Can't fight your skeletons while hanging on to mine.

We experience life, and we grow, we win, and we fail, and in the happiest cases, we learn. But the learning process is biased by our sequence of experiences, which tends to become a pattern. Exactly like animals used in tests we tend to associate past experiences and grow…fears. What animal experiments? The ones where they have some electrical fences and get electrocuted every time they try to escape and touch it so that in time they don’t even get close to them, don’t try to pass them because they might feel pain. Similarly, we end up building our own fences, set our own boundaries.

But because we consider ourselves more evolved than animals, we figured out ways of escaping “just” with emotional luggage. Because we don’t like carrying stuff, we metaphorically built closets where we shove in the… skeletons.

We know about the skeletons in the closets, we agree on having them, although some hide it better than others.

And they’re hidden, because they’re failures, direct results of our lack of some kind of competencies, even if it comes from picking the wrong time, situation or person. Might be our fault, might be Mercury retrogrades fault, long story short, it’s a skeleton, a trauma, that triggers us.

The question is why are we more afraid of the skeletons we find in the closest’s of others?

Why are we getting anxious even by the thought of discovering the closet?

Might be because familiarity plays an important role here. Since ours were made by us, or with us being involved, we have some kind of overview. We know how to put the bones together, and sometimes we even know if there are bones missing. We are born storytellers who can convince themselves that the circumstances causing the death of the skeleton were foreseeable, or impossible to avoid. Mostly we miss the real explanation.

What we don’t know is how the skeleton ended up in someone else’s closet… Our fear fuelled by the unknown is always bigger.

We get blinded by a fear that the other person isn’t able to deal with their own past, and can’t keep the skeletons locked in their closet.

We don’t realize that our fear isn't caused by the other person, is just our own messy closet. It keeps us trapped in scenarios we think we know and makes us project.

We end up blowing relationships by opening our closets and letting our own skeletons loose. Because we lived it with others in the past, we think it's going to electrocute us again.

We must acknowledge that the only common actor in the story is us. It’s ourselves with the bloody closet full of skeletons projecting fears and interpreting everything the new person is doing with our own filters. We fear something we do will remind him of his ex. We think he might reject us if we don't like something he loves doing.

He definitely has his skeletons too, and his own triggers, but everybody should only try to tame their owns.

If we never clean the slate, we don't give a chance to the other person to be themselves, because anything they do ends up being a reflection of our past fears which easily turn into today's argument and sadness.