, the less you’ll feel the need to explain. People will notice. And if they don’t, that’s not your concern. You’re not doing this for their recognition. You’re doing it because it’s who you choose to be.
This step isn’t loud or flashy. It is also not angry or dramatic. It’s often gentle, quiet, and subtle. A small internal pivot from pleasing others to honoring yourself. From hiding to standing in your truth. From avoiding pain to stepping forward with clarity.
Practices for Step 3
Define Your Core Values: Write down 5-10 values you want to live by—words like honesty, courage, compassion, creativity, discipline.
Then reflect:What does it look like to live these values when I’m afraid?
When I’m tired?
When I’m alone?
Rewrite Your Origin Story: Describe a key memory from your childhood that shaped how you see yourself. Then rewrite it from the voice of your future self, someone who sees the whole truth and doesn’t confuse survival with shame.
Boundary Rehearsal: Practice saying “no” in low-stakes situations. Decline a favor. Leave a conversation early. Skip an obligation. Each time you do, remind yourself that this is what it means to protect who I’m becoming.
Belief Detox: List three beliefs that have kept you small or silent. Next to each one, write a counter-belief rooted in truth. Repeat these new beliefs daily until they start to feel more familiar than the old ones.
When can you expect a measurable difference?
You begin to feel like a participant in your own life, not a character written by someone else. You act in alignment with your chosen values, not just your triggers. And for the first time, you don’t just know who you’re not, you start to know who you are.
Step 4: Rebuilding
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
This is where most people want to start. They want the actions, the strategies, and the changes. But rebuilding only works after you’ve gone through the earlier steps—after you’ve paused, listened, and reclaimed your sense of self.
Rebuilding is the phase where you translate self-love into behavior. Not promises. Not potential. Action.
For both alienated parents and alienated children, the alienator often attacks your confidence as a method of control. They tell you, explicitly or implicitly, that you’re helpless without them. That you’re not capable, not smart enough, not resilient enough to function on your own. And over time, you start to believe them. Their voice becomes your own inner critic. Even when they’re not physically present, the conditioning lingers.
This step is how you prove them wrong, not with revenge, but with evidence.
Rebuilding is about providing yourself with measurable proof that you are capable and competent. That you can handle life, make decisions, solve problems, take initiative, and follow through. You don’t start by doing everything perfectly. You start by doing one small thing that challenges your self-doubt. Then another and another.
Eventually, you realize: the voice that told you “you can’t” was lying.
The process is progressive. You begin with low-risk efforts—things you can try, fail at, and try again. As your confidence grows, you increase the difficulty. You take on more meaningful challenges. One day, you look up and realize that you're doing things at an expert level you once thought were impossible.
This is how competence inspires confidence. The more you try, the more data you collect that you can handle discomfort, bounce back from failure, and make progress—imperfectly, but consistently.
One of the biggest traps in this stage is all-or-nothing thinking. If you can’t do it perfectly, you don’t do it at all. If you can’t feel confident, you don’t try. But confidence doesn’t precede action. It follows action. And progress doesn’t require perfection. It requires movement.
Rebuilding also means creating systems around your values, not your moods. You don’t wait until you feel motivated to do the thing. You create the conditions where your desired behaviors are more likely to happen.
If your value is health, you prep nourishing meals.
If your value is courage, you set up regular opportunities to speak up.
If your value is connection, you commit to initiating conversations—even awkward ones.
These systems become the backbone of your new identity. They teach your nervous system what safety looks like in real life: structure, consistency, and self-respect.
This stage is also where your inner critic tends to resurface. You might hear: “Who do you think you are?” or “You’ve tried this before and failed.” That’s expected. The goal isn’t to silence that voice, but to keep moving while it speaks.
You act anyway. You apply anyway. You write anyway. You ask anyway. Because every time you take action that aligns with your values, you teach yourself that you can be trusted. And that is the foundation of unshakable self-respect.
Practices for Step 4
Micro-Bravery: Each week, identify one small but meaningful action that scares you slightly. Do it. Reflect on what happened and what you learned. Track your progress—not in outcomes, but in effort.
Competence Loop: Pick a skill you’ve avoided because of self-doubt. Break it into tiny steps. A great exercise to break down a goal is to use this framework.
“To do X, I must do Y… To do Y, I must do Z…To do Z, I must do…”
Continue this process until you have the tiniest first step mapped out ahead of you. Learn → Try → Reflect → Repeat. Let failure be your teacher.Evidence Journal: Every day, write down one way you showed up for yourself. A decision, a boundary, a moment of honesty, a task completed. This builds a growing bank of proof that you are trustworthy.
System Support: Choose one of your values and build a small, repeatable system around it. This could be as simple as a 10-minute morning routine, a weekly check-in, or a recurring event that aligns with who you want to become.
When can you expect a measurable difference?
You begin to act in ways that align with your chosen identity, even when it’s uncomfortable. You stop being driven by emotion alone and start creating structure around your values. You start to believe in yourself, not because of a mantra, but because you have proof. The voice of the alienator no longer controls your confidence. You do. And your life starts to reflect the person you decided to become.
Step 5: Reintegration
“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”
~ Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
The final step isn’t about completion—it’s about return. After you’ve done the inner work of recognition, reconnection, reclamation, and rebuilding, there comes a moment when you begin to bring that work back into your relationships, your rhythms, and your life as a whole.
This is reintegration.
Reintegration means embracing self-love, not just privately, but also relationally. You stop compartmentalizing who you’re becoming. You begin to move through the world in alignment with the self you’ve rebuilt, and you let that self be visible.
This doesn’t mean performing your healing, giving lectures about boundaries, or making speeches about trauma. It means embodying your healing so clearly that the people around you begin to adjust, even if they don’t understand you yet.
Reintegration also involves confronting major fears like:
What happens when I show up as my full self, and not everyone likes it?
What if some people pull away?
What if my family doesn’t approve?
What if I lose connections I once depended on?
These are real risks. Reintegration is not without grief. But what you gain is far more important, namely peace, clarity, and a life that actually belongs to you.
This is the stage where your values begin to guide your decisions automatically. You no longer have to debate whether to abandon yourself to avoid discomfort. The answer is clear. You don’t. You may still feel fear, but it no longer outranks your integrity.
You also begin to allow safe people back in. Not because you need rescuing, but because you understand that healthy connections are part of healing. You give yourself permission to be seen, not just when you’re strong or put together, but when you’re real.
This doesn’t mean every relationship becomes perfect. In fact, some may fall away. But the ones that remain and grow will do so on the foundation of mutual respect, shared values, and emotional safety.
Reintegration also invites you into stillness, not as avoidance, but as a form of arrival. After years of running, proving yourself, and surviving, you learn to sit with yourself in quiet and discover that peace doesn’t have to be earned. It can simply be allowed. In stillness, your nervous system begins to understand that it’s no longer under siege. You no longer have to chase healing. You just have to let it land. It’s in these quiet, ordinary moments—watching the light shift through a window, breathing deeply without urgency, doing nothing and feeling okay—that you realize: this is what coming home to yourself actually feels like.
You stop waiting for a crisis to make the rest legitimate. You begin letting moments of silence, beauty, or ease carry weight, not because they’re productive, but because you’re finally allowed to have peace.
This is where the deepest form of self-trust emerges. You’re no longer striving to become someone better. You’re simply being who you’ve worked so hard to reclaim and letting that be enough.
Practices for Step 5
Joy Permission & Stillness: Create a short list of things that bring you quiet joy—walks, music, books, textures, tastes. Then add one form of stillness that brings you peace: sitting outside, practicing breathwork, meditating, or journaling without an agenda. Schedule time for at least one of each every week. Not as a reward, but as a personal ritual for stillness.
Safe Visibility: Choose one safe person and practice letting them see you more fully. Share something real—something you would’ve previously hidden. Watch how it feels to stay present in the moment.
Relationship Audit: List the relationships in your life that energize you versus drain you.
Ask:Where am I still shrinking?
Where am I growing?
Begin adjusting accordingly—not with anger, but with clarity.
Living Your Values:
Review your core values from Step 3.
Then ask: How can I express these values in my relationships? In my work? In the way I talk to myself and others?
Make these values visible through small, consistent actions.
When can you expect a measurable difference?
You stop living two lives—the one inside you, and the one others see. You begin to experience a sense of congruence between who you are, how you feel, and how you show up. Your relationships begin to shift to reflect your wholeness. You stop mistaking exhaustion for virtue. And for the first time, self-love isn’t something you do in private—it’s something you live.
Becoming Whole Isn’t Linear
Healing doesn’t happen in a straight line. You might be in the rebuilding stage in your professional relationships, but still in recognition when it comes to your familial relationships. You might feel integrated in how you speak to yourself, but still struggle to reconnect with your body.
That’s not failure—that’s how wholeness works.
These five stages are a cycle. They are a way of orienting your inner life toward deeper truth and alignment. You’ll move through them again and again, each time with more clarity, compassion, and capacity.
Self-love isn’t a finish line you cross.
It’s a posture of curiosity, a willingness to return to yourself again and again with honesty. You will continuously outgrow versions of yourself. You will have to pause, reconnect, reclaim, rebuild, and reintegrate more times than you can count.
Becoming an eternal student of your own life.
Every trigger is a teacher. Every relationship is a mirror. Every emotion is a message. The work is to keep listening and asking questions. To keep choosing alignment over performance, peace over approval, and truth over comfort.
You don’t have to master this process overnight. You only have to keep returning to it, with less judgment and more patience than the time before.
Because you are not broken, you are actively creating yourself. And every time you choose to meet yourself with dignity, you are practicing a kind of love the world desperately needs more of.
Start where you are. Stay with yourself.
And remember that no matter what anyone has told you—especially the ones who tried to hurt you—you are not beyond repair.
You are becoming.
Loving Another Person
I spent a great deal of time running in circles romantically because I hadn't done the necessary healing work first.
After breaking up with Celine, I believed I was not worthy of love for a long time. I didn’t say it in those words, but if you read between the lines, you would see the wound under the mask of noble martyrdom.
I told myself, “I cannot protect a partner from my stepmother.”
But what I was really saying was, “I am powerless. I will fail the people I love. I am dangerous to be close to.”
Later, I told myself, “I cannot date until I reunite with my brother.”
Beneath that was another wound. “I must prove I am good enough. I don’t deserve joy until I fix the family. If my family is broken, how can I start a new family without it falling apart? I am not allowed to love or be loved until I earn redemption.”
At face value, these narratives sound responsible and even selfless. But they were fear in disguise—shame masquerading as integrity. And as long as I obeyed them, I kept myself outside the reach of love. Not because others didn’t try to love me, but because I wouldn’t receive it.
You can’t receive what you believe you don’t deserve, and you can’t hold what you’ve never felt safe having.
Before I met June, I thought to myself, “The only person who would truly understand me is someone who is also broken.”
At the time, I saw that belief as a form of compassion. But it wasn’t compassion—it was trauma bonding. I wasn’t looking for a partnership. I was looking for someone who mirrored my wounds so I wouldn’t have to face them alone. If they were in pain too, then maybe I wouldn’t feel so ashamed of mine.
At first, I thought I could fix her.
I thought if I loved her enough, supported her enough, stayed patient enough, maybe she’d feel safe enough to heal. Perhaps that would make it all worthwhile. But the truth is, when you try to fix someone, you’re just trying to outrun your own pain. You’re saying to yourself, “If I can rescue them, then maybe I wasn’t as powerless as I felt back then.”
It becomes less about them and more about making your old wounds mean something.
And underneath that, there's an even more subtle fantasy: “If I can fix them, then maybe I’ll finally know how to fix myself.”
But that’s not healing either. That’s procrastination disguised as purpose. That’s outsourcing your inner work to someone else’s recovery. It keeps you focused on their chaos so you don’t have to face your own.
Even if you magically transformed someone you loved from a broken individual into a thriving person, you will still realize at the end of the day that you are still stuck in the gutter while they are outgrowing you.
Trying to fix another person doesn’t make you a savior—it makes you unavailable to yourself. You abandon your own needs while over-functioning for someone else’s. And deep down, there’s often a quiet hope: If I can heal them, maybe I’ll finally feel healed too.
But that’s not love. That’s emotional reenactment.
Every rupture in my attempted relationships was playing out the same old script: “If I could fix it, if I could just be enough, maybe this time the story would end differently.”
But it never did. Because I wasn’t healing, I was reenacting trauma.
And that’s how I kept circling the same emotional orbit. I wasn’t choosing partners based on mutual growth or shared values. I was choosing from a place of familiarity. Pain recognizes pain. Chaos feels like home when you’ve only known tension.
Carl Jung once said, “What you most want to find will be found where you least want to look.”
I didn’t want to look at my own shame or at my fear of inadequacy. So I made myself useful instead. I tried to earn my worth by being needed.
And at the end of the day, the only person you can fix is yourself.
Imago Relationship Theory
I learned about Imago Relationship Theory from Bill Eddy during an interview for a podcast I was co-hosting. He mentions it around the 21:20 minute mark.
I had asked him why so many people, especially those with trauma histories, seem to allow repeated boundary violations in relationships. Why do they stay? Why do they return to partners who disrespect or control them?
He explained that when someone grows up in an abusive or emotionally unstable household, they unconsciously learn a “script” for how relationships work. You figure out what to say, what not to say, how to tiptoe around volatility, how to survive. That becomes your normal. And even if it’s painful, it’s familiar, and familiarity is powerful.
So later in life, when you meet someone—often someone with narcissistic traits—and something about them clicks, it’s not random. It’s not even about their charm. It’s that your nervous system recognizes the script. You’ve played this role before.
That’s when he mentioned Imago theory, developed by therapist Harville Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt. The core idea is that we all carry an unconscious image of love that was shaped by our earliest caregivers. That image includes both the good and the bad. We don’t just seek people who make us feel loved, we seek people who feel familiar. And that often means people who recreate the very wounds we never healed.
As Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, describe in their book Getting the Love You Want, this unconscious template—the Imago—drives us toward partners who resemble our parents or early attachment figures. Not to suffer all over again, but in the hope that this time, the story will end differently.
That’s why, as Bill said, you might meet someone and think, “This feels right.” But what you’re really saying is, “This feels familiar.” And if you’re not aware of the pattern, you’ll find yourself defaulting to the same old roles without understanding why.
Doing the emotional work of self-love will help you eliminate most of these recurring patterns and replace them with healthier habits. With that said, I do think that there is some level of connection that needs to occur with other people to help you better understand your blind spots.
There is a concept known as the Johari Window, where self-awareness is broken into four quadrants:
Public Persona (Known to Self and Others):
This is the part of you that you’re consciously aware of and that others also see—your values, habits, quirks, strengths, and even your struggles when you’re open about them. The more honest and authentic your relationships, the larger this window becomes.Blind Spot (Unknown to Self, Known to Others):
These are the parts of you that are visible to others but hidden from your own view. It could be a pattern of interrupting when nervous, a tone of defensiveness you don’t hear, or your tendency to dismiss praise. These blind spots often block intimacy, not because they’re bad, but because they go unaddressed.Facade (Known to Self, Unknown to Others):
This is the realm of secrets, private fears, traumas, and desires that you choose not to share. Sometimes these are withheld for safety or boundaries. But other times, they’re locked away behind a facade because of shame or fear of rejection. The healing journey often involves slowly and wisely shrinking this area.Unknown Area (Unknown to Self and Others):
This is the mysterious terrain of the unconscious—your untapped potential, suppressed memories, inherited beliefs, or future transformations. This quadrant shrinks through life experiences, introspection, therapy, and especially meaningful relationships.
The goal of personal growth is to expand your public persona so that it reflects your authentic self. The more you explore yourself and share vulnerably with safe people, the more you collapse the facade and blind spots into conscious awareness. And in doing so, your sense of self becomes clearer, more stable, and more integrated. Additionally, the parts that are entirely unknown to you and others will slowly rise to the surface until they become known.
Understanding Imago Theory and the Johari Window gives us the language to explain why we’re drawn to certain people and how our wounds shape our relational habits. But insight alone doesn’t change behavior; practice does.
Whether you’re an alienated parent learning to trust again, an alienated child rebuilding your internal compass, or someone navigating romantic partnership after trauma, the next step is conscious relationship.
This is where self-love meets the real world. It’s the process of continuously choosing to relate with presence, honesty, and care, even when your reflexes scream otherwise. And it’s possible for all of us, no matter where we started or what traumas happened to us.
Conscious Love
Conscious love is not about chemistry, compatibility, or finding someone who never triggers you. It’s about choosing to show up with awareness and intention, especially when you’re triggered. It asks more of you than romance ever will, but it gives more back than fantasy ever could.
Most people pursue relationships based on instinct or longing. We look for someone who makes us feel alive, seen, safe, or validated. But without consciousness, even the most exciting connection will eventually run aground on old patterns of defensiveness, withdrawal, control, and fear of abandonment.
Conscious love is what happens when two people decide not to run.
They agree to stay curious when conflict arises. They agree to slow down rather than escalate. They agree to look inward instead of blaming outward.
This is just as true for a romantic partner as it is for a parent reconnecting with their child. The old roles don’t need to be performed anymore. You don’t have to prove you’re good or chase approval. You don’t have to be fixed or fix others. Instead, you learn how to be real with each other—how to stay in connection without sacrificing who you are.
For many alienated parents, they lose years with their children. And in their minds, they still see their child frozen in time at the point where the alienation started. But the child is growing. Time is passing, and each day, they are changing. You have to accept that your child is a new person for you to discover and rebuild the relationship with the child in front of you, not the child you lost.
Conflict as an Opportunity
In unconscious relationships, conflict is treated as a problem to avoid, suppress, or win. But in conscious love, conflict is the beginning of growth.
Imago theory reframes conflict as a signal that something deeper is being asked for. When you find yourself triggered by your partner, child, or parent, it’s rarely about the surface issue. It’s not just about the dishes, the silence, the tone, or the timing. It’s about what that moment activates, which is usually an unmet need from earlier in life.
I mentioned before that one of Imago’s key insights is that we are drawn to people who resemble the very figures who wounded us, because unconsciously, we want to finish the story. But the only way to break the loop is by facing what we’ve been avoiding.
This is where alienated parents and children face a similar task. The parent wants to be heard and forgiven. The child wants to be seen and protected. Both are carrying years of unsaid pain. Both feel unsafe. And both may lash out or withdraw when it feels like too much. These points of conflict are opportunities to rediscover each other on a deeper level.
In romantic relationships, it’s the same dynamic. Your partner might say, “You never listen,” when what they really mean is, “I’m scared my voice doesn’t matter.” You might shut down during an argument, not because you don’t care, but because you’re terrified of being misunderstood or punished, just like you were as a child.
These patterns won’t shift through logic alone. They shift when both people stop reacting and start relating to each other. It is when both sides learn to listen, not just hear.
Conflict is resolved through curiosity. Ask questions and explore the root of the pain. That way, you can practice a new way of speaking that prioritizes connection over control.
The Imago Dialogue
At the heart of Imago Relationship Therapy is a deceptively simple structure called the Imago Dialogue.
The dialogue consists of three steps: Mirroring, Validating, and Empathizing.
These steps are designed to slow down reactive patterns and create space for real connection, whether you're speaking with a romantic partner, an alienated child, or even revisiting memories internally as part of your healing process.
1. Mirroring – “Let me make sure I heard you.”
This is where you repeat back what the other person said, word-for-word or in paraphrased form, without interpretation. It’s not agreement—it’s presence. It shows the other person that their reality is safe to express and that you’re not going to hijack it.
“What I hear you saying is…”
“Did I get that right?”
“Is there more about that?”
Mirroring reduces the urge to correct, defend, or “fix.” It’s about slowing down and listening until the other person feels truly heard.
2. Validation – “That makes sense.”
Once the person has shared and you’ve accurately mirrored their experience, the next step is to validate it. This doesn’t mean you agree with their perception. It means you can understand how they got there.
“That makes sense to me because…”
“Given your experiences, I can see how you’d feel that way.”
Validation is what allows someone to lower their guard. It’s the antidote to gaslighting, defensiveness, and invalidation. It’s a way of saying, “You’re not crazy. Your feelings matter.”
3. Empathy – “I imagine you might be feeling…”
Finally, you name the emotion, or series of emotions, that you imagine the other person might be experiencing. This step moves the conversation from the head to the heart.
“I imagine you might be feeling scared… or hurt… maybe even angry.”
“Do those feelings feel right to you?”
Empathy creates warmth. It’s what makes the person feel not just understood, but held. And in relationships that have carried trauma, this moment of emotional attunement can be incredibly reparative.
You don’t need to follow the Imago Dialogue script robotically. What matters is the energy behind it, namely curiosity, non-defensiveness, and a commitment to connection over control. When practiced consistently, it can begin to rewire both people’s nervous systems, teaching them that love doesn’t have to mean danger, silence, or erasure.
Love as a Mirror and a Catalyst for Growth
Whether you're an alienated parent trying to reconnect with a child or a formerly alienated child learning to trust love again, the work is never just about the other person. It’s about what the relationship calls forth in you—your wounds, your patterns, your capacity, your growth edge.
Every meaningful relationship is both a mirror and a catalyst for growth. It reflects the parts of you that you’ve yet to embrace, and it challenges you to stretch into new ways of being. The more self-love you cultivate, the more you can hold space for another person’s full humanity without collapsing or controlling.
It’s also important to remember that love is not a destination you arrive at, it’s a practice you return to again and again.
In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.
Sometimes, you’ll feel like a novice. Other times, you’ll feel grounded and wise. And often, you’ll be both at once. You’ll be strong in one area of your life and fragile in another. You’ll have clarity in your friendships but may struggle with setting and maintaining romantic boundaries. That’s not failure—that’s the truth of being human.
You are not here to become perfect. You are here to become whole.
The self-love framework you’ve explored—the five phases of recognition, reconnection, redefinition, reinforcement, and reintegration—gives you the foundation. Imago gives you the relational tools. Together, they create a path forward where love is no longer survival, performance, or self-abandonment. It becomes something richer: a space where healing is mutual, growth is welcome, and connection is sacred.
You are an eternal student of yourself. And every act of love you give—whether to yourself, a partner, a child, or a friend—becomes a part of your becoming.
This is how we heal and love.
Concluding Thoughts
When I met my wife, I had already taken many of the self-love steps that I mentioned above. And even then, I learned more about myself through the conflicts we had. My wife taught me so much that I feel nothing short of gratitude and awe for her.
She has pushed me to challenge my assumptions, identify my blind spots, and become a better person. What we’ve built didn’t happen by accident—it happened because we both chose to keep showing up.
Even in a loving relationship, the work doesn’t end. Love reveals new places inside of you that are still learning how to be held. It asks you to become more, not less. It asks you to soften where you once braced, and to open where you once closed.
Love is a gift, and I have been blessed to share it with her.
And if you're still looking for that kind of love, start with yourself. Because when you love from wholeness instead of hunger, you no longer settle for crumbs. You know what you’re worth. You know how to offer love without losing yourself in the process. You know how to receive it without suspicion or shame.
When you are filled with love for yourself (not narcissism but deep respect), you have the ability to see people as they are and offer them the love they are desperately seeking.
For alienated children, this is the path to breaking the cycle of trauma. And for alienated parents, this is how you light the way for your alienated child.
Love. And love deeply.
Until next time,
Andrew Folkler
Such a powerful piece... So much earned wisdom from the pain/abuse... Sound warnings, advice, guidance... authentic & inspirational... Thank you for writing this; it's inspired me to look at my own pain/suffering in a different way... Keep "Sparking" & encouraging others through your emotional honesty/authenticity and writing to keep moving forward and not get "stuck" from all the pain/suffering...
Wow, Andrew. This is such a worthwhile read. And the Loving Yourself section is invaluable- not only for those who have been through alienation, but for those who have been coercively controlled or abused in any way. It will resonate!