Whatever pain this person caused us becomes the potential danger of everybody else in life.

Sometimes in life a dangerous person comes along.

A person that ends up doing far more damage to us, our self-esteem, our sense of selves and our life,

than we ever thought possible.

Now when someone like this comes along and when we meet them at a time in our life where maybe there are wounds we haven't healed,

there's childhood patterns that we're repeating, where we're doubting ourselves, where we find ourselves at a vulnerable moment,

or we just find ourselves without the awareness of the kind of damage a person like this can do, we let them in.

And upon finding that this relationship is difficult or this person has patterns that we don't understand,

we invest more in trying to make the relationship work, in trying to bring about peace with this person,

in trying to make this person happy or give them what they say they want.

All the while hoping that one day the dynamic will change, that this person will change, that the behaviors that are causing you pain right now will cease.

But they don't.

And when we keep investing in a person like this, when we keep giving and giving and giving, they begin to take up more and more space in our world until eventually they are our world.

They monopolize our time, our energy, our attention and the emotional toll that the relationship takes, the stress, the anxiety, the fear, take up so much space that we no longer have the bandwidth to think about anything else.

When someone becomes our world, it can actually start to rewire our brain the way we think it can create new trauma,

or activate old trauma. It can make it so that we no longer distinguish between this person and the rest of the world.

In our mind and our emotions, they become the same thing. It's no longer what this person is like and what people are like.

Logically we may understand that our X is not everybody, but emotionally it feels like that's not true. Whatever pain this person caused us becomes the potential danger of everybody else in life.

And so when a relationship like this ends, there is this aftermath that continues.

We now no longer present in your life, but they have left an emotional footprint.

So now when we find ourselves trying to form a new relationship, especially romantically, but it can even take place in new friendships, we find ourselves distrusting other people.

We find ourselves thinking that situations represent danger that don't necessarily represent danger.

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