Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

Josephson emphasizes that waiting for apologies, recognition, or validation from those who caused harm keeps healing in someone else’s hands—a position of perpetual disempowerment. Parents or caregivers who lacked emotional awareness during your childhood may never develop the capacity to acknowledge the impact of their behavior. Rather than remaining stuck in this waiting, you can provide yourself with the belief and acknowledgment you once needed from them. In practice, this might mean journaling about difficult childhood experiences and writing responses to yourself that validate your feelings. When working through grief about what you didn’t receive—emotional attunement, consistent safety, unconditional acceptance—you become the source of that missing care. This doesn’t erase the original wound, but it prevents you from spending years hoping someone else will finally see and validate your pain.

Chronic fawning disconnects people from their authentic desires because they’ve spent years prioritizing others’ needs over exploring their own. Josephson explains that anxiety feels jittery, urgent, and catastrophic—it creates worst-case narratives. Intuition, by contrast, feels calm, clear, and grounded in the present. The complication is that trauma can make safety feel dangerous simply because it’s unfamiliar. When deciding whether to set a boundary with a demanding friend, anxiety might scream that the friendship will end and you’ll be alone forever. Intuition might quietly observe that this relationship consistently leaves you drained and resentful. To access intuition, create space between stimulus and response: Pause before seeking others’ opinions, spend time alone without constant information consumption, and notice what emerges when you’re not performing for anyone. Over time, this practice rebuilds trust in your own guidance system.

Josephson reframes resentment not as a moral failing but as valuable data indicating that your needs are unmet and boundaries are necessary. When you notice yourself having imaginary arguments with someone or feeling exhausted after interactions, these feelings signal boundary violations. For example, a worker might realize they feel mounting resentment toward a colleague who consistently dumps last-minute tasks on them. Rather than continuing to say yes while internally fuming, they can use this resentment to identify the unmet need (reasonable notice and workload distribution) and set a clear boundary. Effective boundaries focus on your own actions rather than controlling others’ behavior. The colleague might push back initially, but maintaining consistency—declining same-day requests while remaining friendly and collaborative—eventually establishes new norms. The discomfort of boundary-setting isn’t evidence of wrongdoing, it’s evidence of trying something new.

Josephson argues that relationships strengthen through repair after rupture, not through avoiding conflict entirely. The goal is not to avoid making mistakes or to never have disagreements. Rather, growth happens when one acknowledges a rupture, takes responsibility, shares what one learned from the rupture, and commits to behaving differently in the future. This models accountability without over-apologizing or performing. It also creates psychological safety for the other person to voice concerns in future. Repair transforms conflict from relationship-ending events into opportunities for deeper trust and authenticity. This process requires two willing participants, which means you cannot repair relationships where the other person refuses to engage.