Rulene Jansen Therapy

27/02/2026

26/02/2026

A big thank you to Steyn Rossouw for another amazing and out of this world, masterful experience with his Trauma-Informed Mastery Coach Course. Also a big thank you to his amazing wife Celeste Rossouw and their behind the scenes team! I am truly blessed!

25/02/2026

There’s something else I’ve been noticing, and it doesn’t get talked about much because it’s easier to hide behind.

Sometimes when we feel lonely or unseen, we don’t actually name it that way. We don’t sit down and say, “I’m aching for connection.” Instead, the focus shifts somewhere that feels more practical and controllable. We start thinking about our bodies.

We tell ourselves we need to lose weight. To tone up. To become more disciplined. To look stronger. It feels productive. It feels like movement. Loneliness is abstract and vulnerable. Your body feels actionable. So the mind quietly decides that if we just fix this one visible thing, maybe everything else will fall into place.

If I felt more attractive. If I was more confident in my skin. If I could just get myself back to where I used to be. Maybe then I would feel chosen. Maybe then I would feel steady. Maybe then something would shift.

But often the body isn’t the root of the pain. It’s just where the pain gets redirected. It becomes the container that holds emotions we don’t know what to do with.

Wanting to feel strong and aligned in your body is not shallow. It’s not wrong. It can be healthy and empowering. But when that desire is fueled by attachment ache, it starts to feel urgent and heavy. It stops being about vitality and starts being about worth. The pressure increases. The tone inside becomes harsher.

And sometimes it’s worth pausing long enough to ask a difficult question: is this about embodiment, or is it about belonging?

Because when we don’t feel deeply chosen or emotionally held, it’s easy to believe that becoming smaller, fitter, or more attractive will solve something much deeper.

The two can get tangled without us realising it. And untangling them takes honesty that most of us were never taught to practice.

25/02/2026

Attachment (You Again)

You don’t look dangerous.
That’s the problem. You move like smoke under a door.
You show up clean. Calm. Almost reasonable. You don’t beg. You don’t seduce. You just sit there like you’ve always had a right to be in the room.
Slowly, almost lazily, you start undoing things I fought hard to build. You loosen my guard. You don’t storm the gates. You convince me they’re unnecessary. You let my armour feel heavy, outdated. Like something I’m wearing out of habit instead of survival.

And I hate how good it feels to take it off.
You convince my nervous system it can unclench. You whisper, “You’re safe here,” and I hate that I listen. I hate how quickly I adjust to warmth. I know better.
I’ve seen what happens when the ground gives way. I’ve felt what betrayal does to the spine. I’ve rebuilt after collapse. I don’t forget that kind of thing. But you... You don’t ask me to forget. You just ask me to trust. And that’s worse. You make rest feel possible.
You let my body experience a version of itself that isn’t on alert. My shoulders drop. My jaw softens. My heart feels. The calculations quiet down. The exits don’t need mapping.
I start thinking, maybe this time the bond won’t fracture.
Maybe this time it won’t be me carrying it alone. And then, subtle as ever - you shift. Ever so slightly.

You pull back just enough. Just enough for my body to notice before my pride does. Just enough for the old vigilance to snap back into place like muscle memory. And the humiliation hits.
I lost something. I allowed something.
I allowed myself to soften. I allowed myself to believe that being chosen could be steady. I allowed the armour to come off my ribs.
That’s on me.

You stand there, amused, watching me put it back on.
You don’t shatter me. You don’t need to. You just prove, I still want what I claim I don’t need. You just show me how much I want: Peace. Safety. Consistency.
A bond that doesn’t disappear when it’s inconvenient. You expose the tender nerve I pretend is scar tissue.

I can’t even hate you properly. Because you didn’t lie.
You just revealed the part of me that still hopes. And hope, after everything, feels reckless.

That’s what makes you dangerous.

You show me I’m still breakable.

25/02/2026

Attachment Grief

25/02/2026

Grief

There’s a kind of grief that feels almost embarrassing because it doesn’t look dramatic or real enough to justify how deeply it lands. On the surface, the relationship may have been complicated, unfinished, or imperfect. You can list the reasons it wasn’t ideal. You can logically explain why it may not even have worked long-term. And yet when it shifts, or ends or quietly changes, something inside you sinks in a way that doesn’t seem logical.

It's like a weight that settles in your chest without announcing itself. After it felt like your heart was ripped out. You notice your sleep feels different. Food tastes different. The quiet moments feel heavier. Thoughts you thought you had processed return. It’s not really about the fantasy of the relationship. It’s about what your body has started to build around it.

When someone’s presence makes you feel steady, even subtly, something in you begins to relax without you realising it. The constant background vigilance softens. The part of you that is always bracing, always proving, always holding it together loosens its grip just a little. You move through your days with less internal tension. There is less effort in being strong. There is less scanning for danger. For a while, your nervous system experiences what it feels like to rest inside another person’s consistency.

And when that consistency disappears, the system doesn’t adjust gently. It tightens again. It scrambles to understand what happened. The strength you usually carry so naturally suddenly feels heavier, more deliberate, almost forced. The steadiness you thought was yours alone now feels co-created, and its absence is disorienting. Gut-wrenching and physically painful.

That ache isn’t irrational, even if it feels that way. It isn’t a weakness. It’s attachment grief. It’s the body mourning the sense of safety it had started to trust. Sometimes what we are grieving is not the person in isolation, but the version of ourselves that felt softer, calmer, less guarded in their presence. Felt chosen.

That’s why it can feel larger than the relationship itself. It can feel like the ground shifted under something you had quietly begun to believe in. And sitting with that realisation can feel like unravelling, even when, in truth, it may be the next layer of integration.

24/02/2026

I’ve been thinking about something lately.

Sometimes we finish a romance novel or a series and feel strangely low afterwards. Not because the story wasn’t good... but because it was. For a few hours (or days), our nervous system experienced something it doesn’t always get in real life.
Certainty. Being chosen. A bond that is protected when things go wrong.

And when the story ends, there’s a quiet drop. We'll sometimes it's dramatic, sometimes just a subtle ache.
It’s easy to dismiss that as being “silly” or “too emotional.” But I don’t think it is. I think it’s attachment hunger.

Many high-functioning women are very good at telling themselves they’re fine. Independent. Content. Past the stage of needing reassurance. And often that’s true, until something touches the part of them that still longs for steady, protected love.
It’s not perfection we want.

It’s not fairy tales... (well...perhaps it might feel like it )

It’s repair. It’s consistency. It’s knowing the bond won’t fracture the first time there’s stress.

When that pattern is simulated in a story, the body feels it. And when it disappears, the contrast can hurt more than we expect.
That doesn’t mean we’re naive. It means something in us still values being deeply chosen.

Sometimes awareness feels like unraveling, but it’s actually integration.