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hey guys I'm Heidi PRI welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we're going to be talking about maintaining personal Integrity inside of our relationships so what that looks like is
Heidi Priebe explores how to balance personal authenticity with relational care, distinguishing the pain of disappointment from the pain of feeling uncared for, and contrasting insecure and secure res
Key Takeaways
- Disappointment is inevitable in close relationships; the key is avoiding the added pain of feeling uncared for.
- Relationships are not zero-sum; secure partners negotiate ongoing balance between each person's needs.
- Explicitly communicating care and relational reassurance buffers the impact of unavoidable disappointments.
- Repair work matters after significant disappointments, including acknowledging how actions affected the other person.
What the video covers
- Introduces the monthly theme of maintaining personal integrity within relationships, balancing authenticity with closeness.
- Notes that people raised without secure attachment often struggle with tension between self-expression and keeping connections strong.
- Distinguishes two types of relational pain: disappointment when expectations go unmet, and feeling uncared for.
- Explains that disappointment is tolerable when people feel cared for through it, but insecure systems pile pressure onto actions alone.
- Describes how conflicting needs trigger dysregulation, fear, panic, or anger, leading to narrowed thinking.
- Argues that disregulated people often see relationships as zero-sum games, believing one person's needs must be sacrificed.
- Warns that self-abandonment or selfish withdrawal both lead to resentment, scorekeeping, and eventual relationship damage.
- Contrasts secure patterning, which seeks creative solutions that honor both self and other rather than choosing one.
- Emphasizes learning to tolerate disappointing others and seeing oneself as capable of letting people down without being unlovable.
- Recommends explicitly reassuring the other person of care, empathizing with their hurt, and repairing damage when significant disappointment occurs.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Personal Integrity in Relationships
- 01:47Two Types of Relational Pain
- 03:32Secure Systems and Negotiating Care
- 05:19Dysregulation and Conflicting Needs
- 07:10The Zero-Sum Trap in Relationships
- 08:58How Secure Patterning Differs
- 10:53Communicating Needs and Empathy
- 13:00Repair After Disappointing Someone
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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figuring out the balance between our own authenticity our own wants needs desires who we are as people and what we need to do and how we need to show up in order to stay in close or even very intimate
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connection with the people that we care about in our lives now if you were raised securely attached those two things might not strike you at all as things that are at odds with each other but if you did not grow up with that
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secure system in place it's really likely that in some form or another you struggle a lot with the tension between your own authenticity and your ability to keep connections strong and close so over the course of this month we're
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going to talk about this from a lot of different angles and lenses but today I want to start by going right to the core of this and talk about what it looks like when we find our own authenticity
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or one of our own needs or wants or desires is in conflict with what somebody else wants so this could be as simple as having a different idea of how you want the night to go than someone that you're planning a date with but it
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could also be as complex as something like the version of myself that I feel most comfortable and happy embodying is a version of myself that someone I'm really close to takes effect offense to or doesn't like or feels hurt by so what
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we're going to look at is how we can find the right balance between self-expression and relational care especially if we feel like some aspect of our self-expression is going to hurt somebody that we care about I want to
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start out by pointing out that there are generally two types of pain that we experience in relationships and once again this might feel totally obvious to you if you air more secure and totally foreign to you if you don't so the first
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type of hurt that we tend to experience in close relationships is the pain of disappointment so of our expectations going unmet or of plans getting canceled last minute or of some aspect of what we were hoping would happen inside of the
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relationship ends up not happening but then we also have the pain of feeling uncared for so if our friends or our partners or our family members feel like we're just not that interested in how we're impacting them or how the things
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that we do affect them there's going to be a direct relational impact of that in most cases it's pretty easy to stomach disappointment when we feel like we're cared about and supported through the disappointment but again if you grew up
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in a culture or in a family system where it wasn't common to talk about feelings what often happens is that too much pressure gets put on the things that you do in a relationship so if we're used to
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showing up for each other as our only means of really showing love then then if you need to cancel a plan or if something that you want to do is in contrast with what someone else wants to do and you care about that person it's
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probably going to create an extreme form of inner conflict because if you don't know how to reassure that person that you still care about them and love them and don't want to damage your relationship with them it's going to
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feel like the only thing you can do is either put your own needs aside and show up for them in the way that you'd concretely planned or disappoint them and have the relationship fall into disarray around that disappointment
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because insecure systems that second type of care the care that shows up and attends to the relational Dynamic itself very overtly and explicitly is the thing that shoulders the pain of the first type of disappointment which happens all
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of the time in life all of the time plans change needs come into conflict and to be in a secure relationship means to be in a kind of ongoing negotiation about which needs get attended to when and by whom so this is a skill that you
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absolutely need to develop if you want to have those healthier more connected relationships down the line but before we get there we're going to look at what happens if you grow up with more of that in meshed patterning when you find
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yourself in conflict with what you need and what someone you care about needs or wants from you and all of the stuff that kind of comes up relative to what might come up for a more secure leaning person
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so let's start out in that moment where you realize that something you want or need or care about is in conflict with someone you love maybe you want space in the relationship but the other person is really struggling and you feel like it's
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not necessarily the right time for you to be pulling back and taking space because maybe you feel like they really need you right now or maybe there's a commitment that you made or something you offered to do for someone that you
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need to back out of because your own circumstances have changed in a way that now make it really challenging for you to follow through on that plan maybe there's something that your partner really wants or needs from you that you
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just don't feel like you can give them authentically so when these moments come up these moments where our authenticity is in conflict with some part of our connection to someone else what often happens when we're insecurely attached or when we don't have the relational
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skills to navigate this is we immediately become disregulated so all of this kind of fear or Panic or anger rushes into the system because we believe that having a need that differs from the need of someone we love means
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that either there is something wrong with us or that we should be ashamed of having our own needs and feelings or that in any case we're now in a situation where somebody needs to get hurt which might be true but what we're
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going to talk about as we go through this is how we can contain that hurt to that first type of pain the pain of disappointment without coupling it with type two which is the pain of feeling uncared about so very often when we're
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in a dis regulated State our thinking gets very neurotic so our thinking starts to narrow and it feels like we have less options than we have in reality so in this case if we have that in meshed patterning our thinking might
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kind of zero in on one of two options either I need to abandon myself in my own needs in order to keep this relationship strong or I need to tend to my own needs in a way that is completely
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selfish which means that I'm abandoning the other person so we start seeing relationships when we're in this disregulated state as Zero Sum games and a zero sum game is one where one player's gain is always the other player's loss so a very basic example
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would be a game where you have $10 and you have to split it between yourself and the other player and there's no way to make more money so essentially every time one player takes a dollar the other person loses a potential dollar there's
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a finite amount of resource being played with when we're thinking of relationships as Zero Sum games we're thinking of relationships as places where only one person's needs can be satisfied at a time if the needs conflict with each other the problem is
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that neither of these options that we see when we're in this disregulated state are either true or lead somewhere positive because what usually happens is when we go down that route of self- abandoning and of putting our own needs
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aside and Catering to what somebody else wants or needs or when we decide to suppress our ourselves in situations where it feels like the person that we are with the thoughts and feelings that we have is not wanted or welcomed by the
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other person this very often leads to resentment and scorekeeping down the line so we start thinking to ourselves well I'm suppressing myself in this way for you or I'm giving you what you want at the expense of what I want which
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means in the future you owe me or there's some form of resentment that's getting built in me towards you and so I think that for a lot of people attra they fall into when they want to stop people pleasing if they've identified
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that they are doing too much of acquiescing to other people's desires and they want to start living from their own desires is that they're still looking at relationships as a zero sum gain and they're still stuck in this
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kind of neurotic thought pattern so instead of self- abandoning they might go okay it's time for me to start doing what I want and I don't care what anybody else thinks and then we're going down that other route of prioritizing
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the self but abandoning other people and not approaching the relationship with care when our self-expression has a negative impact on somebody so when we start going down this route and we give ourselves permission to disappoint people to prioritize ourselves to set
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boundaries all of which are completely and totally normal parts of secure relating so there's nothing wrong with that but we don't combine it with a deep care for the impact that our actions are having on the other person that we're in
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relationship with what often happens is we end up hurting people in more ways than one so we're causing them not just the pain of disappointment but also the pain of not necessarily explaining to them in an embodied and secure way why
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we're doing all of this or not helping them understand why the relationship is suddenly changing and not being present with them as we talk through the impact that our new way of being has on them and finding ways to find a middle ground
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so often what happens if we go into this response pattern with kind of guns blazing and this attitude of I'm just going to do what's right for me and I don't have to answer to anybody else about it is that inevitably we end up
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really hurting people because all of a sudden these connection points that we used to have with them were abandoning left right and Center and they might assume that that means we don't care about them anymore and so often what
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happens when we notice that pain that we're causing other people is we become further disregulated so now maybe shame comes back online or guilt or we start second guessing ourselves or fear that we're going to lose the relationship and
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this can lead to a different range of response patterns maybe we freeze and withdraw because we don't know what to do when someone gets upset with us and I think that in a lot of cases this is where ghosting comes from when we just
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don't know how to respond to the impact that we've had on someone and we go into kind of a shutdown state it can be really hard to bring ourselves out of that face the shame or the fear or
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whatever it is that we have around conflict and enter back into the relationship so this can actually be an exit point from the relationship that we didn't want or intend when we just don't know how to deal with the impact that
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our self- prioritizing has on the people around us another thing that's pretty common is we ourselves might get very disregulated by the idea that someone else is upset with us and so we might take some action that causes that first
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type of pain the pain of disappointing somebody else because maybe we're cancelling on a plan that we made with them or maybe we're expressing ourselves in a way that they're uncomfortable with and we're not really talking through the
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impact of it with them and if we can't self-regulate around the feelings that come up for us when we've hurt someone else another route we might go is trying to get them to regulate us around the fact that we hurt their feelings so
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either explicitly or implicitly trying to get them to soothe us and tell us it's okay that we hurt their feelings Maybe by acting more and more vulnerable and disregulated ourselves and now we're causing once again two types of
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relational pain the pain of disappointment and the pain of the other person having to take the adult role and do the relational repair when they were the one that was hurt so if we try going to the other person and let's say crying
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and going I didn't want to let you down but here's what's going on for me and implicitly asking them to regulate us around the disappointment that we've caused them if that doesn't go well we might split into the third response
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pattern which is villainizing the other person and this is something that I think is actually pretty common but that we don't often look at because if we have too much shame to stay present with the pain that we cause the people in our
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lives one way to get rid of that shame is to tell ourselves a story about how the other person deserved it they deserve to be treated that way or if they have a problem with me doing what's right for me then they deserve to not
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hear from me anymore this type of thinking temporar soothes the shame that comes up when we can see that we've disappointed someone or let them down but it also tends to end relationships permanently because as soon as we're
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putting the other person in that bad guide position inside our own minds because we don't want to stay present and Associated to the fact that we have a responsibility to stay on the page with people when we cause them pain
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intentionally or unintentionally then there's essentially no hope for relational repair to ever happen because it that point we're working with a false model of reality that isn't going to get us anywhere and so now what we're going to do is kind of rewind the tape and go
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back to that moment where we realize that our needs or our wants or our authenticity is at odds with the needs or wants or authenticity of somebody else and we're going to look at what it would look like to approach this through
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a secure lens so through that framing of I'm okay you're okay instead of thinking of Rel relationships as this kind of zero some game where everybody's needs are in conflict with each other we're going to talk about opening this up a
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little bit and exploring what it might be like to play a positive sum game so positive sum game is one where resources are actually able to be increased through collaboration so it's kind of like saying here's $10 if you work
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together to invest it well you could both end up with $10 and that's how we want to start looking at our relationships if I have a need and my partner has a need or my friend has a need or my parent has a need and they
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seem like opposites on the surface how can we think creatively to get to a place where not only does everybody feel like their needs are reasonably satisfied but everybody also feels like they're cared about and like the relationship has a solid foundation to
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it so the first thing that tends to be different right off the bat when we're looking at secure attachment is that in those moments where their needs are in conflict with someone else's secure people tend not to get
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disregulated because they have that inherent worldview of I'm okay there's nothing wrong with the fact that I have needs or that I have wants or that I am a different person than the people around me and I want to express myself
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in different ways and they see it only as a logistical problem so it's not that one of us has to be morally wrong for having the need and the other person has to be morally right and we have to
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figure out who's wrong wrong and who's right to solve this instead of that there's this deep knowing that it's okay that I have needs that's completely normal and part of life and actually it's really important for the people
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around me especially the people I'm in close relationship with for me to make sure that my needs are met because otherwise I'm going to be all disregulated and it's going to show up in my relationships so it's really
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important for me to attend to my needs and I recognize that other people have needs to and just because they have a need or a desire or a form of self-expression that differs from mine doesn't mean that they are bad or wrong
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it's also totally normal and okay that they have needs so what we're looking at here is not a problem of figuring out who's the bad person and who's the good person it's just a matter of looking at how do we get everybody's needs met as
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simply as possible and if that's not possible how do we make sure that the relationship survives a situation where maybe I have to behave in my own best interests in a way that hurts somebody else so where that insecure patterning
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might automatically go to am I going to abandon myself or abandon the other the secure patterning automatically goes to thinking creatively around how do I care for myself and care for the other and what this generally looks like is if
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that first type of pain comes up so if you recognize I have to let someone down here or I have to set a boundary for myself that I know the other person is going to struggle with what we want to
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do is really hone in on that second type of hurt and make sure that as much as possible we are avoiding it we want to make the other person feel cared for and like we are willing to stay on the page
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with them and hear them out and listen to them as they share the impact that this thing is having on them and let them know that even though we can't necessarily give them the thing they want concretely we can still care about
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the relationship and about the impact that our actions are having and for a lot of us especially those of us who grew up with more in mesh patterning this is a very highlevel skill to adopt because it might mean working through a
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lot of old patterning we have around what type of person we believe it makes us if we are ever to set a boundary or disappoint someone so if we have any type of belief that disappointing people makes us a bad person it's going to come
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out really strong and we're actually going to have to make sure that we're able to check ourselves on that because otherwise we're going to be flipping back into that old patterning of either needing comfort from the other person or
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freezing and getting really weird around the whole situation or villainizing the other person so we don't have to see ourselves as the villain so we might find that most of the work we need to do around this skill is actually learning
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to tolerate people being upset with us learning to tolerate seeing ourselves as the kind of person who could disappoint someone else because in Secure relationships there are tons of tiny disappointments that happen all of the time it's just part of being in honest
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relationship with other people communication challenges happen mismatched expectations happen life gets in the way and sometimes we can't always do the things that we really hoped we could do for someone and learning to handle those situations with Grace and
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with care for both ourselves and the other person is a humongous part of what it means to become securely attached to uncouple the ideas that disappointing someone means I am a bad person another thing that might come up in this process
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is you might learn that you really struggle to stand behind your own decisions so when we start acting in our own best interests and other people start reacting negatively to that it requires a lot of character strin for us
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to say you know what I know that this is right for me and to be able to communicate that to other people in a way that is firm but kind and again kindness is the important part here but if we feel like anytime we
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act in our own best interests and someone questions us or gets angry with us or pushes back at us we immediately start to doubt ourselves to the point where we have no idea whether our decision was a good one or a bad one
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that's another area we might just find we need to do some work in learning to get aligned with how to tell in our bodies when we are making a decision that feels right versus one that feels wrong for us and on the flip side of
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this something you might struggle with if you air more avoidant you might feel way more comfortable just kind of backing off or dissociating a little bit from the situation if you feel like you need to disappoint someone because you
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probably internally cringe at telling other people what's going on for you that makes it a challenge for you to show up in the ways that they need you to and you might not even be super aware of that yourself right so the work that
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might need to get done there is sensitizing yourself to the needs and the fears and the challenges that come up for you that tend to put you in that freeze or withdraw response and learning to bring those things into relationships
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and take them seriously so that your partners or friends or family members can also learn to see you as a person who has their own challenges which is probably not the image you tend to give off most of the time because you're
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unconsciously and systematically shutting down your own vulnerabilities now in terms of actual process what we want to be looking at when we need to disappoint somebody so when we're in some situation where our needs are in conflict with someone
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else's and we go you know what now is the time to tend to my needs for whatever reason this is what's really important and feels right right now but I want to also make sure that the relationship stays strong alongside it
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so Step One is being very transparent with the other person around what's going on for you and again what we're doing here is not trying to get the other person to regulate us or soothe us it's simply to lay out on the table
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everything that's going on so that they know what they're working with we are not letting them down or backing off or disappointing them for no reason we're being clear and communicative about what is that we're struggling with and why it
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feels like it's in conflict with whatever it is that they need or want from us that might sound like hey I know I made this commitment and I feel really terribly about backing out of it and I've been really struggling with my
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mental health lately and I'm feeling pretty overwhelmed and I'm wondering if we could have a conversation around how to make sure that this thing I've committed to that I now need to back out of doesn't leave you too high or dry
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maybe there's something you could actually do that would smooth over the situation practically in a way that you wouldn't be able to come up with on your own right so it takes going to that other person and kind of laying
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everything out on the table and figuring out where you might be able to creatively problem solve to get to those solutions that you might not be able to think of on your own this could be as simple as hey I really need some space
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from this relationship but I know that might impact you because we're really close and as of right now we spend a lot of our time together can we talk about how me tending to that need is probably going to impact you and how we can make
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sure that the relationship doesn't suffer too much because of this and as soon as we're having conversations like that we're now tending to that second type of pain right the pain of not feeling cared about people are often
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very willing to understand changes and boundaries if they feel like they're being deeply respected and cared about through the process of those things being said so this leads us to the second thing we want to keep in mind
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we're doing this work which is that we want to make sure we are overtly expressing the care that we have for that person and for the relationship so letting them know here's what I need to do for me but I'm not abandoning you as
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a person in the process I know that the actions I take are probably going to have an effect on you and I care about that and I'm going to be here to process it with you emotionally even if I can't
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do the thing that I once thought I was going to be able to do for you and a big part of this is learning to really empathize with the person who you are hurting and this is actually again a
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pretty high level skill if you come from an insecurely attached background where you might have these shame beliefs that to hurt somebody else means I am a monster and so we want to do that work of getting into that secure I'm okay
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you're okay mindset where we can hold strong in the belief that we are good caring and okay people even when we're letting somebody down and when we can hold strong in that belief it allows us to access actual
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empathy so what actual empathy doesn't sound like is this kind of stilted therapy speak right where we're going I need to set a boundary and I am hoping that you will understand my decision because this is what's important for me
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what it means is finding the place inside of ourselves where we can access genuine authentic kindness and we can put ourselves in the shoes of the person that we're disappointing and really ask ourselves the question what do I think
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that is like for them and how can I make sure that I'm still showing up for them in a way that makes them know I care what would I really need in that situation what pain might I be in and
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how might somebody be able to soo that pain for me even well holding their own boundary around this thing that I'm disappointed around so again this is about working through the shame and guilt that comes up for us so that we
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can access actual embodied real time empathy for the people that we are letting down which is going to make the fourth and final step of this process a million times easier which is the process of relational repair so if we
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have actually hurt somebody if we have disappointed someone in a way that is very significant there's likely repair work that needs to get done in that relationship so we have to think to ourselves how has this impacted the
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other person and what might i' be able to do to make it up to them on either a practical level or an emotional level or in a lot of cases both so if I've backed out of something last minute can I help
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them find an alternate solution and if not can I look at what it might look like in the future for me to rebuild trust with this person maybe that means getting honest with yourself if you tend to overcommit to things and figuring out
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how to stop that process so that you can authentically go back to that person and have a plan for rebuilding your trust with them going forward maybe it means getting real with yourself about the fact that other people tend to not know
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what's going on for you and so they can be really hurt when you let them down because you aren't upfront with them about how much you're dealing with or struggling with and so the repair has to be around bringing more of that into the
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relationship in the future so they have more context as to why they're being let down and they aren't taking it personally because they have no other explanation so whatever it is that it feels like you need to bring more of into the
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relationship in order for the other person to feel like they're cared for and that second type of pain is not happening even when the first type of pain has to this is the work of relational repair and it's going to look
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unique to every situation but here's the thing this process on a small level happens all of the time in Secure relationships it is part of what makes makes a relationship secure is that people feel like they can be honest and
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open about the areas where their needs or their self-expression are in conflict with each other and they can find ways to care about both themselves and the other person simultaneously so that when they need to disappoint each other or even when
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there's no way to avoid hurting each other they still feel respected by each other and they still feel like the relationship itself has a strong Foundation that can absorb things like hurt and disappointment and mismatched expectations relationships are at their
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strongest when they're able to withstand a lot of these type one pains and the more that they're discussed and put out in the open the more you figure out together how to avoid this in the future because if you're aware of what's going
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on for yourself and what's going on for the other person with increasingly greater context and Nuance it means you're not only better at anticipating where your needs might soon come into into conflict you're also better at collectively figuring out Creative
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Solutions to your problems because you are playing that positive SU game with flexibility and creative thinking and once again the reason why secure relationships involve so many need negotiations like this are because both people understand that it's actually
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kind of their social responsibility to keep themselves feeling regulated and resourced because when we are constantly self- abandoning it means we're depleting the resource that we have to show up for other people in an authentic way and over time that really depletes
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our stamina and can lead to things like depression or anxiety or other challenges that make it really hard for us to show up for ourselves and other people so setting those boundaries being clear with what we need and making sure
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that we are prioritizing our own well-being well caring for the people around us and the impact that we have on those people is preventative relational work we're preventing these burn points that could come up down the line if
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we're not attending to these things in the moment even when it's uncomfortable to do so all right I think I'm going to leave it at that for today as always let me know in the comments any questions you guys have as you go through this any
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thoughts that are popping up I love you guys I hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see you back here again really soon [Music]
Topics:attachment theoryboundariessecure attachmentemotional regulationrelationship conflictpersonal integrityself-abandonmentpeople pleasingrelational repairHeidi Priebe
