The Most Important Relationship You'll Ever Have Is With Yourself

I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard Taylor Swift’s Tolerate It. It hit me like a tonne of bricks, because she wasn’t singing about heartbreak. She was singing about something quieter and worse: being in a relationship where you’re doing all the noticing, all the watching, all the effort, while the other person simply allows you to be there. The gap between being tolerated and being loved. Sitting across the table from someone, doing everything right, and still feeling like a guest in your own relationship.

If it's all in my head tell me now

Tell me I've got it wrong somehow

I know my love should be celebrated

But you tolerate it

I didn’t have language for any of that before I heard it. I just knew I’d spent years in a relationship built almost entirely on self-abandonment, shrinking myself, performing for crumbs, mistaking being permitted to stay for being wanted. Hearing it named, externalised, sung back at me in three minutes, something in me cracked open.

That was my story for a long time. And, honestly, it didn’t stay confined to one relationship, or even to romantic ones. The same pattern ran straight through my friendships too, the same shrinking, the same performing, the same working harder to be liked than I ever worked to just be myself. Good Girl Conditioning doesn’t pause to check whether the person in front of you is a partner or a friend before it switches on.

James has watched my whole deprogramming process up close, almost from the start. He’s the lucky bugger who’s still around to see who I am on the other side of it.

You know the pattern. With partners. With friends. Sometimes both, at the same time, in different rooms of your life.

You give your full self to a partner or a friend who gives you their leftovers. You stay flexible, available, easy, accommodating, while they stay vague, inconsistent, hard to pin down. You tell yourself you’re patient. Understanding. Not needy.

What you’re actually doing is performing for a love that was never on offer.

And here’s the question nobody asks when you’re in it: if love has to be earned, who taught you that?

The conditioning underneath the chase

Nobody is born believing love is a reward for good behaviour. That belief gets installed.

It gets installed by a parent whose attention was inconsistent, warm one day, withdrawn the next, so you learned to scan for which version of them you were getting. It gets installed by a household where being quiet, easy, and undemanding kept the peace, so you became quiet, easy, and undemanding as a survival strategy, not a personality trait. It gets installed by being praised for achievement and overlooked for just existing, so your nervous system quietly concluded: I am loved for what I do, not for who I am.

This is Good Girl Conditioning. It’s the same mechanism as Biderman’s Chart of Coercion, the framework originally used to describe how prisoners of war are controlled, repurposed here because the parallels are too exact to ignore. Inconsistent reinforcement. Conditional approval. Punishment for autonomy, reward for compliance. Most of us didn’t survive a war. We survived a childhood. But the nervous system doesn’t know the difference between the two, it simply learns the rules and keeps playing by them, forever, with whoever’s in front of it.

So as an adult, when someone gives you the bare minimum and you find yourself trying harder, becoming more flexible, more agreeable, more invisible, you’re not malfunctioning. You’re fluent in a language you were taught before you could walk.

You’re not chasing love. You’re chasing a rerun

And the part that bloody stings... it’s rarely really about the specific person who’s unavailable, partner or friend. You’re in love with the chance to finally win.

Every time you try to make someone choose you, you’re not really negotiating with them.

You’re renegotiating with your past, quietly hoping that this time, if you perform hard enough, the ending changes. That this time, taking up less space gets you more love instead of less.

It never does. It can’t. You’re not trying to solve a present-day relationship. You’re trying to solve a childhood one, with the wrong person, using the wrong tools, in the wrong decade.

Which brings us to the only love that was never conditional

Parents can fail you. Partners can leave. Friends drift. Even the people who love you well will, at some point, be unavailable, distracted, human, imperfect.

There is exactly one relationship guaranteed to last your entire life: the one with yourself. And if you grew up learning that love is conditional, you almost certainly never learned how to run that relationship without conditions either.

This is why “just love yourself” lands like nothing. It’s not a mantra problem. It’s a skills problem. Nobody taught you the mechanics, so you’re being told to do trigonometry in a language you’ve never studied. (As an aside, so glad I spent all that time at school learning trigonometry because it's come in so useful in my life/career. Not.)

What self-love actually is (because it isn’t bubble baths and bullshit affirmations)

Self-love isn’t a feeling that arrives if you wait long enough or repeat the right phrase in the mirror. It’s a practice, built the same way every other relationship skill is built: through repetition, not inspiration.

It looks like:

• Staying with yourself when you’re not okay. Not abandoning yourself the moment things get hard - which is exactly what you’d be doing if you numbed, distracted, or performed your way out of a difficult feeling instead of sitting with it.

• Telling yourself the truth. Not the polished version you’d give in a job interview, the actual truth about what’s not working, who’s not showing up, and what you’ve been tolerating because you were scared of being “too much.”

• Protecting your own time and energy the way you’d protect someone you loved. If a friend handed their whole calendar over to someone who barely texted back, you’d say something. Say it to yourself.

• Talking to yourself the way you’d talk to someone you actually liked. If your internal monologue would be cruelty if said out loud to a friend, it’s still cruelty when it’s silent and aimed at you.

• Receiving without performing first. Letting someone help you, compliment you, or care for you, without immediately working out what you owe them for it.

None of that requires anyone else’s permission. None of it requires being chosen.

How you start, practically

You don’t fix a decades-old pattern by deciding to, once, dramatically. You fix it the way you built it, slowly, through repetition.

• Name the pattern out loud. “I am trying to earn something that should be freely given” is a sentence that breaks the spell the moment you say it.

• Catch the performance in real time. The exact second you notice yourself becoming more accommodating to keep someone interested, that’s the moment to stop and ask: would I have to do this for someone who already wanted me?

• Practice being chosen by yourself first. Before you check whether anyone else picked you today, ask whether you did. Did you rest when you needed to? Speak up when something mattered? Or did you abandon yourself again, quietly, the way you were trained to?

• Reparent the part of you still running the old script. That part isn’t broken, it’s loyal. It’s still trying to win a love that was never available, using tools it learned at five years old. It doesn’t need shame. It needs you to step in as the adult and say: I’ve got this now. You don’t have to perform for me.

You don’t need anyone to choose you to have worth

I want you to remember this.

You were never too needy. You were neglected, and you adapted brilliantly to survive it.

The fact that you’re still looking for love now doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It means the wound is still open, and you’ve been trying to close it with the wrong hands.

Self-love won’t replace the love you didn’t get as a child. Nothing can go back and give you that. But it can stop the chase. It can be the safe, stable, unwavering love you’ve been trying to extract from people who were never built to give it - because it’s the one love that was always, fully, entirely within your control.

I think about that Taylor Swift line again... 

If it's all in my head tell me now

Tell me I've got it wrong somehow

I know my love should be celebrated

But you tolerate it....

and I think about how long I spent waiting for someone else to do the celebrating. The truth is, you can stop waiting. You can be the one who celebrates it. You can be the one who finally treats your own love like something worth more than tolerance.

So, who are you trying to win over right now? And what would it look like if you stopped performing for them, and started showing up for you instead?

If this is landing somewhere familiar, this is exactly the territory Rise Above is built for. Take the Good Girl Roles quiz and find out which role you’ve been playing to stay safe - and what it would take to finally put it down.

If you want to get The Deprogramming Room emails directly in your inbox every Sunday. Sign up here.