Dr. Hale nodded slowly, like she was filing the words away carefully.
"When you carry a negative core belief like that—'I'm not enough'—your mind starts searching for evidence to support it," she said, her voice steady but gentle. "It becomes what we call confirmation bias. Your brain essentially becomes trained to look for validation of that belief. It highlights the moments that reinforce your shame, and it filters out the ones that might challenge it."
I looked down at my hands, twisting my fingers in my lap.
"So the good stuff doesn't even register?"
"Exactly," she said. "Let's say someone smiles at you warmly or genuinely enjoys your presence. But your inner narrative says, 'They're just being nice,' or 'They don't know the real me.' That experience gets dismissed, because it doesn't fit the story your brain is clinging to. But the second someone looks disinterested, or forgets to reply to a message, or seems to pull away evenslightly—your brain latches on and says, 'See? Proof. You are too much. Not enough. A burden.'"
I nodded, almost involuntarily. That was exactly how it felt—like my brain was some cruel editor, cutting out the moments where I was okay, and magnifying the ones where I wasn't.
"It becomes a kind of emotional tunnel vision," she continued. "And over time, it doesn't even feel like a belief anymore. It feels like fact. Like truth."
I blinked back the sudden sting behind my eyes.
"I think that's what scares me," I whispered. "That I don't even know what's real anymore. Like... I can't tell the difference between what's actually happening and what I've just trained myself to believe. What if I can't trust my own perception?"
Dr. Hale didn't rush to answer. She let the question breathe between us.
"You're right to question it," she said at last. "Because those beliefs have been with you for so long, they've become the lens you see yourself through. But that lens isn't you—it's what was handed to you. By your mother. By the people who hurt you. By the culture that told you how you needed to look or act to be lovable."
"I've felt it in other relationships too," I said, voice quiet. "The one before Ryder... his name was Alex. He... he cheated on me."
Dr. Hale stayed silent, letting the weight of the sentence hang in the space between us. Not rushing. Just letting it settle, like dust in sunlight.
"It wasn't just the cheating that broke me," I said, after a long breath. "It was what happened after. The aftermath. The silence. The way everyone shifted around me."
I paused, chewing on the inside of my cheek.
"At first, some of my friends were sympathetic. They said all the right things—'You didn't deserve that,' 'He's a coward,' 'You're better off.' That kind of thing. And for a second, I believed them. Or tried to."
Dr. Hale waited, eyes steady, soft.
"But then... they saw her. The girl he cheated with."
My stomach twisted just remembering it.
"She was everything I wasn't. Tall, smooth-skinned, expensive-looking in this effortless kind of way. Confident, but not loud. She had that cool-girl ease—like she belonged in every room she walked into. She looked like the kind of person who never second-guessed her reflection in a mirror."
My throat tightened.
"And they didn't say it outright, but you could feel it. Like the air shifted. The pity in their voices changed to something else. Like confusion. Like they didn't know how to justify their sympathy anymore."
I let out a bitter laugh, sharp enough to sting my own throat. 'One of them literally said, "Well, I don't condone cheating, but... look at her."' My hands curled into fists on my lap. 'Like it made sense. Like it was a math problem that suddenly solved itself. Asif I was supposed to nod and say, "Right, of course, thanks for clearing that up."'
Dr. Hale didn't move much, but I caught the smallest shift – the way her spine straightened, the way her pen paused mid-note. It made me feel like every syllable I spoke was landing somewhere, sticking.
'It felt like they were saying, "We don't blame him." Not directly. But enough for me to hear it anyway. Like the moment they saw her face, everything that happened to me became inevitable. Like the universe had signed off on it. Suddenly I wasn't the person who'd been betrayed, I was just... the one who lost. The one who wasn't enough, and somehow, I ended up feeling like the guilty one – like I'd failed at holding his attention, and this was just the natural consequence.'
My voice wavered.
"And I know people cheat for their own reasons, I do. But no one ever stopped to say, 'That has nothing to do with your worth.' Not once. Not even me. I just—" I swallowed. "I just started comparing everything. Her smile. Her body. The way she dressed. The way people looked at her."
Dr. Hale tilted her head slightly, her voice calm and measured. "And when you sat with that thought," she asked, "what did you conclude?"
The words scraped on the way out, but I forced them into the open.
"That I lost. That he chose better. That maybe everyone eventually will."
