Why does nobody ask how I am?

Start with what cannot be known. You cannot see inside anyone else. You do not know whether they forget, or assume you are fine, or never learned to ask. This archive makes no claims about them and neither should you, at least not yet.

Now take what can be known. Someone says, how are you. Watch the next second. You say fine, or good, or busy, and before the word has landed you have turned the question around. How are you, though. And they tell you, because you asked, and because you are good at it.

Over years that second becomes the shape of every friendship you have. Not because anyone decided it. Because the turn is fast, it feels like kindness, and it never once leaves a space where the asking could happen.

You are not invisible. You are very quick. The door closes before anyone has reached it, and you are the one closing it.

That is a verdict question, and this page keeps a record instead. The record says: in your friendships, you hold the listening job. The job was assigned early, it was never reviewed, and it comes with a rule. Your own state is not on the agenda.

The Draining Bond is the pattern where the reasoning arrives at the same answer no matter what the numbers were. Here the reasoning sounds like this. They need it more. Mine is small. I would not know where to start. It is easier to ask. Every one of those sentences ends in the same place: the question goes back to them.

Notice that none of the sentences is about them. They are about a job you carry, and the job does not have a vacancy for the other direction. That is why the friends can change and the asymmetry stays.

The body signal is what you feel as the pattern starts, before the turn. On this file the report is a small drop in the stomach, or a tightening in the throat, the moment a real how are you lands. It feels like being put on the spot.

Not by telling your friends to ask more. You can, and some might. But the turn can still happen in the second after they do, and then the floor is theirs again before either of you noticed. Knowing why does not change the sequence. Repeating a different action in the window does.

The three moves are the same as on any file. Catch: feel the body signal and name the pattern before it becomes the behavior. Intercept: interrupt the usual response and choose a different action before the old pattern completes. Rewrite: repeat the different action until it becomes easier to reach when the signal returns.

A fine that slips out, followed by, actually, not fine, still counts. The repetition is the different action, not the quality of the conversation that follows it.

The obvious cost is being tired. The quieter cost is this. Nobody in your life has an accurate record of you. They have the version that is fine and asks good questions. When something real happens, there is no one to tell, not because they would not listen, but because they have never been shown the door.

Where the job was learned is a separate question, and you do not need the answer to work the window. Pattern Archaeology is the optional work between moments, looking back at where the pattern was learned and what it once did for you. SOURCE UNKNOWN is a complete answer.

The core file on this pattern is at /patterns/why-cant-i-leave-a-relationship-that-drains-me. It describes the same job in one relationship. This page is the same job in all of them, which is the strongest evidence it is a pattern and not the people.