How Do I Stay Myself When Someone Gets Close?

Why getting close can make you disappear or pull away, and how to stay yourself while staying connected.

When you get close to someone, you can start to lose track of yourself. The nearer you get to a partner, a parent, or a sibling, the fainter your own sense of what you think and want becomes, until it’s hard to tell where you end and they begin. Some people respond by pulling away instead, keeping just enough distance not to disappear.

It can feel like a choice between two bad options: stay close and lose yourself, or stay yourself and keep people at arm’s length.

This is one of the harder things in any close relationship, being fully your own person while fully in connection with another. The two pulls, merging into someone or backing away from them, are really two attempts to solve the same problem: how to be close without feeling overwhelmed or erased. Underneath, there’s often something else as well, a quiet tendency to want your sense of worth or okayness to come from the other person. When that’s running, their mood and their approval can flood your inner world or threaten it, which makes closeness feel high-stakes in an exhausting way.

You don’t actually have to choose between being close and being yourself. The skill is staying in contact with your own center while you stay in contact with them.

That skill can be learned. It’s a bit like a dive into deeper water: unfamiliar at first, and then, with practice, something you can do with more and more ease. Learning it is much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program. You can use the code substack10 to get 10% off at checkout.

In the rest of this article, I’ll go through four things that make it possible: staying anchored in your own body, remembering that you’re the author of your own life, using ordinary interactions as a kind of practice ground, and meeting another person with deep curiosity without being absorbed by them.