How Therapy Made Me a Better Fighter

I’ve been on a journey lately. I haven’t gone anywhere particularly far, but the going has been rough.

In November, roughly three months ago, my partner Ria of two years ended our relationship. The details of navigating that with each other are another story. What matters here is that the breakup became the missing piece that catalyzed a major shift in my awareness of myself and how I relate to others.

We all fall prey to unconscious dynamics in our relationships and unexamined coping strategies in ourselves. I certainly have. Several years ago, while trying to navigate polyamory with my partner Hanna, we were fortunate to encounter attachment theory. It helped us see some of the common patterns we were acting out to cope with insecurity, and we began to address them consciously.

What I didn’t yet understand was how possible it was for my own behavior to remain unexamined even while I believed I was doing the work. I gained insight into specific behaviors, but not into my broader capacity to miss important things altogether.

Ria encouraged me to start therapy.

When I was a teenager, my family went through a period of severe disintegration that resulted in me being court-ordered into therapy. I was open to it, but I found it deeply unhelpful. I didn’t feel I gained any real insight, which is unfortunate.  Especially unfortunate because, being stubborn and resistant to advice, I could have used a stronger foundation of trust in that process early on.

I was lucky to have other mentors in my life whom I did trust, and they helped me navigate that crisis. Since then, I’ve been broadly supportive of therapy for others, but never for myself. Looking back, that was itself one of my unexamined patterns and one that quietly prevented me from discovering others.

I don’t trust people, by and large. Even when I love them deeply.

You could question whether it’s possible to love someone without trusting them, but that isn’t really relevant to my experience. I know that it is possible, because I’ve done it.

For years, I thought of trust as a function of predictability. I could trust someone to act in line with their established patterns and stated capacities. I could trust someone to hold a rope if I were dangling over a cliff. I could trust someone I loved with my bank details and not expect my money to disappear.

What I could not do was trust people with the unfiltered truth of my internal experience.

My emotional landscape was always padded, edited, or distorted into a shape I thought another person could handle. A childhood of not feeling safe to express my feelings or perceptions without repercussion left its mark.

The downstream effects of this have been many.

I struggled to stay in touch with my own emotional state, something I’ve been trying to repair over the past few years. Slowly, I became better at processing intense emotions after the fact, but rarely with others, and rarely in the moment. That meant I often didn’t fully know what I was feeling while I was feeling it.

This disconnection limited my ability to communicate needs, wants, expectations, and boundaries. It also meant I didn’t trust advice from others, because I felt they didn’t truly understand my internal experience. Closed off to critique, I was often unable to benefit from truths people were trying to reflect back to me.

At the same time, I wasn’t really trusting others with my own perspective either. That combination of dismissing their view while withholding mine created a fundamental disconnection that led to chronic relational insecurity. When that disconnection became palpable, I would become avoidant, creating distance in search of comfort.

When I did share difficult things, I often did so from behind a shield.

Rather than speaking vulnerably, I leaned on intellectual or theoretical framings. I stated things authoritatively. I argued well. This protected me from exposure, but it came at a cost. Partners felt diminished, and there wasn’t room for us to meet on equal footing and navigate difficulty together as adults.

These patterns, both my insecurities and the distance they created, became a fast track for triggering insecurity in the people I was seeing. Even when we could name the attachment dynamics at play, the deeper core remained untouched. It went unseen, unaddressed and ignored.

Therapy has helped. Videos by YouTuber Heidi Priebe helped too, accelerating my understanding.

But most of all, change came from recognizing that I couldn’t continue as I had been.

As the Tao says: “It is because the sage is sick of being sick that he is no longer sick.”
Whenever I can, I try to turn toward the thing my mind wants to avoid. I try to say the thing that feels dangerous to say. I listen more carefully to what people reflect back to me, trusting that I’m finally giving them enough pieces of the puzzle for them to see something I can’t.

Opening these parts of myself has revealed other layers I didn’t expect.

On my way to an MMA training session recently, something shifted in my emotions. I noticed the shift and I noticed how quickly I tried to repress what it pointed to.

As a teenager and into my early twenties, I tied a huge amount of my self-worth to becoming a skilled martial artist and fighter. I believed that if I could fully embody that identity, my sense of self would be safe. That belief fueled a constant need to prove myself to myself and to others.

I felt its effects in my parkour and eventually stopped training with others to escape it. I noticed it creeping into my fight training too: raising the stakes, clouding my judgment in sparring, tightening my movement. When I felt recognized or already established, the pressure relaxed and I was more in flow. But the deeper insecurity never really went away. It stayed active beneath the surface.

How I moved and fought became a direct reflection of whether I felt seen or examined. When that insecurity was active, my movement became stuttered and one-dimensional. I lost access to flow, the core of my practice. This affected my parkour for years, and more recently, my performance in MMA competition.

On that bike ride, I finally let myself acknowledge what was there. I spoke inwardly to the part of me still holding that need to prove something.

I cried.

I told myself, and this time it landed, that I truly had nothing to prove. I know who I am. I know what I’ve done. I know how much I’ve grown. And I know that my worth doesn’t depend on any of it. None of it matters more than the meaning I’ve made from those experiences and the growth they’ve allowed.

That night, I moved and fought better than ever. Not because I was sharper or more aggressive, but because nothing was being evaluated as a sign of my worth.

I felt light.

I’m not where I’m headed yet. None of this is “in the past.” My relationship with these parts of myself is only just becoming conscious.

My patterns and fears have cost me, and they’ve cost people I love. I can’t change that. But more than ever, I feel more curious than afraid of what will happen when I trust.

Maybe I don’t need to care about being a better fighter, wouldn’t that be something?