@H0eNewWorld Yeah, I found this very real. As someone avoidantly attached, I also feel suppressed and controlled by the approach of intimacy. But I do not feel safe to share that with people, both because of the basic fear of intimacy and the unfairness--they didn't do anything wrong, why should they have to deal with my unreasonable nonsense? So I withdrew, and now I ward off anything getting that intimate (like Taegun before Eunsung). I'm now trying to reverse that, and I should be doing what Taegun did here (being honest with someone I KNOW is trustworthy, but my heart is afraid of trusting them). Honestly, this is a huge step forward in this chapter, not lost progress at all. Taegun is terrified, but he also values the relationship and Eunsung's feelings so much that he wanted to tell him the real reason he "can't do it."

Of course, the idea that a person would come along to push through your boundaries and know and love you so much that they save you depite yourself is a fantasy, and it wouldn't be good to happen in the real world (because people who ignore your boundaries are rarely safe people, even if your boundaries are unreasonably high). But it's nice to see through a fantasy story how having secure and trustworthy people around you, and a determination to "live," can give someone the courage to step up and see how it's worth pushing through your own self-hatred to experience the rewards that can come from being real with someone good, when you've never experienced them before, and only know how to suffer for giving others power over you. I appreciate the author taking the time to explore this at a pace that makes sense to someone who understands trauma and disrupted relational attachment.