By Lori Marchak and Craig Stein
We all know those inner refrains: I’m not good enough. I’m too much.
They’re not random wounds. They make sense in context.
For many men, the conditioned strategies of working hard, staying ahead, accommodating, and withdrawing once ensured belonging and survival. But they rarely meet the emotional needs of their partners or children. Nor do they address men’s own needs for connection, love, and genuine intimacy. These strategies keep life functioning—but they keep love at a distance.
For many women, the deeply ingrained pattern of caring—of tending to everyone’s needs, including their own—can lead to emotions that feel too big for others to hold. The result is a painful paradox: the more they reach for connection, the more others retreat.
Both make sense. Both are rational responses to the worlds we came from—family, culture, and generations of adaptation etched into our nervous systems. They were the best we could do.
When conditions for healing draw near, what begins to shift is not that we suddenly become enough or learn to be less. It’s that we stop believing we’re supposed to be either.
We stop trying to perform emotional perfection—to share our feelings in just the right way, to communicate without rupture, to carry each other’s pain gracefully and without fatigue. These are noble attempts, but underlying them is fear and anxiety. Often, that is the message that others feel and receive, rather than the love we intend to communicate.
The problem isn’t our failure to be good at relationships. It’s that we were never taught how to bear the enormity of the pain and alienation that we’ve inherited.
When we begin to see that we’re not bad or wrong, but lack experience of safety and support, something softens. We can say, with more honesty and less defense:
I want to care for you, but it’s too hard. I’m too frustrated and overwhelmed.
I get to have these feelings, even if they’re too much for you.
I don’t know what I want or need—or how to assert myself without being a burden.
There is no shame in not being enough, and no guilt in being too much. There’s only the invitation to be human, together, amidst it all.
This is what we’re really trying to say: Can we go through this together? Can we be bad at this for a while, and hold hands while we get better at it? I’d rather struggle through our messy but real life together with you than have some fantasy of a “safe” but shallow life without you.
When we stop trying to be the right kind of person in a relationship—strong enough, calm enough, caring enough, not too much—we begin to move beyond the roles that keep us trapped. We start to meet one another as humans, not as performances of masculinity or femininity, competence or sensitivity.
This is the real work of healing: learning to stay present inside the messiness of being two imperfect nervous systems trying, sincerely, to love.
