“You’ve entered your villain origin story arc, and it’s looking familiar.”

This meme is half-joke, half-body flashback.

It captures the unsettling moment when your new partner triggers the exact wound you swore you’d healed—and you’re suddenly transported, not logically but somatically, back to a past relationship.

You know they’re not your ex. But your nervous system didn’t get the memo.

We tend to think of romantic relationships as discrete stories with clean endings. But attachment science and trauma theory beg to differ.

According to Bowlby (1969), our early relational experiences shape internal working models that we carry from one connection to the next.

When a new partner hits an old nerve, it’s not coincidence—it’s continuity.

Let’s begin with a confession appropriate to the setting. The recent British historical sitcom: Derry Girls is not about autism.

At least, not overtly.

It’s about Catholic girlhood in 1990s Northern Ireland, the final bloody chapters of the Troubles, and the universal humiliation of adolescence rendered in a dialect so quick and poetic it deserves subtitles even if you speak English.

But like all great shows about misfits, outsiders, and the socially erratic, it is absolutely haunted by autistic tropes—whether it knows it or not.

A Weekly Practice Guide for Families Who Want to Look Up Again

Because every parent says they want more connection.
Because every kid is quietly starving for attention, not entertainment.

Because every therapist has watched a client get an “urgent” Slack ping in the middle of a breakthrough.

Because healing doesn’t need to be perfect—it just needs to be practiced.

Let’s begin with a now-familiar domestic scene:
Dad scrolling Reddit in the kitchen while muttering about the economy.

Mom toggling between work Slack and Pinterest recipes while standing next to the fridge.

The toddler, luminous-eyed, watching Baby Shark on repeat while instinctively flinging cereal to the floor like it’s part of a ritual.

And no one—no one—is making eye contact.

We are now, collectively, living inside an eerie remake of The Stepford Wives, except the robots are us and the glowing rectangles are our gods.

Dear clients, former clients, and anyone who’s ever thought, “Wow, therapy with Daniel is cheaper than a nervous breakdown,”—

Let me interrupt your regularly scheduled existential dread to clear up a little nonsense: I did not ask you for money via a sketchy hushmail.com address.

I did not go off-grid, fake my own death, and start a new life as a low-budget Nigerian prince. I’m still here. And still me.

The offending address was:
danieldashnew@hushmail.com

I know. It sounds like me after a few glasses of Malbec and a rebrand.

But it is not me. It’s some imposter bot in a basement somewhere, trying to make a quick buck off the trust you and I built over months of crying in chairs.

The word micromance sounds like a marketing ploy for bite-sized Valentine’s Day candy, but make no mistake—it’s the emotional equivalent of playing with matches in a room full of kindling.

What is a micromanage?

A micromance is a fleeting, often ambiguous romantic interaction, typically short-lived, emotionally charged, and never quite defined.

It’s not a relationship. It’s not even a situationship. It’s a vibe that gets under your skin.

If love bombing is a flood and ghosting is a vacuum, micromance is the humid stillness before the storm—a moment saturated with tension that never resolves, but still rearranges your emotional furniture.

Imagine a couple sitting in their newly refinanced kitchen, sipping $7 matcha lattes from ergonomic mugs shaped like lowercase letters.

They can’t stop talking about money. Correction: they can’t stop not talking about money.

Every conversation is a performance review. Every silence, a spreadsheet.

Welcome to the world of “money focus”—a psychological script in which the Almighty Dollar becomes a third party in the marriage bed, elbowing out intimacy in favor of itemized deductions.

A new study out of Brigham Young University (LeBaron-Black et al., 2024) confirms what many therapists have suspected since the dawn of two-income households and TurboTax:

when couples obsess over money, their relationship satisfaction tanks.

Not because they’re broke, but because they’ve confused net worth with relational value.

There he was, every time—front row, clapping louder than anyone, camcorder in hand. He never missed a recital. Never forgot your birthday. He probably printed the soccer schedule and laminated it. But you never actually felt him.

Welcome to the meme: “Emotionally Unavailable, But Present at Every Recital.”

It’s not a dig at bad dads or cold moms.

It’s a Gen Z therapy meme, yes, but also a blisteringly accurate snapshot of a very American brand of emotional absence: the high-functioning, schedule-keeping, achievement-focused ghost parent.

This isn’t neglect with bruises. This is subtle neglect in beige khakis. And it’s not just a meme—it’s a research-backed social epidemic.

Welcome to the golden age of emotional regulation — where every mom on TikTok knows what a "rupture and repair" is, and every kid has a Ph.D. in "vibes."

But beneath the glowy reels of whisper-voiced bedtime scripts lies a new kind of childhood trauma: being raised by someone who never yelled, but also never really felt.

This is the meme: "My mom didn’t scream. She just clenched her jaw and softly narrated the consequences like HAL 9000."

It started as a miracle.

The idea that we could raise children without yelling, without threats, without rupturing their souls every Tuesday morning in the minivan.

Emotion coaching, as popularized by John Gottman and others (Gottman et al., 1997), told us: name it to tame it. Validate their feelings. Co-regulate. Show up with curiosity.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

If the early 2000s gave us the phrase "he's just not that into you," the 2020s have blessed us with its gender-neutral, psychoanalytic cousin: "he's love bombing you."

It started with good intentions.

Survivors of emotional abuse needed a term to describe the overwhelming attention used to manipulate and destabilize.

But like most useful psychological metaphors, it became a meme.

Now, any bouquet of flowers before date #4 is suspect. And God forbid someone listens to your Spotify playlist and remembers your cat's name.

Let’s begin where all modern love stories do: somewhere between a clinical manual and a TikTok comment thread. “Trauma bond” used to be a serious term.

It was born in the work of Patrick Carnes (1997), who studied the deep psychological tethers between victims and abusers—often in cycles of intermittent reinforcement, power imbalance, and dependency so intense it overrides logic.

Now? It’s shorthand for, "I dated a guy who texted me three times in a row and then didn’t answer my meme." We’ve gone from psychological rigor to pop-psych poetry.

But here’s the messy truth: most of what people are calling trauma bonding is actually some variation of Anxious Attachment, and the confusion is doing damage.