Dependency & Self Regulation

Dependency didn’t look like dependency to me.

It looked like closeness and intimacy. 

For many years, I needed other people to be able to feel okay with myself. 

I was outsourcing something I hadn’t yet learned: self-regulation.

If the other person was there (no matter how unkind they were), I felt steady.

If that person pulled away, I spiralled.

My body knew before I did…it gave me the signals. It felt very much like a panic attack. I didn’t feel safe alone in myself.

Through the lens of attachment, it started to make sense. When we don’t learn how to feel safe, soothed, or regulated as children, we grow up looking for that safety in others because it was never demonstrated to us by secure and stable adults. 

Children don’t come into this world knowing how to self-regulate. It is learned from parents and care givers through demonstration and consistency.

If that wasn’t available to us, we attach, we adapt, we reach…trying to recreate the sense of stability we weren’t able to build in our early years. 

Breathwork changed that.

It showed me the tension I was holding, the fear, the quiet urge to reach outside of myself. I saw how often I abandoned myself in an attempt not to be abandoned by others. 

Gradually, things shifted.

It wasn’t loud or dramatic,
there just became a solid stillness where there used to be a reaction.

Of course, I still want connection. It’s an innate part of being human. Connection is healthy and necessary. But it shouldn’t feel like survival in our day to day life. I learned that I wasn’t dependent on people. I was dependent on regulation I never learned to give myself. And learning that changed everything. 

When working with clients, it’s a really important part of facilitation to support clients with co-regulation, and also to support them in self sourcing and self regulation.

#attachmenttheory #nervoussystem #healingjourney #breathwork #selfregulation