Don't Be Mad At Me

January 15, 2026

I’ve been doing some research on attachment, love, traumatic endings, and how our bodies, brains, nervous systems, and emotional centers process loss.

One thing I learned recently is that our emotions process faster than our brains do.

The feelings surge first.

They rip through the body.

They overwhelm the nervous system.

Over time, they calm.

The timing is different for everyone, but the order is consistent: emotion first, cognition later. Much later than most of us want.

That’s why it’s normal to think about a relationship even after the hurt has subsided. Even after you feel emotionally neutral. Even after you’ve let go.

The brain finally feels safe enough to process things cognitively. And when it does, thoughts and memories begin to surface.

That framework explains something I’ve been noticing in myself.

Last week, I wrote about lies and manipulation. A few days later, I wrote about memories of tenderness and love rising to the surface. Today, another memory appeared.

It was something he said to me after he disappointed and hurt me on one of the most important days of my life as a mother. The day I was moving my first child out of town.

I won’t go into the specifics of what he promised. What matters is what he said when he didn’t follow through.

Instead of apologizing, he said,

“Please don’t be mad at me.”

Almost like a little boy.

To be fair, it wasn’t always like that.

There were a lot of times when he listened.

Times when we talked things through.

Times when he said things like, we can make this work.

I believed we communicated openly. I believed the conversations mattered.

And in the moment, the words were often right.

What I couldn’t see at first was that the words weren’t consistently followed by action. Or by repair. Or by change over time.

That sentence —

“please don’t be mad at me” —

says everything about his capacity to sit with emotional discomfort. About his inability to tolerate letting me down. About the unspoken expectation that my very reasonable hurt needed to be minimized for his comfort.

Instead of accountability, I was expected to coddle.

Instead of repair, I was expected to reassure.

Instead of an apology, I was asked to make him feel okay.

I needed to not hold him accountable.

I needed to let it go.

I needed to never bring it up again.

Even when there was real hurt.

Broken trust.

Unfinished repair.

I’ve spoken before about the power of patterns, especially patterns of behavior. They tell us far more than isolated moments ever could.

Please don’t be mad at me or other words that never fully took accountabililty.

Followed by words without follow-through.

Without consistency over time.

That was the pattern.

And eventually, after more moments like this than I can count, I hit my limit.

I couldn’t put his comfort above my own pain anymore.

That is what led me to blocking him when he said he was too busy to stop by the hospital.

That was the separation.

That was what ultimately led to the full exposure.

Not anger.

Not revenge.

Not drama.

It was resentment.

It was unreasonable, accumulated hurt.

Hurt that began very early on.

It was the absence of real repair.

It was the absence of consistency over time.

And finally I began the process of stopping the abandonment of myself so he wouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable.

And that changed everything.