Your feelings are always valid and yet how you are interpreting and assigning meaning based on what you are feeling isn’t always accurate.

Especially when it’s filtered through the lens of your unmet needs and the perceived threats of your trauma brain.

Every time you run away from or avoid a perceived threat due to fear of being hurt, regardless of it the threat is real, your brain catalogues that as a successful strategy for protecting yourself. And reinforces that paired association (trigger).

If you have assigned the meaning of someone not calling you or texting you immediately back to be they don’t care about you and are going to eventually abandon you, you might decide to protect yourself by abandoning the relationship first.

This experience of someone not calling/texting you back may have become a paired association (trigger) to abandonment because in the past someone who actually did abandon you, also ghosted on communication. Your brain now assigns that trigger to anyone who doesn’t call you back.

This is why I say it’s important to lovingly examine your automatic interpretations of your feelings to determine where you are going unconscious and losing your connection to the present. Also communication and asking questions to check validity is how you break cycles.

You might say, my trauma brain is telling me to run away & protect myself and is triggered by you not calling me. And seeing that as a red flag. I do know because of my past that might not be truth. And I have a need to feel validated and affirmed that you still care about me.

What’s healthy about this is you are taking accountability for your past rather than projecting your fears on to the other person. And you are moving from unexpressed needs to asking for exactly what you need.

For me, unexpressed needs is a big boundary. As an energy reader and an emotionally intelligent caregiver, there is often an unspoken assumption that care means I should empath, feel and interpret people’s feelings for them. And jump in to save them and meet all their unmet needs

It’s unrealistic and unfair to assign the role to your highly psychically sensitive friend as the person who is going to unpack all your feelings for you. That’s your work. They will be more inclined to hold space for you when you acknowledge and value their gifts of sensitivity