Why High-Achieving, Self-Aware Women Struggle in Relationships
I was working with a client recently in my Inner Alchemy Program who on paper has it all together. She’s done years of therapy, sat in countless ceremonies, read every book, looked deeply within herself, and genuinely feels content in her life.
Her work is fulfilling, she has a beautiful home, wonderful friends, a supportive community, a clear sense of purpose, and she’s deeply connected to her calling. Her health is good, her mindset balanced, and when you speak to her, you can feel her self-awareness — it’s genuine, not performative. She has really done the work.
And yet, her dating life has been a continuous struggle. She’s thirty-nine and has never had a relationship last longer than three months. She looked at me recently and asked, “But why? Why can’t I seem to make it work when everything else in my life feels so good?”
And I knew why.
The Gap Between Explaining Emotions and Feeling Them
She has an extraordinary ability to explain her inner world — she can describe her sadness, her heartbreak, her grief — with such clarity and consciousness that it’s almost poetic. But as she was speaking, something in me felt the absence of actual feeling. Her words were vulnerable, but her body wasn’t. It was as if she had built a bridge between her emotions and her expression — one made entirely of intellect and understanding.
She was speaking about her feelings rather than from them.
And that’s such a common experience, especially among those who have journeyed deeply into self-development. We learn to articulate our pain, name our patterns, and understand our wounds, but sometimes in that very process, we become detached from the rawness of what we’re actually feeling. We intellectualise the emotion instead of embodying it.
How Inner Protection Blocks Emotional Connection
Intellectualising the emotions is an incredibly intelligent form of protection. The mind steps in to keep us safe. If we can understand it, we can control it. If we can name it, we don’t have to be consumed by it. But the truth is, when we operate like this for too long, we begin to lose touch with the part of us that feels, that trembles, that cries, that loves without knowing how it will end.
And so we stay safe — but we also stay untouched.
The feminine, at her essence, is the current of emotion, of movement, of surrender. She wants to be seen, felt, and met in her truth. But if she doesn’t feel safe — whether within herself or with the person in front of her — she’ll stay in the mind. She’ll explain, justify, and perform vulnerability rather than embody it.
And often, this happens because the masculine energy within us has become overdeveloped. We’ve learned to protect ourselves, to create safety, to hold everything on our own — which is powerful and necessary at times — but it can also mean that we don’t leave space for someone else to help hold us.
What Real Safety in Love Truly Requires
True safety in intimacy is co-created. It’s not about splurging our hearts open to anyone, nor is it about staying behind the walls of independence. It’s the dance between inner and outer safety — the moment when we trust ourselves and the other enough to let the heart breathe again.
True intimacy requires us to soften. To let ourselves be seen — not just for the parts that we’ve already processed and integrated, but for the parts that still ache. It asks us to risk being felt in real time, not once we’ve tidied up the emotion and found the perfect way to explain it.
And this is terrifying for many of us. Because to be fully seen means to relinquish control. It means that someone might not meet us, might not understand, might not hold us the way we need. But without that risk, love becomes theoretical. It becomes something we talk about, not something we live.
Moving From Awareness to Embodied Love
So our work together has become less about “understanding” and more about feeling. Less about talking it through and more about letting it move through.
Interestingly, she is dating someone now, which makes it even more powerful to work with her in real time through this experience — to help her see how deeply she longs to be seen, and how, until now, she has been the one unconsciously hiding. For years she’s wondered why men haven’t really seen her, when in truth she has never fully allowed herself to be seen.
Recently, she shared something beautiful that happened between them. She told him about a meaningful experience she’d had, and he said, “I’d love to hear more about that.” And she shrugged it off, changed the subject, brushed past it as if it were nothing. But that moment was everything. It was a window. An invitation. A chance to open and share something real — and she didn’t take it.
And now, we get to work with that. To slow it down, to explore what was happening in her body in that moment. What part of her closed? What fear was being protected? What would have happened if she had stayed open instead?
These are the moments that change everything. Because when we begin to notice ourselves in real time — when we can see where we retreat and where we hide — we also begin to reclaim the power to choose differently.
This is the bridge between awareness and embodiment. Between understanding love and allowing it to find us.
Because healing isn’t just about explaining where we’ve been — it’s about feeling where we are.
And that’s the work I love to do: helping women come home to the body, to the places that have gone numb, to the tenderness they’ve learned to guard. It’s not about fixing or improving; it’s about remembering how to feel again, how to be safe in our softness, how to let ourselves be truly seen.
Because only when we allow ourselves to be seen — in all our depth, our truth, and our humanness — can love really find a place to land.
