"I Cannot Re-Member": On Estrangement, Relational Memory, and the Dance We Know | The Relational Thread

There is a particular kind of grief in understanding someone you can no longer be close to in the same way. Sometimes not understanding would be easier; a villain simplifies grief. But many of us who find ourselves estranged from someone we love are left with something far more complicated. We understand. This is Jen's first essay for The Relational Thread, and it's about that grief. In close relationships we don't simply learn things about one another, we learn choreography. Relational memory is the implicit knowing carried forward from repeated experience: what closeness requires, what conflict predicts, what shape we need to take to preserve connection. With enough repetition, those adaptations stop feeling like strategies at all. They simply feel like who we are. One child learns to disappear. Another learns to perform. Some of us learn to rescue. The essay follows what happens when one person stops taking the familiar step — how the relationship begins reaching for the old version of you, because that is the version it knows — and how the question of estrangement becomes something more subtle than whether you want someone in your life: who do I have to become for this relationship to continue in its familiar form? It ends with a poem about the difference between recalling who we once had to be and "re-membering": gathering those fractured pieces of myself back into the shape that once made the relationship possible. Understanding someone's pain is not the same as organizing your life around it. Distance does not require a loss of empathy. And another person's pain can move us without becoming an instruction. Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week): https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_Therapists_Summer_2026 The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage: https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.