You Learned This Early

I first went to therapy to fix my dating life.

When I was in my 20s, every relationship lasted two months and ended in spectacular failure. After enough blow ups, I had to accept that all my exes only had one thing in common: me.

I walked into therapy expecting to talk about my last girlfriend. But instead, we spent about two months talking about my parents.

I’d explain how I kept screwing up relationships with amazing women, and the therapist would somehow ask a seemingly innocent question that subtly steered the conversation back to my childhood.

I thought I had a dating problem. But therapy revealed this emotional blueprint I didn’t even know I was stuck following.

Every relationship started the same: great connection, tons of chemistry, and then—around the six- or eight-week mark—I’d quietly check out. And worse, find reasons why it was their fault.

Over and over and over.

I grew up in a family where real emotional vulnerability didn’t feel safe.

So when someone actually wanted closeness, I panicked. My nervous system read safety as danger, and the part of me that grew up neglected didn’t know how to stay once it felt seen.

It’s a pattern I absorbed before I even knew what healthy looked like. And it took months of work just to uncover that it even existed, much less that it could be changed.

And that’s the funny thing: so many of our problems aren’t even the actual problem. They are the downstream effect of some deeper, unseen problem. And the work to actually fix the problem usually has way less to do with fixing and way more with simply learning how to see it clearly in the first place.

See you Monday,
Mark Manson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
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