Sometimes we make ourselves incredibly small without even realising it.

Maybe we do it to fit in the spaces we think others want us to inhabit. Maybe so we feel we're out of the way.

Very often we do it until we can barely see ourselves, because, after all, the point was to render ourselves unobtrusive.

I'm paraphrasing, but the gist is here: 'There are two primary emotions, fear and love, everything spills from those two core feelings. What are you afraid of?' she asks.

'Easy, I'm unlovable,' Brooke answers.

'Unlovable in what way?' she asks.

Brooke says, 'I'm not enough.'

She says, 'Enough easy answers. What's the hard one?'

'That I'm too much,' Brooke, now a proper weeping mess, finally splutters, 'That I was too much for my mother.'

She says, 'Too perceptive, too inquisitive, too capable. These are the exact qualities a mother should celebrate in a child.' (The dialogue continues but then we get to…) 'You think that by lowering yourself you become lovable,' she says.

The person Brooke is talking to is also Brooke. Brooke, a therapist, has double-Brooked herself, because sometimes you're only willing to let you deal with you. This dialogue is taken from an episode of HBO's In Treatment.

Based, in part, on the Israeli series BeTipul, the first three seasons ran from 2008- 2010. It did well. Gabriel Byrne was in it.

Then it was over. I was sad. I got over it. Then lo, ten full years later, it wheeled and came again. New doctor (Uzo Aduba), new everything. Again, it did well.

I'll come clean: Season 4 sailed straight past me until I saw a clip with the scene transcribed in the intro. The idea of lowering ourselves, or making ourselves small, in order to be lovable, landed neatly in my lap with a horrible sound. That thing that sounds like a truth you don't want to hear.

We do it all the time. We lower ourselves. Or don't draw attention to ourselves. We make ourselves small. Make ourselves invisible. Hide. Withdraw.

We know these may be survival tools for not getting hurt, but how did they become ways to be loved?

Because the world makes no sense.

That's all I got. I wish I understood this better, but I do not. Whether we're looking at romantic relationships or those within groups of colleagues, this can be a dynamic that really doesn't have any winners.

The person for whom you're smalling up, they seem to be the winner, but I don't really believe they can be. They will never know you. They will never know who or what you can really be. And perhaps, in the long run, the world will not know.

How small can you make yourself? That's the way I keep hearing it in my head. I think in a very tired corner of my soul, on the very darkest days (or the other way around) that's something that's played inside me. And maybe it has, in its way, kept me safe.

I've seen couples do more damage to each other by a kind of quiet, incessant gnawing than those who scream and break coffee cups. Some of them push ever so gently, but push constantly, so in the end the other is out of room, out of air