“I wrote this essay. This came to me when you were talking about the fact that you stayed in a marriage for longer than you should have done, and that you'd used a skill that had got you a lot of accolade in your military career, but it had damaged you when it came to your relationship. The curse of psychological strength.
Everyone has a limit, an end to the amount of discomfort that they can cope with. This is obvious physically. Some people can lift more and run further than others. But how much emotional pain, upset or disappointment a person can endure is subtler and harder to detect. It's not apparent in the size of someone's arms, but the capacity of their nervous system. It's not a weight that you can see on a squat rack. It's their ability to carry a heavy emotional load. This psychological strength can be a good thing. You're able to handle more than most.
You don't bulk up pain. You keep pushing through regardless of how you feel. But too much strength can be a weakness.
High performers are particularly vulnerable to this trap. Psychological strength is rewarded almost everywhere.
In the gym, it's discipline.
In business, it's grit.
In public, it's composure.
You become the person who can handle it, who doesn't complain, who pushes through when others would quit.
Your ability to ignore how you feel and keep moving forward earns admiration, builds your career and creates momentum. But what you are praised for in public, you often pay for in private. Relationships don't reward endurance, they require attunement.
If your default strategy in life is to absorb discomfort and override warning signs, you will do exactly that when someone repeatedly hurts you. You'll rationalize it, reframe it, decide it's your job to make it work. And the stronger you are, the longer you can stay.
What looks like strength from the outside becomes self-abandonment on the inside. You've trained yourself to believe that struggle is noble and difficulty is meaningful. So when love feels destabilizing, it doesn't register as a warning, it feels like a challenge.
And challenges are your thing. But a relationship isn't a marathon to be endured, it's a place to feel safe. The qualities that make you formidable in the arena can quietly make you miserable in your own living room.
“Let's say that you're dating and feel like a side character in your own relationship. You put them first and they put you sixth. The rupture is regular and the repair is absent.
Lower resilience, less stubborn people, would have broken long ago and said, I'm out. But not you. You're the Jocko Willink of psychological suffering.
Forget carrying the boats, you'll carry the whole fleet forever. In these situations, you're faced with a much tougher problem. Not how much can you tolerate, but how much do you want to tolerate.
Perhaps this is what you had to do as a child. If your needs weren't noticed, your sadness was ignored and your feelings didn't matter, then you become accustomed to pushing through disconnection in order to make those relationships function. If child you learns, I need to work hard to be loved, then adult you believes, if I am not loved, I just need to work harder.”
“You've achieved 10,000 hours of ignoring your own needs. You can't tell people how you feel without first worrying about how it'll make them feel. You unconsciously believe that suffering is the price of connection and that silent subjugation is noble.
You basically think, I should be able to tolerate the intolerable in order to make this work.”
