It always feels safer to run rather than confront, but poetically by running, you become prisoner to the very thing you're trying to avoid for the rest of your life, for it is only by confronting demons that you can defeat them.

In my line of work over the years, I've learned most people are too scared to tackle their deepest issues.

If we work backwards from the present to the past, you will keep putting up walls that stop us from reaching the truth because you haven't learned how to push through pain.

People fool themselves, and then provide you with these bullshit answers that sound superficially plausible, but are not in fact the real reason for why what happened, happened.

So you're constantly working against self-delusion, merely trying to unravel but one thread of truth.

Patience is not even the word for this. There is a certain amount of coaxing involved. Unmanipulated, the fearful mind will always settle for the first comfortable lie that comes along, rather than be rigorous in asking "could it be anything else?" "why is it that then?"

It doesn't even fight. It doesn't explore. It has no curiosity. It simply accepts whatever fits with its biases. A person with low self esteem will always blame themselves. A person who fears abandonment will never blame themselves. You get the idea. They are totally delusional.

Now combine a person who fears abandonment, with a person who has low self esteem.

You have one person saying "it's all your fault, I wouldn't have done this if not for you!" and another person saying "it's all my fault I should have been better" - a toxic form of compatability.

And this is how abuse begins.

One person never owning everything, and another person always owning everything.

The fucked up thing about this is, the person always blaming themselves is also toxic, because they are enabling the blame avoidant person to grow more tyrannical.

Think about it.

What does a blame avoidant/immature/abandonment fearful person need? Someone to hold them accountable, and condition them out of petulance.

By continuously agreeing with their narrative, you give them precisely what they don't need rather than what they do.

On the flipside, the person who always blames themselves for everything needs to be taught proper accountability too - that they don't have control over every little thing in the universe, sometimes, things actually aren't their fault and they need to appreciate their own efforts

These kinds of relationships are functionally perverse, for you effectively nourish one another's core toxic vulnerabilities.

The low self-esteem person becomes more slavish and self-hating, whilst the immature child becomes a narcissistic tyrant.

Doomed from the start.