If someone can't show up for you, they are revealing their capacity, and not a reflection of your worth.
Every single person deserves this reminder and to drink it in like daily medicine:
Your worth and value—as the indelible person you are—has nothing to do with the capacity of any other person to meet you in that splendor.
As humans, we use the feedback of others to make sense of who we are:
"I know I'm funny because people laugh at my jokes!"
And we internalize this external feedback, and it becomes part of our identity.
This same mechanism goes terribly wrong when the inability of other people to be present and consistent feels like a reflection of who we are or a measure of our worth.
As infants, we can't rationalize the absence of caregivers not showing up or meeting our needs or emotional states - and we endure and compensate. These compensations can be called attachment styles.
As we get older, we add stories to fill in the gap of why people don't or didn't show up for us.
Other people not showing up for us can look like them pulling away, shutting down, stonewalling, ghosting, or not being able to validate and honor our feelings and needs.
These inner stories can sound like this:
"If I were loved, people would stay!"
"If I were enough, people would show up for me!"
"If I were ____ (smarter, better looking, more important, etc.), they would be less distant and meet my needs."
The sad tragedy is that these stories become beliefs - and these beliefs then get internalized as who we are.
How do we even begin to unwind a lifetime of narratives and beliefs that lock us into pain and suffering?
Let's start by recognizing that the pulling away, shutting down, not meeting you, etc., is the behavioral reflection, the symptoms, of the other person's capacity. It is a manifestation of their not feeling safe in themselves to be fully present with another person, the limit of connection they can handle, and the overwhelm of their nervous system with the lack of resources to navigate it. In other words, they can't be there for you because they can't be there.
It's sad to be on the receiving side of this truth, and awareness is one of the first steps to healing and changing this pattern of pain.
