let's imagine that we know what we want to leave a relationship but that we're suffering from a problem which inhibits us from acting on our wishes we can't bear to cause another person pain especially another person towards whom we feel a sense of loyalty who's been kind to us who looks up to us for their safety in their future who has expectations of us and with whom we might have been planning a trip together to another continent in a few months perhaps we've come near to telling them on a dozen occasions but always pulled back
at the very last moment we tell ourselves though we'll get around to it after the holidays or once their birthday party's over or next year or in the morning and yet the deadlines rolled by and we are still here our discomfort has to do with the thought of unleashing an appalling upset they will dissolve into tears there will be sobbing which may last a very long time there will be wailing uncontrollable cries and mountains of wet tissues all because of a truth that currently lurks in the quiet recesses of our cranium we will have been
responsible for dragging a formerly competent and independent person into chaos it's more than we can bear it sounds peculiar but it might almost be better for us to spend the next few decades unfulfilled than experience even five minutes of unbounded upset in another part of our minds there may also be a terror more than we realize day to day we're scared of our partner by telling them it's over we risk a discharge of Titanic anger they may scream at us accuse us of leading them on of being a charlatan and a disgrace there might be
violence and danger there is a certain symmetry to our fears we may tell them and by doing so kill them or we may tell them and they will turn around and kill us kill or be killed no wonder we put off the news the reasonable adult part of our minds knows that these fears are killing and dying can't really be true but this may weigh very little in how we unconsciously feel wielding sensible arguments can at points be as effective as telling a person with vertigo that the balcony won't collapse or a person with depression
that there are perfectly good grounds to be cheerful a lot of our mind is not amenable to hard-headed logic in an ancestral part of us we simply operate with a sense that going against the wishes of a significant person will mean either endangering their lives or our own to explain the origins of such terrors childhood is the place to turn as it always is when trying to account for disproportionate and limitless fears perhaps we are the offspring of a fragile parent whom we loved profoundly and whom it would have broken our hearts to disappoint they
might have been struggling with a mental or physical health they might have been maltreated by another adult maybe they were relying on us to hold them back from despair or justify their whole lives we may have derived an early impression that we had to conform to their idea of us if we weren't to cause them grave damage that our wishes and needs could easily have driven them to the edge that by being more ourselves we might have broken their spirit we simply loved them too much at the same time felt them to be too weak
to ask them to take on our reality we can be three years old and without knowing any of this consciously have taken such messages on board and as a result we might then have learnt to play very quietly to rein in our boisterousness or mischievousness our aggression or our intelligence to be extremely cheerful and helpful around the house to be no trouble at all towards a beloved adult who already seemed to have far too much on their plate alternatively we might have spent almost vulnerable years around a person who responded to any frustration caused by
another person with extreme anger it can be hard to appreciate just how terrifying an enraged adult can seem to a sensitive two-year-old another adult might know that this red-faced figure of course wasn't gonna murder anyone they're just letting rip for a while and we'll pick up the pieces of a smashed farce soon enough but that's not at all how it can seem through a child's eyes how would they to know that this person many times their size wouldn't just go one step further and at the end of their ranting pick up a hammer and smash
their skull in how can they be certain that the momentarily genuinely out-of-control parent who just broke the door wouldn't for that matter throw them out of the window to child murder may be entirely alien to the furious adult but that's not how it can strike a sensitive offspring one doesn't have to actually murder anyone to come across to an unformed mind as someone who seriously might no wonder we might be a bit scared of sharing some awkward news our minds are freita dwith fears that stem from things that happened under precise circumstances long ago but
that continued to have a potent subterranean scarcely recognized an immense force in our lives today by taking stock of the past the task is to acknowledge that these fears are very real but only in a very limited space our own minds they don't belong to adult reality the catastrophe we fear will happen has already happened we have already experienced someone who seemed to risk killing themselves if the news grew too bad and someone who looked like they were perhaps going to kill whomever displeased them but these issues are firmly located in another era we need
to take on board an always unlikely sounding thought we are now adults which means there is robustness to ourselves and to our dealings with others another adult is highly unlikely to collapse on us and if they do there are plenty of measures we can take we will know how to help them cope with their grief directly and indirectly it may seem as if it will never end but that is a child's reasoning not an adults in reality it will be very bad for a few hours or days or weeks but then eventually as happens they
will get over it they will recover their good humor they will wake up one morning and see the world hasn't ended and that they know how to go on similarly they won't actually try to pick up the nearest axe and chop us into small pieces they may be furious they may shout there may be some ugly words but again we are now tall an independent we can get away in extremists we have the number of the police and a lawyer we can let the fury vent and like a well-built bridge in a hurricane be utterly
confident that we can withstand anything that will come our way to further lend us courage we should remember a distinction between being kind and seeming kind it can look as if the kind thing to do is never to anger or distress anyone and therefore never to give a person we have loved unwelcome news but that is to overlook the more insidious ways in which we can ruin someone's life to stay with a person because we wish to avoid a few hours of unpleasantness is no favor to them if we then go on to be bitter
mean snide unfaithful and depressed around them for the next few decades we're not helping someone by sparing them a bad breakup scene if we then deliver a lifelong foot-dragging scene a surprising amount of the misery of the world comes from people being overly keen to appear kind or rather who are too cowardly to cause others short-term pain the truly courageous way to leave is to allow ourselves to be hated for a while by someone who still loves us we shouldn't imagine that they will never find anyone else like us they may believe it now and
might even sweetly tell us so but they won't believe it when they finally understand who we are real kindness means getting out even though the holidays been booked the apartment paid for and the wedding arranged there's nothing wrong with and nothing dangerous about deciding that someone isn't for us there is something very wrong with ruining large chunks of someone else's life while we squeamish me or fearfully hesitate to get out of the way deciding whether to stay in or leave a relationship is one of the trickiest and most consequential decisions we can face our stay
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