“I’m Done!!”

Wrestling with, and Surrendering . . . to Need

When someone says “I’m done,” they usually believe they’re finished with their marriage . . . that the relationship has run its course. Their partner can't give them what they want (the partner is the problem).

But more often, something else is collapsing: the lifelong project of trying to control their experience of need.

The adultified child has reached the end of their endurance. Not because they are with the wrong partner or the marriage has failed . . . but because every strategy they’ve used to manage intimacy and avoid the pain of loss in the marriage has run its course . . . and failed.

To Need or Not to Need

The adultified child isn’t trying to build intimacy; they’re trying to survive it.

As a child, intimacy meant exposure. It meant being dependent on someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t meet their needs. The longing for closeness became tangled and conflated with the terror of abandonment.

So the child makes an unconscious but deeply serious vow: I will never need anyone again. . . Or . . . I will take care of everyone else's need so that then it will be my turn to get my needs taken care of . . . OR . . . I will focus on myself; they won't need me and I won't need them. The vow, whichever way it went, became the architecture of relationship and is the signature of the adultified child in relationship.

At a very young age, as early as gestation and infancy, the child understands they will need to parent the parents . . . they will need to be little adults who do not need from their caretakers. As infants and children they are already becoming super competent, burying their needing hearts while becoming isolated, separate and lonely.

They learned to perform a kind of co-dependent care and connection in order to be loved while simultaneously protecting against it, fearing the pain of love ending or being revoked. Every “adult” move has, at its core, a child’s attempt to manage the unbearable ache and frustration of dependency.

For many, it can be overwhelming to realize that their self-development journey over many decades was never really about opening and surrendering; it was about learning to be invulnerable in a convincing way. It can be excruciating to recognize the ways they've used their own growth and goodness as protection. So much of what we’ve called personal and professional development has really been an exquisitely intelligent avoidance of the old wound . . . the wound of needing and not being met.

The adultified child became skilled at caring for others, anticipating their needs, offering insight and containment, hoping that if they were indispensable enough, love would finally circle back. But there was no return on that investment. The more they gave, the more invisible they became.

Others learned to stay competent instead of close, useful instead of vulnerable and vowed not to need anyone, while also expecting others to keep their needs to themselves. An unspoken agreement formed: Let’s not go there. Let’s not need too much, expect too much, feel too much. I can contain mine; you contain yours.

What the child doesn't grasp is that these strategies create isolation in the name of safety . . . and that isolation makes impossible the very connection we installed the strategy to accomplish! If I take care of everything and don't rock the boat . . . if I don't need anything from you . . . will you meet my need for love from you??

All our insight, all our care, all our accomplishments, all of our efforts and trying were subtle ways of bypassing our need to be met AND our fear of not getting it. We were performing connection while avoiding the one thing that makes it real: letting ourselves be touched by the pain of wanting connection and intimacy and not receiving or experiencing it.

Falling in Love: Safety Awakens the Need

Then something miraculous . . . and disastrous . . . happens: two people fall in love. The new partner feels safe enough to let the ancient need surface. The nervous system relaxes. Hope flickers. The inner child whispers, Maybe this one will finally love me the way I always needed.

For a while, it works. The honeymoon period feels like redemption; belonging, tenderness, relief.

But safety is dangerous for the adultified child. Safety awakens dependency. And dependency awakens the old threat of loss.

When the partner inevitably fails to be the longed-for parent, the disappointment feels catastrophic. The child’s vow . . . never again . . . roars back to life. The partner becomes the enemy, the trigger, the proof that love always hurts.

And so begins the cycle: work harder, be better, be good enough, make them stay. Or withdraw completely and pretend not to care. Either way, intimacy has become unbearable and both are avoiding it, even while attending therapy, reading relationship books, listening to podcasts galore and doing the tantra workshops. The need wants desperately to be met . . . but to be met, our early experience of loss and death must be felt . . .

.

Eventually, the system breaks. The child can’t keep pretending to be an adult. The marriage feels suffocating. Divorce starts to look like salvation.

It’s easier to kill the marriage or partnership than it is to die ourselves.

The Distortion that Disorients

The adultified child isn’t trying to save the marriage; they’re trying to save themselves from feeling the loss, the sense of annihilation from their past that intimacy evokes. Their efforts . . . all the doing, fixing, managing . . . are not a bid for closeness but a defense against it.

Every act of self-improvement is a child’s desperate hope that if they take the right course or participate in the ultiimate meditation program they’ll finally understand how to be loved without having to feel need, fear and loss. They’re trying to earn an unconditional love that can only be given to a child by a parent; and they’re trying to get it from a partner who never got it themselves and can’t possibly provide it.

When that hope fails, the pain is total. They feel as though they are dying as the original pain of the child overwhelms the system; and in a sense, they are dying. What’s dying is the fantasy that they can finally get, through performance, effort and avoidance in partnership, what was missing in childhood. Without that fantasy, they don’t know who they are.

A Couple at the Breaking Point

Emma and Caleb sat in my office, drained. She said, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m done.” Caleb nodded, numb. “I can’t seem to make you happy. And I’m sick to death of trying and just getting your anger sprayed all over me.”

They had spent years “working on the relationship.” They were thoughtful, articulate, trauma-informed.

They both believed they’d been showing up as adults. But what was actually happening was this:

Emma’s adultified child was trying to earn love by being excellent to an extreme. Thinking ahead of Caleb, knowing what was good for him and the kids before they knew themselves. Caleb’s adultified child was trying to stay safe by shutting down and retreating, attempting to be enough for Emma, prioritizing her expectations and subjugating his own desires, until he didn't recognize that he had any . . . all the while judging her for being too needy and a bit crazy . . . Neither was truly adult; both were exhausted.

I offered, “Maybe it’s not the marriage that’s dying. Maybe it’s the hope that you can finally fix your childhood trauma through each other.”

There were a lot of tears. It wasn’t over . . . yet. Something was ending . . . maybe the marriage, ultimately . . . But the illusion that the marriage would complete the adultified child’s fantasy was definitely dying.

The Free Fall of Surrender

When the trying stops, there’s terror.

The adultified child generally has no clearly defined internal adult to catch them . . . no one internally developed who can tend to the rawness of re-exposed unmet need. They have always outsourced the compensation for their need, either to their partner or to their professional performance.

Now there’s no hope left. No new technique to try. Just the unbearable feeling they’ve been avoiding their whole lives: the grief of needing and not being met.

This is the moment that feels like death. And it is . . . but not necessarily the death of the partnership. It’s the death of the survival structure that made sustainable intimacy impossible.

As Stephen and Andrea Levine wrote, “Healing is what happens when we allow ourselves to die into what is true.” The old identity collapses, and something quiet and undefended begins to breathe.

When an Adult Finally Arrives

In time . . . sometimes weeks, sometimes years . . . an inner adult can come into form. Not the child's performative, compensating adult of intellect and control, but the genuine one: a mature part that can hold the child’s despair and distortions with presence, not solutions. Not merging with the child’s fear but also not sublimating it.

When that happens, partnership changes. Two adults can finally tend to two children, instead of two children trying to parent each other. Intimacy stops being a reenactment of past hopelessness and becomes an encounter with the present.

Some marriages survive this transformation; others end with grace. Either way, I’m done becomes not a declaration of defeat, but a surrender to what’s real.

Surrender and Sovereignty

Surrender is the moment the adultified child lays down the tools of control and admits, I cannot make love safe by avoiding the loss of it. Sovereignty is what follows; the capacity to stay oneself in the presence of another, without collapsing into need or abandoning it.

This is the paradox of maturity: We stop trying not to need, and discover that need is not weakness . . . it’s the gateway to intimacy.

Sometimes that discovery happens within the marriage. Sometimes it happens in its aftermath. Either way, I’m done can be the first honest step toward being real, rather than the final word on being finished.

An Invitation

If you find yourself saying, “I’m done,” don’t rush to close the door. Ask:

• Who in me is done?

• What impossible promise have I been keeping alive . . . ?

• What would it mean to let hope die and still stay open?

• What am I truly done with . . . my marriage, or my identification with a little person’s grandiose, superior inferiority?

Your answers will tell you whether you are at the end of your partnership or at the beginning of a mature, adult relationship . . . with yourself.

You may still leave. You may not.

But if you stay long enough to face what’s truly ending, you might find that it isn’t the marriage that’s dying, it’s the illusion that your partner’s love could heal the unbearable in you that you can’t meet in yourself.