The Trauma of What Didn’t Happen

I have been contemplating idealization lately. Limerence, fantasy, and the strange human tendency to meet another person and slowly begin falling in love not only with who they are, but with everything we imagine they could be. I know this tendency intimately.

There was a chapter in my life where I began to wait the knight on the white horse, the person who would arrive and somehow know how to love me exactly right. And of course my conscious mind completely denying me doing this, if anyone asked I could say definetly Not!

This special someone would see all of me, understand the depths of my inner world, stay curious about who I am, and finally offer the kind of connection I had always been longing for.

I used to think this was simply romantic idealism, that I was only beginning to open to Divine Love. But now I see a pattern.

I wonder if some of it began much earlier, in something far less visible.

There is trauma caused by what happened to us, but there is also the trauma of what didn’t happen. The conversations that didn’t happen, the emotional availability which was not present, the moments and years where nobody was really curious about you and your inner world. All the questions that weren’t asked. The emotions that weren’t met or were even denied, being punished in subtle ways for feeling. The nervous system that wasn’t helped back into safety through the presence of another. The consistency that wasn’t experienced. The simple feeling of someone genuinely wanting to know: Who are you? What is happening inside you? Let me understand.

I don’t say this to blame anyone. I am becoming increasingly interested in understanding these things without needing to create villains. People can love us and still be unable to meet us in ways that we deeply need. But a child doesn’t stop needing something simply because the people around them are unable to provide it. The need remains, and somehow it has to find somewhere to go.

I do understand how deeply in survival state my parents and their parents have been. There has been no room for things that were not straight linked to staying alive. Food, roof over head, getting hug there and there.

I wonder if sometimes all our unmet needs create a whole world of their own, in our imagination.

If the connection I long for does not exist around me, I can create it inside myself. Somewhere there is someone who will understand me. Somewhere there is someone who will see me, who will finally love me in the way I have always known love could feel.

Seen this way, fantasy is not simply foolishness or romantic naivety. It can be a remarkably intelligent adaptation to emotional hunger. It keeps alive the possibility that what I need exists somewhere, even when I cannot find it in the relationships surrounding me.

But what protects us in one chapter of life can quietly begin preventing intimacy in another.

Eventually a real person appears, and real people are terribly inconvenient for our fantasies. They have limitations and contradictions, their own wounds, desires, rhythms and needs. They misunderstand us. They don’t always respond in the way we hoped. They have boundaries. They may refuse the role we have unconsciously written for them.

And if I have been hungry for something for a very long time, it can become remarkably difficult to distinguish between the person standing in front of me and everything they have begun to represent.

And this was always a surprise for me as most unconscious patterns are. I immetiadly started fantasizing when getting to know new people and being absolutely horrified when they were nothing what I had expected! How dare they! And it’s so sad, how many great people I have just looked pass, because my own limerance. And again, all this happened not in a conscious way, I always had a story ready why these people were unfit for me.

This might very well be one of the roots of limerence. The less I actually know someone, the more empty space there is for imagination to fill. A gesture becomes meaningful, a coincidence becomes evidence, chemistry becomes destiny and intensity can easily be mistaken for intimacy. The internal experience may be enormous while the actual relationship between two people remains surprisingly small.

I find this especially interesting in relation to spiritual ideas about relationships: twin flames, soul contracts, divine counterparts, destined lovers. I don’t feel a need to decide whether such things exist or don’t exist. Mystery is allowed to remain mystery. But I do think spiritual language deserves particular care when it is applied to another human being, because it can give our projections an almost unquestionable authority.

Someone’s distance can become part of a cosmic runner-chaser dynamic instead of simply being distance. Incompatibility can become a spiritual lesson that must be overcome. Another person’s boundaries can become obstacles in a destiny we have already decided belongs to both of us. We may believe we are seeing the deepest truth of the connection while slowly becoming less able to see the actual person.

And this is where idealization becomes intimately connected with boundaries and consent. If I have already decided who another person is, what they feel, why they behave as they do and what our relationship ultimately means, there is surprisingly little room left for them to tell me who they are. I may love my understanding of them very deeply while failing to notice that they are trying to show me something different.

Underneath the fantasy there may be something very real: the original hunger.

And healing, at least for me, does not mean convincing myself that I no longer need anyone. I don’t believe radical independence is the answer to unmet relational needs. We are relational beings. We need to be seen, touched, understood, challenged, loved and accompanied by other people. But another human being no longer has to arrive carrying the impossible task of repairing every relationship that came before them.

That is when something fundamental begins to change. Instead of meeting someone and quietly asking, Are you finally the person I have been waiting for?, I can ask something much simpler and much more vulnerable:

Who are you, really?

And then I have to be willing to hear the answer.

And here, in these moments of openness, space and curiosity, I can feel the love actually flowing. Not when another person finally becomes the fulfillment of the dream, but when the dream dissolves enough for two real human beings to finally see each other.