The Beliefs That Look Like Reality

Last week I had a conflict with a friend. Many things happened between us, but underneath all of them, one thing affected me more deeply than anything else: he withdrew from contact.

At first, I understood my reaction through the language of boundaries. I do not want relationships where someone repeatedly withdraws from communication when something difficult arises. That still feels true. But with some distance, I began to understand that a boundary is not a way of controlling another person’s behaviour. It is a promise I make about what I will do with the things over which I actually have authority.

I cannot demand that another person remain in contact with me. I can tell them what happens in me when they withdraw, listen to what happens in them, and decide what I will do if a certain pattern continues.

But before I could see any of this clearly, something had to settle.

For a while I felt strangely cold towards this person. Part of me wondered whether I even wanted the relationship anymore. Only later did I recognize that the coldness was not indifference. Underneath it was frozen terror.

His withdrawal had touched something very old in me.

There is something in me that cannot be loved.

And from inside that reality, how could I possibly create genuine social connection? How could I calmly sit with another person, allow myself to be seen and heard, remain interested in their experience, and discover together what had actually happened?

I couldn’t. Not yet.

This is where the turtle keeps returning to me as a teacher. There is no hurry.

I wanted us to sit down and meet what had happened between us. But even meeting has its own timing. The body cannot be argued into connection. Fear cannot be hurried out of the room. There was nothing useful in dragging either of us towards a conversation before there was enough ground beneath our feet to actually have one.

So I left the door open.

Today we had a video call. We spoke openly, and the connection between us returned. And only then, while actually sitting inside the connection I had feared was lost, could I see what had happened inside me.

His withdrawal had not simply registered as: this person is withdrawing right now.

It had become: this person does not want connection with me.

Beneath that:

There must be something wrong with me.

And further down:

I am too difficult to love.

This is what makes core wounds so elusive. They rarely introduce themselves as beliefs. They arrive disguised as reality.

Many of them were formed before we had enough language, perspective or separateness to understand that another person’s behaviour might belong to their own inner world. A child encounters distance, absence or rupture and has very few ways to make sense of it.

So the world becomes personal.

This happened because of me.

Decades later, the original conclusion may never appear in words. It may appear as terror, coldness, urgency, defensiveness, the impulse to leave first, the need to restore connection immediately. The body reacts to the old conclusion as though no conclusion was ever made at all. This is simply how things are.

And that is the part that fascinates me.

The pain was real. The rupture was real. The fear moving through my body was real.

But the meaning was not necessarily reality.

There is something unlovable in me had been standing so close to perception that I could not see it as an interpretation. I was looking through it.

Only when connection returned did the lens become visible.

There is something extraordinary about that. We often imagine insight as something we should be able to reach by thinking clearly enough in the middle of an experience. But there are truths about our inner world that remain inaccessible until the conditions for seeing them exist. My system first needed to discover that the feared ending had not happened. I needed to sit across from this person again, hear his voice, speak my own experience, listen to his, and feel that the bridge between us was still there.

Then the old reality developed a crack.

Not because I replaced it with a better story, but because life itself contradicted it.

This also changed the question I had been asking about the relationship. During the rupture, part of me wanted to decide whether this was a connection I should remain in at all. Now I see the wisdom in not answering certain questions while terror is answering on my behalf.

There will always be relationships that need to end. If the same rupture keeps repeating and two people cannot find a way to meet each other within it, walking away can be an act of maturity. But discernment has a different texture from escape. I want to know which one is speaking before I close the door.

The turtle knows something about this.

It carries its home with it. It retreats when retreat is needed. It emerges when the world can be met again. It does not mistake slowness for failure.

There is a kind of trust in allowing an experience to remain unfinished long enough for more of the truth to arrive.

I don’t need to decide what everything means at the moment it hurts.

I can leave a little air around what feels absolutely certain.

Because the most deeply buried beliefs are not always hiding somewhere in the darkness waiting to be discovered.

Some of them are the eyes through which I am looking.

And it may take the return of safety, connection and time before I can finally see the difference between the world itself and the ancient story I have been seeing the world through.