Hello and welcome to The Happya Life Podcast. I’m Clare Deacon, positive psychology expert, trauma-informed coach, and someone who’s spent years unlearning the belief that being easy to love means being easy to tolerate everything.

Today we’re talking about relationships. The real kind. The ones you want to feel fulfilling, reciprocal, nourishing, but that often end up draining, confusing, or one-sided.

This episode isn’t about finding “the one” or fixing other people. It’s about showing up in your relationships, all of them, in a way that honours your needs and your nervous system.

Because thriving in relationships isn’t just about communication skills or emotional intelligence. It’s about safety. And a lot of us haven’t felt truly safe in connection for a very long time.

Let’s be honest: most of us weren’t taught how to do this.

We learned how to manage relationships, not how to be in them.
We learned how to keep things calm, keep others happy, and keep ourselves quiet.

If you were the emotional caretaker in your family, the peacekeeper, the responsible one, the sponge for everyone else’s moods, you probably built your whole sense of safety around how well you could anticipate other people’s needs.

You became exceptional at empathy… and perhaps a bit estranged from your own truth.

And so now, as an adult, receiving love can actually feel… uncomfortable. Because if love wasn’t safe or consistent growing up, your nervous system won’t fully trust it now. You’ll find ways to manage it, test it, overgive for it, anything but simply receive.

That’s not dysfunction. That’s adaptation. And the work now is to gently come back to yourself, and bring that version of you into your relationships.

So what does it mean to thrive in relationships?

Let’s start with a reframe.

It’s not about always being calm, easygoing, or agreeable.
 It’s not about finding the right script or setting perfect boundaries.

It’s about being able to show up with your truth, your whole self, and still feel safe. And when that safety isn’t present, it’s about knowing how to return to yourself without shame.

Because relationships aren’t just emotional, they’re physiological.

Co-regulation is the nervous system’s way of saying, “We’re okay here.” In healthy connection, our systems tune to each other. You feel a sense of ease, of clarity, of being held without having to explain or justify your existence.

When that’s missing, what often replaces it is vigilance. You scan for tone changes. You manage their feelings. You cushion your words. You keep the peace, but lose your peace in the process.

And when that happens often enough, your system will start to associate connection with exhaustion.

Here’s something I share with clients all the time:

It’s not that you’re bad at relationships. You’re just used to surviving them.

And surviving relationships takes energy, constant output, emotional filtering, double-editing your truth.

Thriving, on the other hand, is quieter. Softer. It lets you relax in relationship, not just react.

So how do we shift toward that kind of connection?

We start by building trust with ourselves.
 Because when you trust that you’ll meet your own needs, you stop outsourcing that safety to people who can’t give it.

That might sound like this:
 “I’m feeling overlooked in this dynamic. I need to bring that into the open.”
 Or even: “This relationship hasn’t felt safe for a while and I need to take some space.”

And look, I know the moment you think about saying that, everything in your system might light up.

Because truth feels risky when you’re used to relationships built on performance.

So here’s a small but powerful practice you can use:
 Before you speak, pause and ask: Am I being clear, or am I cushioning my truth to protect their feelings?

And if it’s the latter, you have more choices than you think.
You can still speak gently. But you can speak honestly.

Now, not all relationships will survive this kind of honesty. And that’s okay.

Sometimes people will step up. Grow with you. Relearn how to meet you in a new way.
 Other times, they’ll shrink from the discomfort. They’ll push back. Or they’ll drift.

That’s not always a tragedy. It’s clarity.
 It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means the version of you who tolerated the old pattern… isn’t leading the relationship anymore.

And if you’re feeling unsure about how to navigate those shifts, whether to stay, to speak, or to step away, this isn’t something you have to figure out alone.

Sometimes it takes a thoughtful, quiet space to say, “I don’t know what’s happening in this dynamic but I know it’s costing me something.”

So if that’s where you are, I invite you to book a free, no-pressure chat with me. Go to happya.coach/chat. It’s not a funnel. It’s just a place for you to land and be heard, without performance or pressure.

Let me leave you with this:

You don’t have to earn your place in someone’s life by disappearing inside of it.
You’re allowed to have needs, preferences, boundaries, limits, emotions and still belong.

And you don’t need to keep contorting yourself to hold on to relationships that don’t hold you back.

You deserve relationships that feel real, even when they’re not easy.
 That feel honest, even when they’re messy.
 That feel like home, not like a test.

If this episode stirred something in you, come and share. You can message me on Instagram or book a chat, I’m here for the parts that feel too big to carry alone.

Until next time, take good care of you. 💛 Clare x