When Presence Isn't Enough: The Unspoken Pattern of Emotional Sabotage
It has been 2 days of hiding inside and dealing with the extreme heat. The sleepless nights of this damn window unit that keeps freezing up, and restless dogs that can not get comfortable. I am shifting from one side of the couch to the other because, regardless of the air, the living room is the most tolerable.
I craved a pizza last night, while I was formulating plots for my next book, SEASIDE SHORE, and I made the painstaking mistake of turning the oven on to cook it. The perk in that deal was running to the grocery store with the car AC on high and meandering around a frigid store for a good 30 minutes. I loligagged...
A mason jar full of ice with Pinot Grigio and a deluxe pizza topped with blue cheese crumbles hit the spot as I sat here and typed away my outline for these two characters, Jess and Jake. Although this book is layered in a multi-twist storyline, these 2 are the main focus. It is imperative to psychologically get the patterns down right so readers can identify, and it can pull them into the story, making them want to learn more.
Jess has inherited a resort in the Outer Banks. She hails from the Midwest, but through her fierce independence and determination for a better, logical type of life, she settles in Bangor, Penn. The Outer Banks is roughly 9 hours away from Bangor. Jess has/had a boutique "Sand & Sea" an upscale boutique and an homage to her father and the legacy he attempted to build in SEASIDE, she names her boutique accordingly.
After relentless economic struggles and the death of her father, an old military man, she is left the resort and all of its disrepair. She sells her shop. Packs up her belongings and her cat, Pickles, and heads out for a new life in front of her.
Jess is stubborn in a dreamy kind of "I see this," and therefore, this is how I am going to rebuild it. It's how she saw her boutique, and it's one time success it had. She has the same vision for the old resort. She encounters Jake. An avoidant, a non-emotional older man, set in his ways. He has no time for feeling anything. A military man himself. Stuck in a time frame that now does not serve him, through life's travels, he traded in one crew of men for a current situation filled with an outfit of incompetent workers on an offshore oil rig. Smelly, unintelligent, immature guys who are there just for the paycheck.
Jake is stubborn and reluctant to veer from "this is my job, and if it kills me, I will see it through." Emotional torture is his bad programming. Getting too close to anything that doesn't resemble a tool or an escape path, he routinely sabotages himself, leaving him is a pattern of pivots. I'm here for now but not for long. "I'll ruin this before you can even see the wreckage of my life."
Here is a glimpse...
Sometimes it’s not the words said, but the ones left hanging in cold air that hurt the most.
She stood at the window of the seaside resort, watching the first flurries of snow drift through salt air. The Outer Banks hadn’t seen snowfall in decades. The waves, usually wild and unbothered, now carried a strange silence, casting an icy frost across the shore.
He didn’t knock.
He didn’t call.
He left everything on the front stoop. A bag. A return. A silent message.
No acknowledgment. No closure. Just a withdrawal as frozen as the temperature.
This moment wasn’t isolated. It was a pattern.
He had just returned from twenty days at sea, working offshore, surrounded by men who reeked of oil and sweat, but demanded no emotional depth. There, the mission was simple: do the job. Precision mattered. Emotions didn’t.
He brought that same military-grade conditioning home, expecting that his mere presence should be enough. That showing up, sitting in the same room, or fixing something mechanical would count as love.
But love doesn’t operate like an oil rig.
Love requires emotional lubrication, connection, attunement, and repair.
The Pattern: Emotional Withdrawal Masquerading as Self-Preservation
What she was witnessing wasn’t just cold behavior. It was emotional sabotage. A subtle, passive resistance rooted in an internal wound that whispered:
“If I get too close, I will fail.”
“If I let her in, she might leave.”
“If I show up emotionally, I won’t be able to keep it together.”
So instead, he did what he knew best: he aborted the mission.
He disappeared emotionally. He kept interactions transactional. He withheld kindness, conversation, and closure. He chose the wrench over the relationship. The job over joy. The familiar chaos of solitude over the risk of being seen.
What looked like detachment was actually defense.
Her Response: Boundaries Built on Self-Worth
But she wasn’t going to tolerate it, not because she didn’t care, but because she had learned to.
Her principles were rooted in self-respect, in the sacred contract of mutual emotional effort. She had no desire to beg for love or unravel herself to interpret silence.
She had already known men like this, who offered just enough to keep the door cracked, but never enough to walk fully in. Who wanted the nurturing of a partner, but had no tools to give that same nurturing in return. Who confused presence with participation. Those who viewed emotional requests as burdens rather than bridges.
The Psychology Beneath It
This is the quiet dynamic of avoidant attachment + unresolved abandonment trauma.
When someone fears being left, they often leave first. When someone doesn't know how to process emotional closeness, they label it “too much” or sabotage the relationship to return to what feels safe, distance.
For them, work becomes their coping mechanism. Precision and control on the job provide a sense of power they can't find in unpredictable intimacy. Emotions are messy. So, they revert to performance-based worth:
“I showed up. Isn’t that enough?”
But relationships don’t thrive in passivity. They require conscious effort. Emotional availability. Reflection. Repair.
The Takeaway for Those Healing
If you’ve ever felt like you’re asking for too much by simply wanting to be seen, understand: you’re not asking too much. You’re asking the wrong person.
Principles matter. Boundaries protect. But most of all, you teach people how to love you by how you love yourself, with clarity, with courage, and without shrinking for someone who is unwilling to grow.
If this reflection resonated with you, you may be in a pattern of loving those who are emotionally unavailable. The healing path begins by recognizing the cycle, giving it language, and refusing to abandon yourself the way others have.
You are not the fixer. You are not the rescuer. You are the reward for someone ready to show up, fully.
So as I complicate these 2 characters and their relationship dynamics, twisting and plotting for the sub characters to show up because there are several!!!! Examine your own relationship and how you are showing up for the person who is trying to add stability and value to your life!
It takes two to set things sailing smoothly, raising tides and all that applies... to the ocean of love.
Seaside Shore coming fall of 2025
Kitryn Marie
#writer #publishedauthor #artenrichmentinstructor
