Attachment Trauma and One-Sided Relationships
Description
Attachment Trauma and One-Sided Relationships: Breaking the Cycle of Giving Without Receiving
I’ve recently begun to see how long I’ve been living the dance of one-side relationships. Growing up with a narcissistic mother who needed and took everything from me and a father who couldn’t or wouldn’t see me, I learned early that my needs didn’t matter. I learned that love was conditional and transactional - that I had to overfunction constantly, be others’ emotional regulator, and give endlessly to earn love, belonging, safety, and to be seen at all.
I was a very lonely child and it’s funny but the first word that comes to my head is ‘starved.’ I felt starved of affection, starved of love and I felt that it wasn’t OK to ask for it.
The most damaging thing wasn’t always punishment or anger - it was the withholding. Attention, love, validation, connection and so many other things withheld from an infant, a child, a growing girl as a way for a parent to manipulate, abuse, and control their own child. Withholding in a quiet, calculated way that teaches a child that nothing they do will ever be enough, that their presence isn’t safe or worthy of acknowledgment. It is one of the most insidious forms of abuse a parent can inflict. It shapes your nervous system, your expectations of others, and the way you move through every relationship for the rest of your life.
That pattern doesn’t leave when you leave childhood. It sneaks into adult relationships, into friendships, into work, into every space where your heart tries to connect and reach another. You give and give and give, waiting quietly for connection, for engagement, for care and reciprocity that may never come. You hold space for someone else’s feelings while yours pile up, ignored and unacknowledged, because your nervous system still thinks that staying small and giving (and over-giving) is the only way to survive.
This heartbreak is more than an imbalance. It keeps you hooked in to old scripts: Am I too much? Am I not enough? Did I do something wrong? For those of us with CPTSD, it’s terrifying to confront. Even the awareness of it feels heavy, scary - even mortally unsafe. But awareness is exactly where healing begins. Naming it, seeing the patterns playing out and how they have echoed through your life, and feeling the grief, acknowledging how your energy was always stretched to serve others’ needs first - that is the first step toward reclaiming yourself.
United States
