Relationships, Attachment, Trauma Rene Tan Relationships, Attachment, Trauma Rene Tan

Gaslighting in Relationships Singapore — How to Know If It Is Happening to You

Gaslighting gets described as a dramatic, deliberate tactic — someone systematically making you question your own reality. That version exists. But most of the gaslighting people experience in Singapore is quieter than that. It is the slow accumulation of small moments where your perception was questioned, your reaction was called unreasonable, and you started to wonder if they were right.

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Why Am I Such a Perfectionist — And Why Is It So Hard to Stop

Most people who identify as perfectionists have already tried to fix it. They have read the articles, heard the advice, told themselves to loosen up. And it still does not shift. That is because perfectionism is not really about high standards. It is about something that sits much deeper — in the way the nervous system learned to stay safe. This piece looks at what is actually underneath it, and why it tends to be so stubborn.

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How to Stop People Pleasing at Work in Singapore

Most people who people please at work in Singapore are not doing it because they lack confidence or assertiveness skills. They are doing it because somewhere along the way, saying yes and making themselves useful became the safest way to stay acceptable. That is not a training gap. It is a pattern with roots — and it requires a different kind of intervention than a communication workshop.

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Why Talk Therapy Does Not Always Work for Avoidant Attachment — And What Does

You have been to therapy. You understand the pattern. You can trace it back to your childhood with reasonable accuracy. And you still pull away when things get close. This post is for the person who has done the cognitive work and found it reaches a ceiling — and wants to understand why, and what might actually move something. 

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Fear of Abandonment Singapore — Why Even a Good Relationship Cannot Quiet It

The relationship is good. Your partner shows up. The care is real. And still there is a part of you waiting for the other shoe to drop — convinced that one day they will see something in you that changes everything. Fear of abandonment does not only visit difficult relationships. Sometimes it takes up residence in the good ones.

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Attachment, Relationships, Childhood Rene Tan Attachment, Relationships, Childhood Rene Tan

What Is Avoidant Attachment — And Do I Have It?

You value your independence. You are capable, self-sufficient, and generally fine on your own. But close relationships have a way of feeling suffocating even when you want them, and you find yourself pulling back at exactly the moment things start to get real. If that pattern is familiar, this post explains what avoidant attachment actually is — and why it is not the same as simply preferring your own company. 

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Trauma Bonding Singapore — Why You Still Miss Someone Who Hurt You

You know what they did. You have replayed it enough times. And you still miss them. You might even want to go back. If that makes no sense to you intellectually but feels completely true in your body, you are not weak, and you are not confused. You are bonded — and that bond was built by the relationship itself.

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Why People Pleasing in Singapore Is So Hard to Stop

You already know you do it. You say yes when you mean no. You manage everyone else's feelings before you register your own. You have probably been told to just set boundaries, speak up, put yourself first. The problem is not that you do not want to. It is that your body will not let you — at least not yet.

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Why Do I Keep Going Back to My Situationship — Even When I Know Better?

You know it is not good for you. You have tried to leave. You have deleted the messages, had the conversation with yourself, maybe even blocked the number for a while. And somehow you are back again. This is not about willpower. It is about what the nervous system does with patterns it has learned to call home — and why insight alone is rarely enough to break them.

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How Do I Stop Being Codependent 

Codependency is one of those words people use about themselves with a kind of resigned familiarity — as though naming it is the same as being stuck with it. It isn't a character flaw and it isn't permanent. It is a set of strategies that made sense once, in an environment that required them, and that haven't updated since. Understanding where they came from is usually what makes changing them possible — not trying harder, not wanting less, but seeing clearly what the pattern is actually doing and why it has been so hard to put down.

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Relationships, Attachment Rene Tan Relationships, Attachment Rene Tan

Why Do I Feel So Alone in My Relationship?

There is a particular kind of loneliness that is harder to name than being single. It sits alongside someone who is present, who probably loves you, who is doing most things right by any reasonable measure — and something essential is still missing. Feeling alone in a relationship is one of the most common and least spoken about experiences in long-term partnerships. It is not usually a love problem. It is an availability problem. And understanding the difference is often the first thing that makes any of it movable.

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What Is Anxious Attachment — And Do I Have It?

You overanalyse the text. You replay the conversation looking for signs. You need reassurance but feel ashamed of needing it — so you either ask too much or say nothing and spiral quietly. Relationships feel like they take up more mental and emotional space than they should, and you can't quite figure out why you can't just relax into them. If this sounds familiar, it's worth understanding what anxious attachment actually is — because it usually goes back much further than your last relationship.

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How Do I Find a Childhood Trauma Therapist for Adults in Singapore

Most people who come to therapy for childhood trauma do not arrive using those words. They arrive describing patterns they cannot exit, relationships that follow the same painful script, and a version of themselves that reappears in family settings no matter how much they have grown. This post is for anyone who suspects their past is still running in the background of their present, and wants to understand what that actually means.

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Situationships: Why They Hurt More Than They Should

You were never officially together. There was no defining the relationship conversation, no commitment, no label either of you agreed to. So why does this feel like a breakup? Why does it hurt this much?

Situationships are one of the most confusing relational experiences to navigate — not because they are complicated, but because there is no socially recognised script for the grief they leave behind. No one asks how you are doing. You're not sure you're allowed to fall apart. And yet something in you clearly did.

What situationships reveal about us is often more important than what went wrong with the other person. This post explores why we stay, what the uncertainty actually does to the nervous system, and what it might be pointing to.

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Relationships, Attachment Rene Tan Relationships, Attachment Rene Tan

When Love Isn’t Enough - Understanding the concept of Capacity

There's a particular kind of pain that doesn't have a clean name. It's not the pain of being unloved — it's something more confusing than that. It's the pain of being loved by someone who genuinely meant it, who tried in the ways they knew how, and who still couldn't reach you in the ways you most needed. You felt the love and the gap at the same time. And when you try to make sense of that, the story tends to collapse into something that isn't true — that you asked for too much, or that it wasn't really love after all. Neither of those is the full picture.

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Why Closeness Can Feel So Scary

You want connection. You think about it, long for it, maybe even grieve the lack of it. And yet the moment someone actually gets close — really close — something in you pulls back, shuts down, or quietly braces for impact. This isn't contradiction, and it isn't damage. It's what happens when early closeness came with conditions, with unpredictability, or with pain. The part of you that's guarded learned its job early. It was trying to protect you.

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Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Relationship Patterns?

You promised yourself this time would be different. You chose someone who seemed nothing like the last person. And then, slowly, it started to feel familiar again — the same arguments, the same distance, the same ache. Repeating patterns in relationships isn't about poor judgment or bad luck. It's the nervous system moving toward what it recognises, even when what it recognises has hurt you before. Understanding where that started is usually the first thing that makes it possible to change.

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