I Will No Longer Confuse Someone’s Inconsistency With My Inadequacy

Someone’s inconsistency is not a verdict on your worth. It is a reflection of their inner conflict, not your value.

Have you ever tried to make sense of someone who shows up fully one day and disappears the next? High achievers often internalize this behavior as failure. We look at someone’s inconsistency and quietly convince ourselves that we were the problem. Psychology calls this self-referential bias. It is the habit of interpreting someone else’s emotional instability as evidence that we are inadequate.

The truth is much simpler and far more freeing.
Inconsistency is rooted in their nervous system, not your value.

People become inconsistent for many reasons. They may be overwhelmed, avoidant, unregulated, fearful of intimacy, or still carrying unhealed experiences that make closeness feel unsafe. This pattern lives in the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for detecting danger. A person with an unhealed or anxious nervous system does not react to emotional closeness with ease. To them, consistency feels risky. So they pull forward, then retreat. Open up, then shut down. Engage, then disappear.

Their behavior is a confession of their internal chaos. It is not a reflection of your inadequacy.

Where the real injury happens is in the second wound we unknowingly create. Instead of identifying their inconsistency as their struggle, we turn it inward. We criticize ourselves. We question our worth. We offer explanations that sound like self-blame dressed as logic. This second wound often hurts more than the inconsistency itself.

Here is the part high achievers need to hear.
The second wound can heal.

You are not ruined by the stories you told yourself. You simply got tangled in a web you were never meant to carry. Think of the spider who spins a web and accidentally catches itself in the threads. The web is sticky. The struggle is real. But the spider is never terminally trapped. It pulls free, recalibrates, and continues weaving. The web does not end the spider. It only slows it down until it finds clarity again.

You can untangle yourself in the same way.

A Practical Tool: The Reframing Line

Use this in the exact moment your brain starts to blame you for someone else’s inconsistency:

“Their behavior is theirs. My worth is mine..”

Speak it once.
Then take three slow breaths.
This helps calm the amygdala and strengthens the prefrontal cortex, which restores logic, self-worth, and perspective.

This small line interrupts the old story and begins writing a new one.

The Hope You Need to Hold

You are not damaged.
You are not difficult to love.
You are not the cause of someone else’s emotional instability.

Your healing begins when you separate your identity from someone else’s patterns.
Your restoration begins when you stop interpreting their behavior as a mirror.
Your freedom begins the moment you return the weight that was never yours.

You do not heal by chasing clarity from someone who cannot provide it.
You heal by giving clarity back to yourself.

Your worth was never in question.
Your nervous system simply forgot for a moment.
And now, it remembers.