I know how lonely it can feel to be surrounded by noise.
You reach for your phone before your feet touch the floor. The reels roll by. A text comes in and you rush to answer, to help, to make sure everyone is okay. By the end of the day, you’ve given your attention to a hundred things. And somehow, the one person you never really spent time with is you.
You might call it being busy. Being kind. Needing to unwind.
I want to offer another way to see it, tenderly: you may be in a polygamous relationship.
What I Mean by “Polygamous”
In session, I sometimes describe it like this.
Your true self is the relationship you’re meant to be committed to. The one that asks for presence, honesty and care. But alongside it, you’ve been keeping other partners. Scrolling. Busyness. Pleasing people. Fixing everyone else’s problems. Planning the next big thing.
Each of these relationships gives you something. Comfort. A sense of purpose. A break from the heaviness. Approval.
And each one takes you away from home.
The hardest part is that these “partners” are so ordinary. Nobody raises an eyebrow at someone scrolling on the couch or helping a friend at midnight. So the pattern hides in plain sight, even from ourselves.
Why We Keep Other Relationships
Nobody chooses escapism because they’re weak. We choose it because being with ourselves once hurt.
If your feelings were too much for the people around you, you learned to leave them. If love was earned by being useful, pleasing others became your safest relationship. If your inner world held grief, fear or shame, distraction became the soft place to land.
These relationships kept you going. They were survival. And they deserve compassion, not contempt.
But what once protected you now keeps you from the intimacy you long for: with yourself, with God/Love, with the people who could truly meet you.
The Two Most Common “Other Partners”
Distraction. Doom-scrolling, binge-watching, endless research, constant noise. It numbs the restlessness and fills the silence where feelings would otherwise surface.
People-pleasing. Saying yes when you mean no. Anticipating everyone’s needs. Becoming the helper, the fixer, the easy one. It gives you a sense of worth, but it’s worth borrowed from other people’s approval, which means you’re never quite at rest.
Both are forms of self-abandonment, becoming smaller, or people-pleasing. Both keep you close to everyone and everything except you.
Why Healing Asks for a Divorce
Here is the part that can feel surprising: healing isn’t only about adding good habits. It’s about ending the relationships that keep you from yourself.
I call it an inner divorce.
Not a harsh, shaming breakup. A clear, loving decision: I am no longer willing to leave myself to be comforted by something that can’t truly hold me.
A divorce is a process. There’s grief in it. The part of you that relied on scrolling or pleasing will feel scared, even lost, at first. You might feel restless, bored or raw. That’s not a sign it isn’t working. It’s a sign you’re returning to feelings you’ve been avoiding for a long time.
How to Begin the Inner Divorce
Notice the moment you leave. When you reach for your phone or rush to say yes, pause. Ask: What am I leaving right now? Usually it’s a feeling: loneliness, fear, sadness, anger.
Wean off gently. You don’t have to go cold turkey. Start with small moments of stillness throughout your day. Thirty seconds before you open an app. One breath before you answer a request.
Choose yourself in small ways. A walk without headphones. A meal without a screen. A “let me think about it” instead of an automatic yes. These are dates with your true self.
Let the grief come. When the old partners loosen their grip, what they were covering rises. Let yourself feel it. Hand on your heart. Breathe. This is the doorway home.
What Commitment to Yourself Feels Like
Over time, something shifts.
You begin to trust your own company. The silence stops feeling empty. You notice what you actually want, instead of what everyone else needs from you. Your energy returns, because you’re no longer spending it keeping yourself away from yourself.
This is what it means to come home. Not to a perfect life, but to a faithful relationship with the one person who has been waiting for you all along.
Try This Today
Write down your “other partners.” What do you reach for when you don’t want to feel? Scrolling? Helping? Planning? Food? Work?
Next to each one, write what it gives you and what it costs you.
Then choose one moment today to stay with yourself instead. Only one. Notice what you feel.
A Gentle Invitation
If you’re ready to stop leaving yourself and want support through the grief and restlessness of coming home, I offer a free 15-minute consultation.
Book a free 15-minute consultation.
The relationship you’ve been searching for starts with you.
Go Deeper at Your Own Pace
If this spoke to you and you’d like to keep going on your own time, my self-paced course Heal Your Body: CPTSD & Codependency After Narcissistic Abuse walks you step by step through healing the trauma bonds, people-pleasing and self-abandonment that relational trauma leaves in the body and heart.
If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, US/Canada) or call 911.
