Afraid to Lose You. Afraid to Lose Myself.

There's always one person afraid of losing the other, and one afraid of losing themselves.

That tension lives in the body before it ever becomes a conversation. It shows up as a hand that reaches a little too often, or a chest that quietly closes when someone gets too close.

We don't always know which one we are. And the truth is, we're usually both. At different times, with different people, in different seasons of the same relationship.

It flips. The one who once clung becomes the one who guards their edges. The one who needed space starts aching for closeness. This isn't inconsistency. This is what happens when two people are trying to love each other without having first learned how to stay with themselves.

When we don't know ourselves well, we start outsourcing. The one afraid of losing themselves calls their partner too much. The one afraid of losing the other calls their partner distant. Neither is wrong about what they feel. Both are revealing the places they haven't yet learned to hold.

And underneath both fears lives the same longing.

To be loved fully, without disappearing.

To be met in a way that doesn't ask you to betray yourself to receive it.

When we're unaware of this cycle, we meet through it. Every silence gets filtered through: will you leave me? Every glance becomes: am I too much? Every moment of closeness carries the weight of: how long until this changes?

But something different becomes possible when we can name what's actually happening.

Not fix it. Not resolve it in a single conversation. Just name it.

"I'm afraid to lose you."

"I'm afraid to lose myself."

Those two sentences, spoken honestly, from a regulated and grounded place, can change the entire architecture of a moment.

They move us from defending our position to revealing our tenderness. From closing off to making contact.

This is some of what I explore in my sessions, and also in my program Relating, Me Before We.

The idea that the quality of our relating begins with the quality of our relationship to ourselves.

Not as a self-improvement project, but as an act of love toward everyone we're close to.

When you know your own edges, your own needs, your own capacity, you bring something real into contact with another person.

Not a version of yourself shaped entirely by their proximity.

This week, I'm bringing a workshop of this to the Taste of Love Tantra Festival in the Hunter Valley, April 9-12.

A 2-hour workshop where we'll explore this somatically, relationally, honestly.

What it means to be with another person without losing the thread back to yourself.

If you're there, come find me.

If you're not, this work lives in my program online. www.narladean.com

With love,

Narla