Looking at Yourself From a Distance and What Remains When a Deep Connection Ends
Written by Lidija Poth, Transformational Coach
Lidija Poth is an AC-accredited transformational coach and founder of MyLifeCoachingHub, guiding women and leaders toward authentic living and relationship healing. With expertise in architecture, city planning, and teaching at TU Delft, she facilitates transformative retreats and coaching for lasting freedom and joy.
At the end of last year, I met someone who felt familiar before the facts had arrived. We could finish each other’s sentences. When we met in person, I did not recognize him. Later, in a dream, I saw us together when we were much younger. I recognized him. I did not recognize myself.
When he withdrew, the loss was out of proportion to the time we had known each other. Months followed. Deep talks. More dreams with familiar faces, flashes of having been together, a pull that cost more energy than I had to give. Life no longer felt like life.
I sought help in two places that speak a different language from the one I usually trust. A dear friend guided me through pendulum sessions and a regression session. Later, I also worked with Chris Koa. Both helped me step back. To see the connection as something that had been, and was no longer.
That is where the question began. What is real? Was this imagination? If I am someone who wants evidence, what do I do with a knowing that evidence cannot yet hold?
The split between what I know and what I feel
I live in two rooms. In one, I want research, names, mechanisms. Society is loud in that room. If you cannot measure it, it is fantasy, projection, or a wound. In the other room, something in me recognized a person before the facts had caught up. Dreams arrived. The body kept a score the mind could not file.
Carl Jung did not ask us to choose. In Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, he described meaningful coincidences that are not caused in the ordinary sense, yet feel ordered.[1] He treated dreams as messages from a layer of the psyche the daytime mind does not run. That does not prove a past life. It does refuse the cheap conclusion that a charged inner event is “nothing.”
Neuroscience sits beside that, not against it. Matthew Walker, in Why We Sleep, shows that dreaming helps the brain process emotion and consolidate memory. The body responds with a racing heart, a leftover ache.[2] The limbic system does not wait for a logical file. It tags an encounter as significant, and the tag can outlast the facts. On Brainz, Dreams, the Messages From the Mind, Body, and Soul holds the same tension. Mind, body, and soul may be meeting in the same image. I do not need to win the argument about where the image came from. I need to notice what it asked of me.
Why the loss felt larger than the time
A short meeting can still train a powerful loop. Anticipation and reward are closely tied to dopamine. The brain lights up not only when something arrives, but when it might. When the other person withdrew, the prediction failed. What followed was not only sadness. It was a drop in the system that had been organizing attention, sleep, and energy around that possibility.
Helen Fisher’s work on the neurobiology of romantic love describes early intense bonding as a state that recruits reward circuits, similar in intensity to other highly motivating drives.[7] That does not make the feeling fake. It explains why a brief bond can occupy the whole nervous system. The mind says, “We barely began.” The body says, “This mattered.”
Add ambiguity, and the cost rises. Pauline Boss, in Ambiguous Loss, names the grief that has no clear ending. The person is gone from the daily world and still present in the inner one.[3] There is no ritual for “we barely began, and something ancient seemed to end.” Without a clear ending, the brain keeps scanning. That is why analysis exhausted me. The mind wanted a verdict. The nervous system wanted safety.
The body that would not let the story go
Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory is useful here, not as a dismissal of the spiritual, but as a map of cost.[4] A bond that keeps the body in a state of search, waiting for a message, replaying a dream, and bracing for contact will drain a life, however beautiful the story. Chronic activation of the stress response raises cortisol, narrows attention, and makes rest feel impossible. Distance was not a betrayal of the feeling. It was how I stayed in my own life.
Dreams with familiar faces fit this picture. The brain rehearses what is unfinished. Walker’s research and clinical work on trauma, including Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, both point to the same fact. Unfinished emotional material returns in image and sensation until the system is given another way to complete it.[2][8] Looking from a distance was that other way. Not denial. Completion. In the dream, I recognized him and not myself. That was already the lesson, arriving before I was ready to take it.
Looking at yourself from a distance and what the mirror reveals
From a distance, the other person became less the subject. I did. The connection worked as a mirror. It showed a woman who could feel deeply, attach quickly, and lose herself in the charge. It also showed who I am when I stop merging: free, loving, determined, dancing through life, simply herself.
Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion matters in this exact place. Self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness reduce the shame of “I should have known better” and support the systems that help us regulate rather than spiral.[5] The lesson was not to become less sensitive. It was to love the sensitive one enough to let the story go.
Jung would call this a meeting with a figure who carries what is not yet lived. Whether that figure is memory, archetype, or a real person with an uncanny fit, the psychological task is the same. Take back the projection and keep the gold.[1] The gold was not the reunion. The gold was the clearer sight of who I am.
What I actually learned
Looking back, the teaching was not about the other person. It was about me. I had to let go. Not as a spiritual slogan, and not as indifference. As a decision to stop feeding a bond that was costing me my life, the dreams, the scanning, the energy that no longer belonged to me. Letting go did not make the connection unreal. It made my days mine again. Each replay is another training trial for a system that was already exhausted. Stopping the feed was how the nervous system could settle.
I had to love myself more. Again. The mirror had shown how quickly I can merge, how deeply I can feel, how easily I can leave myself for a charge that feels ancient. Self-love, here, was not a mood. It was the choice to stay with the woman who remained when the story ended: free, loving, determined, dancing through life, simply herself. The dream in which I did not recognize myself was the first clear signal. I had left the frame.
The sessions with my friend and the work with Chris Koa did not give me a verdict about the other person. They gave me distance from the charge. From that distance, I could choose again: to stop feeding the bond and to love the woman who remained.
Neff’s work names this cleanly. Self-kindness makes it possible to hold the ache without turning it into a reason to abandon yourself.[5] The more I loved that self, the easier the letting go became. The two lessons were one lesson. Everything else followed from that.
Observe, do not analyze. Analysis kept the bond alive. Observation returned me to the day, where life can move again. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow describes that shift. Self-consciousness drops, and the present becomes usable.[6]
Go with what is, not with what might have been. Synchronicity, if it is real, does not require us to force the ending. On Brainz, The Real Secret Behind Synchronicity and The Science Behind the Soul Work names detachment as mastery, not passivity.
Dare to feel. Feeling was the door in and the door out. Numbing would have kept the bond in the body. Naming sensations–tightness, ache, heat–is how the system updates.
Trust that this, too, is held. Not a guarantee about the other person. A trust that I would still be here and that I would be well.
Now it sounds like a memory. Something that was. Something that formed me. A mirror, not a destiny. What it formed is simple: a woman who can let go and who loves herself more for having done it.
And you?
What have you had to let go of to come back to yourself? Where are you being asked to love yourself more, not in theory, but in the choice you make today?
You do not have to decide whether the connection was imagination, memory, or love. You do have to decide whether it still gets to run your life.
I am still the woman who wants evidence. I am also the woman who felt it. Both can be true. From a distance, what remains is not the other person. What remains is me, having let go and loving myself more.
Footage by Michelle Muus Fotografie at Suitehotel Pincoffs, made possible by the PUT-IT-ON platform.
Read more from Lidija Poth
Lidija Poth, Transformational Coach
Lidija Poth is a transformational coach with an OTHM Level 7 qualification and accreditation from the Association for Coaching (AC) United Kingdom. She is the founder of MyLifeCoachingHub. With two decades shaping urban environments as an architect, city planner, and educator/mentor at TU Delft, she now channels that strategic insight into empowering individuals, executives, high-intelligence professionals, and those recovering from toxic dynamics. Her co-creative approach builds deep trust to unlock personal freedom, authentic leadership, and joy. Through 1:1 coaching, programs, and immersive retreats in Bali and Croatia, she guides clients to reconnect with their true selves and thrive sustainably. Her mission is to ensure no one is left behind in their journey to becoming their best, most aligned version.
References:
[1] Jung, C. G. (2010). Synchronicity: An acausal connecting principle. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1952.)
[2] Walker, M. (2017). Why we sleep: Unlocking the power of sleep and dreams. Scribner.
[3] Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
[4] Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
[5] Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.
[6] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
[7] Fisher, H. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry of romantic love. Henry Holt.
[8] Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
