Healing Relational Attachment Wounds: A Journey Back to Myself

One of the hardest lessons I had to learn in therapy was this: not everyone will be the person you need.
No one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself.

A couple of years ago, I went through one of the lowest points of my life. I spent a lot of time reaching out to close friends — for reassurance, validation, emotional regulation — hoping they could offer the support I couldn’t yet give myself.

Because I didn’t fully trust my own inner judgment, I relied on others to tell me I was okay.
But when I didn’t get the responses I needed, I remember staring at my phone, feeling that sting of disappointment.

Was I asking for too much? Was I too much? Not enough? Too heavy? Too sensitive? Too dark?

It took deep work in therapy to get to a place where I could learn to be the person I needed in those moments.

Yes, relationships are important — and sometimes we do need others to co-regulate with us — but they can’t stop the pain for us. Only we can.

By learning to offer myself the love, care, and guidance I didn’t get as a child, I began to rewrite that old story.

What I’ve learned since then is that people can love you deeply and still lack the emotional capacity to hold space for your pain.

Some people don’t know how to handle vulnerability because it reminds them of their own. Others are in their own battles — too drained to give more. Some are triggered by their own emotional wounds, trying to work through them, or maybe they aren’t even aware of them yet.

And that doesn’t mean they’re bad friends — it means they’re human.

Once I started seeing it that way, I stopped taking everything so personally. I began to separate my needs from their limitations, and that shift became a massive turning point in my healing journey.

When I accepted that not everyone could be my safe place, I stopped trying to make them fit into roles they were never meant to play.

Looking back, I realized that my attempts to make others fit those roles were really attempts to control the outcome — to make people show up in ways that made me feel safe.

But safety doesn’t come from control; it comes from trust — especially trust in myself.

Instead, I learned to:
• Lean on friends who could listen without trying to fix me.
• Continue healing my relational wounds in therapy for deeper emotional connection to my parts that needed re-parenting.
• Go inward and support my inner child — the part of me that once felt unseen, not enough, and too much all at the same time.
• Listen to my intuition more than ever before.
• Reach out to trusted friends, family, and, always, my therapist (shoutout to LR) when I need help processing.

And surprisingly, that created space for new people — people who could meet me where I was, without judgment or confusion. People who didn’t make me feel like I was too much or a burden.

I’m still working on not performing anymore — on simply being.

The truth is, once you stop expecting everyone to understand you, you find the ones who actually do.

It means releasing control.
It means forgiving people for not being able to show up in the way you hoped.
And most importantly, it means showing up for yourself in the ways no one else can.

Healing isn’t about cutting people out; it’s about setting realistic expectations for who they are and what they can give. That’s not bitterness — that’s self-awareness.

Learning that not everyone will be the person you need can feel like loss — but really, it’s a form of clarity.

You stop chasing validation. You stop overexplaining.
And you start building relationships rooted in mutual understanding, not emotional debt.

Because the truth is, you don’t need everyone.
You just need a few real ones — and yourself.