Leah story

Leah, 29, was raised by 2 parents who worked a lot and when they were home, they were distracted and distant— exhausted with trying to make ends meet.
She spent a lot of her childhood alone.
When she did approach her parents to play, connect, or engage they shrugged her off and told her to go play with the neighbors.
At around age 10 she became highly dissociated. She stopped asking for her parents to join in what she was doing, and shut down. In her teen years, she spent most of her time at friends houses. Her parents took little interesting in who she was with or what she was doing.
The subconscious message was clear: life is on you and adults cannot help. They do not care. By her mid 20s she was heavily guarded and highly protected. When she would meet an emotionally available man, she couldn’t understand it. She never had anyone interested in her inner world. It felt overwhelming and she perceived it as neediness. Because her emotionally needs were rejected at a core time in her emotional development, she internalized the belief that having needs was a weakness. These men never had a chance with her. Instead, she subconsciously was attracted to men that were emotionally unavailable (like her parents.) She felt comfortable in this dynamic and knew how to navigate it. Her partners were: unpredictable, let her down regularly, and didn’t show up for her when she needed them. It would frustrate her and she’d spend hours trying to change their behavior (just as she’d witness her mother do with her father) but nothing changed.
In these relationships she did all the chores, took on most of the financial burdens, and the day to day responsibilities.
She’d complain about this often, but on a deeper level it felt like home and she took great pride in the confirmation it gave her that if she was left: she could do everything alone.
This was her younger developmental part, her inner child’s adult attempt at safety. Re-creating her familiar dynamic of childhood that she controlled through her learned coping mechanism of hyper-independence #selfhealers