My dad and I have done real work together
I've coached him through limiting beliefs, old fears, a stuck sense of who he was. What came out the other side was a rekindled relationship with his brothers and sisters, a sense of purpose in ordinary days, the ability to say something vulnerable out loud. We even spent a week doing plant medicine together in Portugal.
It wasn't always like this. My mother died when I was 15 and we never talked about it. We spent time together but I always felt worse after. If you had an emotionally unavailable dad, you know what that feels like.
A few years ago, he and my stepmom Jacqueline came to visit us in Bali. He decided he wanted to get an eagle tattooed on his chest. A big one. It was his way of marking the freedom he felt after everything he'd been through. My dad had never done anything like it.
I sat down with Jacqueline and asked her what she thought about it.
She said: "I don't like tattoos, but I love him for who he is and what he does in life. So I'm excited for him. Not for what it's going to look like, but because I can already tell how it makes him feel."
That answer shocked me. My girlfriend at the time hated my tattoos. Wouldn't even explain why. I always felt judged and unsupported around it, but I didn't know any better. I didn't know love could be so accepting of another person's whole self.
That moment planted something in me. It showed me what it looked like when someone loves the person, not the version of the person they'd prefer. Over time that seed grew, and it eventually played a part in ending that relationship.
I'm with my wife now. We love and support each other in ways that still sometimes catch me off guard.
My dad got his eagle.
Here is the mechanism, because understanding it changes how you look at your own relationships.
When you grow up with a parent who couldn't meet you emotionally, you learn to manage yourself around them. You shrink certain parts. You stop bringing things to the table that got dismissed or ignored before. That pattern doesn't stay in your childhood home. It travels with you. By the time you're an adult choosing a partner, "love" already has a particular shape in
your nervous system, and that shape includes some degree of conditional acceptance. You don't notice it as a condition. It just feels like normal.
So when Jacqueline said what she said, I didn't feel inspired. I felt confused. It didn't match the template I had for what love looked like. My girlfriend's disapproval of my tattoos felt familiar in a way I couldn't name yet. Familiar is not the same as good, but the nervous system doesn't distinguish between the two. It just reads familiar as safe.
This is why people stay in relationships that feel subtly wrong for years. Not because they're weak or unaware. Because the wrongness is calibrated to their early conditioning. It fits.
The question worth sitting with is: what parts of yourself do you manage, hide or apologise for around your partner? Not the parts that genuinely need addressing. The parts that are just you.
If you can't answer that quickly, start smaller. Think about the last time your partner reacted negatively to something you did or wanted, and ask yourself whether you felt judged or whether you felt seen. There's a difference. Being challenged by someone who knows and accepts you fully feels different in the body than being managed by someone who doesn't quite approve of who you are.
If you want to test this in your relationship, here is how to do it in order.
1. Pick something real. Not a test case, not something minor you don't care about. Something that actually matters to you, that you've been keeping quiet or softening around your partner. A desire, a habit, a plan, a part of your history.
2. Bring it to them plainly. Not defensively, not as a confession. Just state it. "I've been thinking about doing this. It means something to me." Leave room for their response without pre-managing it.
3. Listen for what the response is actually about. Are they engaging with you, your feelings, what this means to you? Or are they immediately in their own reaction, their own preferences, their own discomfort? Both responses tell you something true.
The common mistake here is turning this into a trap. You share something, your partner reacts badly, and you treat that as proof they don't love you. That's not the exercise. One reaction on one day isn't a verdict. What you're looking for is a pattern over time. Does this person, on the whole, love you toward your full self or toward a more manageable version of it?
