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For many years, I believed that if two people truly loved each other, they would eventually find a way. Today, at sixty-three, I no longer believe that. Not because love isn’t important—quite the opposite. I believe love is the foundation of every meaningful relationship. But over the years I have learned something I never truly understood before: love, on its own, is not enough to build a relationship.

After my twenty-six-year marriage ended, I could easily have decided never to fall in love again. Many people do. After enough disappointment, enough heartbreak and enough loss, it feels safer to close the door forever. I understand that choice. I really do. But it wasn’t mine. Only nine months after my divorce, I found myself opening my heart again. Then again. And again. Over the years I had several relationships. Different men, different stories, different endings. Looking back now, I realise that although the faces changed, the emotional pattern did not. Again and again, I found myself attracted to emotionally inconsistent men—men who could be loving, warm, funny and deeply present one day, then emotionally withdrawn, overwhelmed or simply unable to remain emotionally consistent the next.

For a long time, I believed I simply hadn’t met the right person. Today, I see something very different. Years ago, I read Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix. One of his central ideas stayed with me: we are often attracted to people who unconsciously resemble the emotional world we experienced as children. Not because they make us happy, but because a part of us hopes to heal unfinished wounds through them. At the time, I found the idea interesting. Today, it feels like a description of my own life.

I grew up surrounded by important men who loved me in the only way they knew how, yet who were also emotionally unpredictable. My father. My grandfather, who in many ways became the real father figure in my life. Later, my husband. Different people, yet strangely familiar emotional landscapes. Without realising it, I kept choosing what felt familiar. Looking back today, I can see that every relationship after my marriage was inviting me to look at another layer of myself that was ready to heal.

My most recent relationship brought all of this back into the light. The signs were there from the very beginning. Part of me recognised them. I already knew this man. I already knew some of his emotional patterns. I could have walked away. Instead, I chose to step into the relationship. People might ask why. The answer is surprisingly simple: because I loved him. But there was another reason too. I wanted to discover whether I had truly changed. I wasn’t entering that relationship hoping to change him. I was entering it to discover whether I could love someone deeply without losing myself in the process.

One sentence has guided much of my own healing: When you want to change, you need to know what you are willing to let go of. What I wanted to let go of was not love. It was the trauma bond that had unconsciously connected me, for so many years, to emotionally inconsistent men. Looking back now, I don’t see those relationships as failures. Each one helped me release another layer. Each one healed another piece of that old bond. My consistency was never about staying in relationships that weren’t working. My consistency was staying committed to my own healing. That, I realise now, was the real consistency in my life.

I have often thought about something Osho wrote: many people decide not to love again because love always carries the possibility of loss. If you never open your heart, you can avoid disappointment. Perhaps. But you also avoid transformation. I chose differently. Not because I enjoyed suffering, but because I believed that every relationship could reveal something about myself that I still needed to understand. Looking back today, I can honestly say that every relationship after my marriage healed another piece of me. Not because the men changed, but because I did.

Today I know that I can love someone deeply and still recognise that we cannot build a healthy relationship together. That has been one of the most liberating discoveries of my life. Love cannot replace emotional responsibility. It cannot replace self-awareness. It cannot replace the willingness to communicate, to repair, to grow, and to build something together. I can still love someone. I can still feel compassion for their wounds. I can understand where some of their behaviours come from. But understanding is no longer enough for me to stay.

I don’t know whether souls meet again to complete unfinished lessons. I cannot prove that. But when I look back at my own life, it sometimes feels that way. What I do know is that every relationship after my marriage brought me one step closer to myself.

Perhaps healing isn’t about finally finding the right partner. Perhaps healing is becoming the kind of person who can love deeply without abandoning herself… and without betraying herself.

For me, that is part of what getting into my groove truly means. Not avoiding relationships because they might break my heart, but choosing to stay committed to my own healing whenever life invites me into one. Relationships have been some of my greatest teachers. Sometimes they reflected parts of me I had never fully seen. Sometimes they reflected the opposite of who I wanted to become. Either way, they invited me to grow.

Getting into your groove is not about becoming someone else. It is about remembering who you were before fear, before conditioning, before the layers of protection you built to survive. It is a journey back to your original nature—love and trust.

For me, relationships have been one of the paths back home. Not because suffering is necessary, and not because every relationship is meant to last, but because every relationship has offered me the opportunity to see another layer, to release another trauma bond, and to remember a little more of who I truly am.

Perhaps that is what healing really is.

Not becoming someone new.

Remembering who you have been all along.

Elisabetta Franzoso

Personal Coach | Counsellor | Speaker | Trainer

Author of Stella’s Mum Gets Her Groove Back – A True Story (Singapore, 2008)

Author of the forthcoming Get Into Your Groove – A Fairy Tale for Men and Women on the Road of Personal Freedom

GET INTO YOUR GROOVE

www.ElisabettaFranzoso.com

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#GetIntoYourGroove

At school they called me Radioolina—“the little radio.” It wasn’t a compliment. It embarrassed me because I never seemed able to stop talking. I talked all the time. For years, I believed that was simply my personality. Only recently have I started putting the pieces together and realised it wasn’t.

I know it all started in my childhood. I grew up surrounded by many different kinds of silence. My mother’s silence. My father’s silence. My grandparents’ silence. My great-aunts’ silence. Looking back, I realise that every important adult around me taught me a different language of silence. My maternal grandmother’s silence was full of anger. My other grandmother’s silence was full of sadness and depression. She talked to me for hours while we cycled together in the afternoons, telling me about her life, her disappointments, and her pain. I listened. I absorbed everything. My father’s silence carried fear and sadness. Through his silence I learned to notice subtle signals long before I understood what they meant. My mother’s silence was perhaps the most difficult of all. When she became silent, I knew she was hurt, angry, or disappointed with me. Her silence punished me. Even today, I can still recognise how deeply that childhood experience lives inside me.

Then there was my grandfather. Sometimes he loved my voice. When we drove around together in his green Alfa Romeo Giulia, he would tell me that I made him feel young. I filled his silence with my stories, and I loved making him laugh. Other times, he took me to the Bar Modenese, where he met three older men to play cards. I was only a little girl, wearing my white dress and white socks, carefully dressed by my mother. I had to sit quietly for hours while they smoked, talked, and played cards. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t simply be a child.

Perhaps that is why, when I arrived at high school, everyone called me Radioolina—“the little radio.” It wasn’t a compliment. I couldn’t stop talking. I talked fast, I talked all the time, and I rarely listened. That nickname made me feel ashamed. At first it was other people’s judgment. Slowly, it became my own. Looking back, I realise that I wasn’t only filling other people’s silence. I was trying to escape my own. Ironically, what once felt like a weakness also became one of my greatest gifts. I never had to learn storytelling. It came naturally. Years later, I found myself teaching storytelling as a trainer, yet I had never learned it from a course. It had been born much earlier, from my need to bring life into silent rooms.

Today I see silence very differently. There is the silence of punishment, the silence of avoidance, the silence that hides pain, and the silence of fear. And there is also the silence of reflection. Sometimes we simply need time before we can find the right words. There is the silence of listening, the silence of peace, and the silence that allows us to reconnect with our body, our emotions, and our senses. It is through silence that we begin to notice what has always been there. We hear our thoughts. We feel our emotions. We become aware of our body. We notice sounds, smells, tastes, and all the subtle signals that are usually covered by noise. Silence allows us to listen both inside ourselves and to the world around us.

During the past two years, I have deliberately chosen a life with more solitude, more stillness, more simplicity, and more silence. For the first time in my life, I have discovered the beauty of silence instead of fearing it. Learning to sit and walk in silence has become one of the greatest gifts of these past two years. Today, the silence in my home no longer feels empty. It feels alive. It allows me to hear my own thoughts, reconnect with my body, feel my emotions, and respond to them instead of running away from them. I no longer see silence as something that has to be filled.

Perhaps getting into our ‘groove’ also means learning that not every silence needs to be filled. Sometimes silence is not empty at all. Sometimes it is quietly bringing us back to ourselves.

Elisabetta Franzoso

Author of Stella’s Mum Gets Her Groove Back – A True Story (Singapore, 2008)

Author of the forthcoming Get Into Your Groove – A Fairy Tale for Men and Women on the Road of Personal Freedom

GET INTO YOUR GROOVE

We often assume that because the light is green, we are safe. But the truth is that we cannot know whether the people around us are paying attention. The cyclist is responsible for his actions. The driver is responsible for theirs. But I am responsible for mine. That is why, even when the light is green, I still look left and right before crossing. Not because I am fearful, but because I am responsible.

For many years, I misunderstood responsibility. I thought responsibility meant taking care of everyone else: their feelings, their problems, their pain, their choices, and their wellbeing. Life has taught me something different. Responsibility is not carrying other people’s lives on our shoulders. Responsibility is the ability to respond to our own needs, our own reality, and our own wellbeing. For me, that starts with two things: my body and my mind. Am I listening to what my body needs? Am I sleeping enough, moving enough, resting enough, and eating in a way that supports my health? Am I paying attention to my thoughts, emotions, patterns, and habits? Because nobody can do this work for me, and I cannot do it for anyone else.

Many years ago, after reading my first book, Stella’s Mum Gets Her Groove Back, my daughter’s counsellor at Tanglin Trust School in Singapore shared an observation that stayed with me. He said: “You took too much responsibility.” At the time, I didn’t fully understand what he meant. I thought taking responsibility was a virtue. Today, I see something different.

One of the greatest paradoxes I have discovered is that too much responsibility eventually becomes irresponsibility. Not because responsibility is wrong, but because responsibility without boundaries makes us responsible for things that were never ours to carry. When we take responsibility for things that do not belong to us, we become irresponsible in two directions. First, we neglect our own lives because our attention is focused on someone else’s. Second, we unintentionally prevent others from fully taking responsibility for theirs. Every adult has a journey to make, lessons to learn, choices to make, and consequences to face. When we rush in too quickly to rescue, fix, carry, protect, or solve, we may reduce someone’s discomfort in the short term, but we may also deprive them of the opportunity to develop their own strength, awareness, and responsibility.

Looking back, I can see how often I confused helping with carrying. During difficult periods in my former husband’s life, I stepped in everywhere I could. I searched for solutions, opened doors, made introductions, encouraged new directions, and tried to create opportunities. At the time, I believed I was helping, and in many ways I was. But today I can also see something else. Every step I took for him was a step he did not have to take himself. Every responsibility I carried for him was a responsibility he did not have the opportunity to carry. Not because he was incapable, but because I was already carrying it.

This is one of the hidden dangers of over-responsibility: it creates dependency. The more responsibility we take away from another adult, the less space they have to develop their own strength, confidence, and autonomy. We believe we are helping them grow, yet sometimes we are unintentionally keeping them small. The irony is that while I was investing so much energy into helping others grow, I was neglecting parts of my own life. I was giving away time, attention, energy, and responsibility that I needed for myself. I wasn’t only limiting them. I was limiting me.

As parents, we have a responsibility towards our children while they are growing. We teach them, guide them, and protect them. But something changes when they become adults. My daughter is thirty-three years old. I can encourage her, support her, and be present for her. But I cannot live inside her body. I cannot make her choices. I cannot take responsibility for her wellbeing. That responsibility belongs to her, just as mine belongs to me.

The same is true with friends, partners, siblings, and parents. Being there for someone is not the same as living their life for them. Presence supports. Rescue replaces. And when we replace another person’s responsibility with our own, neither of us grows.

Today, at sixty-three, I am learning something different. My first responsibility is not to save others. My first responsibility is to care for my own physical and mental wellbeing. Not selfishly, but responsibly. Looking back, I realise that I lost my groove the moment I became more invested in other people’s lives than in my own.

Perhaps that is why Get Into Your Groove — the title of my forthcoming book, Get Into Your Groove: A Fairy Tale for Men and Women on the Road of Personal Freedom — begins with responsibility. Not responsibility for everyone else, but responsibility for ourselves. Because when we stop trying to live other people’s lives and come back to our own, something remarkable happens: we find our groove again.

Have you ever lost yours? And if so, what are you doing to find it again?

With love and responsibility,

Elisabetta Franzoso

International Coach, Counsellor, Speaker & Self-Leadership Trainer

Author of Stella’s Mum Gets Her Groove Back

Author of the forthcoming book Get Into Your Groove: A Fairy Tale for Men and Women on the Road of Personal Freedom