One moment you’re standing on solid ground, the next you’re free-falling through space, grasping for something steady to hold. The relationship is over. The friendship has faded. The colleague you trusted has moved on. And suddenly, you’re left with this aching question: why does it hurt so much?
The feelings arrive in waves. Sadness that sits heavy in your chest. Anger that flares without warning. Sometimes a strange numbness, like you’re watching yourself from far away. And underneath it all, that old, familiar whisper: perhaps I was never really loved at all.
If you’re feeling this way, you’re not damaged. You’re not too sensitive. You’re human. And you’re responding to something that reaches back further than this particular loss, into the earliest days of learning what connection means.
This is where attachment lives. It’s the invisible map we drew in childhood about whether we’re worthy of love, whether others will stay, and what we need to do to keep them close. When any meaningful relationship ends, whether with a partner, a friend, or someone we worked alongside, that old map unfolds itself again. The patterns we learned so long ago wake up and try to guide us through the storm.
Let’s explore why some of us reach out desperately when someone pulls away, why others go quiet and withdraw, and how the fear of being left can shape the way we love. Most importantly, let’s look at how understanding these patterns can help us find our way back to ourselves.
“Attachment behavior characterizes human beings from the cradle to the grave.”
John Bowlby
Understanding Attachment: The Maps We Carry
Attachment theory isn’t complicated in essence, though its effects run deep. As small children, we needed our caregivers for everything: food, warmth, safety, comfort. In those early years, we were constantly asking silent questions. Will someone come when I cry? Can I trust that love will stay? Am I safe here?
The answers we received became the foundation for everything that followed. They formed our inner working models, the assumptions we carry about ourselves and others:
About ourselves: Am I lovable just as I am? Do my feelings and needs matter?
About others: Will people be there when I need them? Can I trust them to stay?
About relationships: Is closeness safe, or does it lead to hurt? Can we work through hard moments and come out stronger?
These core beliefs sit quietly in the background most of the time. But when a relationship ends, any relationship that mattered, they surge to the surface. The nervous system remembers old threats and responds as though you’re that small child again, wondering if you’ll be okay.
This isn’t about assigning blame. Not of your parents, not of yourself, not of the person who left. It’s about understanding. When we see the connection between then and now, we can meet ourselves with kindness instead of judgment. We can start to make different choices.
The Four Attachment Patterns
Most of us lean toward one of these ways of connecting, though we’re rarely just one thing. Think of them as familiar paths we tend to walk, not boxes that define us forever.
Secure Attachment: The Steady Ground
If your early care was mostly consistent and responsive, you likely learned that closeness is safe and distance isn’t abandonment. You can ask for what you need without fearing rejection. You can be alone without feeling lost. Conflict doesn’t mean the end; it means there’s something to work through.
You might notice:
- A natural ease in saying what you need and hearing what others need
- The ability to give space without panicking and seek closeness without clinging
- Confidence that disagreements can be repaired
Anxious Attachment: The Fear of Losing Hold
If care came inconsistently, sometimes warm and sometimes distant, you learned to watch for signs of withdrawal. You became alert to any shift in temperature, any hint that love might disappear. As an adult, you might find yourself seeking constant reassurance, replaying conversations for hidden meanings, working hard to keep people close.
The fear of being unloved sits near the surface. People-pleasing becomes second nature because if you can just be good enough, helpful enough, understanding enough, maybe they’ll stay.
You might notice:
- Anxiety that spikes after silence or disagreement
- A strong urge to reach out, explain, fix things quickly
- Difficulty trusting that someone cares unless they’re actively showing it
Avoidant Attachment: The Refuge of Self-Reliance
If emotional needs were dismissed or care felt distant, you learned to depend only on yourself. Showing vulnerability might have felt unsafe, so you built walls. Independence became your strength. As an adult, you might feel uncomfortable with intense emotions, yours or others’. You might step back when things get heavy, finding relief in logic, distance, or staying busy.
You might notice:
- Discomfort when conversations turn emotionally intense
- A reflexive pulling away when someone gets too close
- Pride in handling things alone, paired with difficulty asking for help
This often results in fealings of Emotional Numbness, when wedissconnect from bad feelings only to find ourselves feeling very little at all, even positive emotions.
Disorganised Attachment: The Push and Pull
If early care was frightening or chaotic, you learned contradictory lessons. Come close for safety, but stay away to survive. This creates a painful bind: you crave connection but fear it deeply. Relationships can feel like a storm, with feelings that surge and contradict, leaving you exhausted and confused.
You might notice:
- Rapid swings between wanting closeness and needing distance
- Intense reactions that feel hard to understand or predict
- Feeling overwhelmed by your own conflicting impulses
These patterns exist on a spectrum. They can shift. With awareness, safe relationships, and support, we can move toward a more secure way of connecting.
When Endings Expose Old Wounds
A relationship ending isn’t just about losing this person, this connection, this particular rhythm of daily life. It often activates something older. The nervous system reads the loss as danger, and suddenly you’re responding not just to what’s happening now but to what happened long ago.
Your attachment system switches on, pulling out the old strategies that once kept you safe. If you learned that holding on tightly might keep love from slipping away, you might find yourself calling, texting, trying to make sense of things, seeking just one more conversation. If you learned that showing need was risky, you might shut down, insist you’re fine, and keep moving as though nothing happened.
Both responses are protective. Both make sense.
These are the ways we try to cope when the ground gives way:
Fight: Push for answers, argue, try to regain control or contact
Flight: Stay busy, distract yourself, plan compulsively to avoid feeling
Freeze: Go numb, feel stuck, struggle to make decisions
Fawn: Please, accommodate, over-function to prevent further loss
Different attachment patterns carry different kinds of pain. Anxious patterns bring loud worry and self-blame. Avoidant patterns bring numbness and delayed grief that arrives later, often when you least expect it. Disorganised patterns bring confusion and turmoil that’s hard to pin down.
Recognising which pattern you lean toward isn’t about labeling yourself. It’s about understanding why you’re responding the way you are. It helps you meet yourself with compassion instead of criticism. It explains why people-pleasing intensifies, why the fear of being unlovable grows so loud, why endings of any kind can feel so catastrophic.
Anxious Attachment: When Endings Validate Internal Narratives
For those with anxious patterns, an ending can feel like confirmation of your deepest fear: that you were never quite enough. The mind loops endlessly. What did I do wrong? What could I have said differently? If I just explain one more time, maybe they’ll understand. Maybe they’ll come back.
Sleep becomes difficult. Appetite disappears or surges. Focus scatters. You might check their social media, reread old messages, reach out repeatedly trying to ease the panic. Self-blame arrives with force. People-pleasing spikes as you promise yourself you’ll fix every flaw, be better next time, do whatever it takes to make sure this never happens again.
None of this reflects weakness. It reflects a nervous system in alarm, doing what it learned long ago to try to keep connection alive.
What might help:
Create small anchors of calm. A breathing practice. A playlist that soothes. A warm drink held in both hands. These tiny rituals signal safety to your body.
Set boundaries around checking behaviors. If you need to look at their profile or reread messages, give yourself a specific window of time, then close it.
Ask someone safe to help regulate your nervous system. A walk with a friend. A phone call. Sitting quietly together. Connection with others can ease the panic.
Write what you want to say, but don’t send it. Let the words out without escalating contact.
Speak to yourself as you would to someone you love. “A part of me feels terrified right now. Another part knows I can sit with this. Both are true.”
Avoidant Attachment: When Numbness Becomes Protection
For those with avoidant patterns, you might seem to move on quickly. You focus on freedom, on logic, on all the reasons the relationship wasn’t right anyway. You might downplay what you had together, keep yourself busy, and resist asking anyone for support because needing help feels vulnerable.
But feelings don’t vanish just because we push them away. They wait. Sometimes grief arrives weeks or months later in a sudden wave that catches you off guard. You wonder why you’re crying now, when you felt fine before.
Staying present with sadness, even in small doses, helps. So does naming what you need, which can feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable.
Supportive steps:
Schedule brief check-ins with yourself. Set a timer for five minutes and simply notice what you’re feeling, without trying to fix or change it.
Practice sharing one small need with someone safe each week. “I could use some company today.” “I’m feeling off and could use a distraction.”
Notice your body. Tight chest, shallow breathing, tension in your shoulders. These are signals, not threats.
Set gentle limits on distraction. If you’re staying busy to avoid feeling, that’s okay. But try pairing it with a few minutes of quiet reflection afterward.
Consider therapy as a structured space to practice tolerating closeness and emotion in manageable steps.
The Fear of Being Unloved and the Pattern of Pleasing
Many of us carry a quiet, persistent fear that love is conditional. That it can be earned through good behavior and lost through mistakes. If this is what we learned early on, relationship endings don’t just hurt. They feel existential, like we’re losing evidence that we’re worthy of being loved at all.
People-pleasing grows from the same root. It’s the belief that our needs matter less than keeping others happy. In relationships of all kinds, romantic, friendship, professional, this can mean molding yourself to fit, avoiding conflict at all costs, swallowing your voice until you’re not sure what your voice even sounds like anymore.
Over time, you lose touch with who you are beneath the pleasing. The ending can feel like losing not just the other person but yourself.
Signs you might be people-pleasing:
Saying yes when everything in you wants to say no, then feeling resentful later
Apologizing for needs or feelings that are completely normal
Avoiding disagreements to keep peace, even when it costs you
Taking responsibility for other people’s moods or reactions
Small boundaries to practice:
“Let me think about that and get back to you.”
“I can help with this part, but I’m not able to do that part.”
“I want to talk about this, and I need a short break first.”
“I care about you, and I see this differently.”
This cycle is exhausting. You please to prevent abandonment. You become disconnected from yourself. The relationship struggles under the weight of everything you’re not saying, everything you’re carrying alone.
Seeing these patterns as old survival strategies, not personal failures, opens space for something different. For setting small boundaries. For voicing needs. For learning to tolerate the wobble that comes with being honest.
The Emotional Landscape of Endings
After any meaningful relationship ends, grief can feel disproportionate to the length or quality of the relationship itself. Through an attachment lens, this makes sense. The loss touches old, tender places. It’s not just about them leaving. It’s about every time someone left before.
Anxiety might spike. You scan messages, timelines, memories, searching for clues about what went wrong. Sleep changes. Appetite shifts. Your chest might ache with a physical heaviness. And shame often arrives uninvited, whispering that you’re feeling too much or not enough, that you’re broken somehow.
Common experiences:
Intrusive memories that play on repeat
Changes in sleep, appetite, energy
Swings between numbness and overwhelming emotion
Urges to reach out for relief, even when you know it won’t help
Shame about the intensity of your feelings or the absence of them
These are natural human responses when our attachment system is activated. They soften with time, with support, with gentle care. This is often when counselling offers us a space to understand and heal.
What helps:
Keep gentle routines. Regular meals, even small ones. Movement, even just a short walk. Consistent sleep times, even when sleep is hard.
Limit contact with the person who left while your emotions find their footing.
Create small rituals of closure. Letters you don’t send. A symbolic goodbye, just for you.
Attend to grief in tolerable doses. You don’t have to dive into the deepest part all at once. A few minutes at a time is enough.
Reach out to safe people before the urge to contact your ex peaks. Prevention is easier than interruption.
“Self-compassion is simply being a good friend to yourself.”
Kristin Neff
The Slow Work of Healing
The space after an ending is painful. It’s also an opportunity. Not in the toxic positivity sense of “everything happens for a reason,” but in the quiet truth that when old patterns surface, we can finally see them clearly. And what we can see, we can slowly change.
Knowledge helps. Naming your attachment pattern. Understanding the links to childhood. Recognising your triggers. But we also need to feel and process what rises, not just think about it. Skipping the emotional work keeps us stuck. Moving through it, safely and at a pace you can manage, is what creates real change.
Start small. Practice speaking to yourself as you would to a frightened child. Journal to track triggers and stories. Use mindfulness to ride waves of feeling without being pulled under. Gather evidence against harsh beliefs. Notice moments of care, warmth, proof of your worth.
A gentle framework:
Stabilise your body first. Breath work. Movement. A calming playlist. Your nervous system needs to feel safer before anything else can shift.
Track what triggers you. When do urges spike? What soothes them? Understanding the pattern gives you more choice.
Challenge the harsh stories. Write down balanced statements you can return to when the old beliefs get loud.
Strengthen your support network. Identify people you can contact when emotions surge. You don’t have to do this alone.
Revisit what matters to you. What do you value in connection, honesty, trust? Let these values guide you.
Practice boundaries. Small ones. Say no to something minor. Make a clear request. Notice how it feels.
Take time before dating again. Give your attachment system space to settle. Rushing into something new often recreates old patterns.
Over time, many people develop what’s called earned secure attachment. You build a kinder relationship with yourself. You seek out steady, respectful connections. You stay present instead of reaching for quick fixes or distractions. You let your nervous system learn that it’s safe now.
Professional support can make this hard work feel less lonely and more structured.
How Counselling Helps with Endings and Attachment
Counselling offers a confidential, steady space to lay everything down. The grief, the anger, the guilt, the confusion, the relief. All of it, without judgment or pressure to move on before you’re ready.
The therapeutic relationship itself can be healing. Consistent, attuned, safe. It can show you what secure attachment feels like, sometimes for the first time. You learn about your patterns, how they show up when relationships end, and how to soothe your nervous system when feelings surge.
In counselling sessions at Liminal, you discover your internal tools for managing intense emotions and challenge the painful beliefs about worth and lovability. You practice new relational skills: naming needs, setting boundaries, tolerating healthy closeness without panicking or withdrawing.
Therapy can offer:
Assessment of your attachment patterns with care and without judgment
Practical tools for grounding, self-soothing, and communication
Space to process grief at your own pace
Support in planning healthy boundaries with the person who left
Guidance for eventually returning to connection in a calmer, more intentional way
My goal as a Counsellor in Cornwall is to meet you exactly where you are. I work in a person-centered way with no long-term commitments required and offer flexible counselling in person at my therapy space in Redruth or online from wherever you are, with reduced rates available for those on lower incomes and discounts for keyworkers, volunteers and NHS staff.
If endings have stirred old attachment wounds, if you’re struggling with people-pleasing, if the fear of being unloved feels overwhelming, we provide a warm, professional space to make sense of it all. At your pace. In your time.
Final Thoughts
Endings can be among the hardest experiences we navigate. The intensity makes sense when we understand how early attachment shapes our adult connections. When any meaningful relationship ends, old fears wake up. This doesn’t mean we’re broken. It means we’re wired for connection, and loss touches something essential.
Recognising your patterns is the beginning. With insight, compassionate self-talk, and steady support, attachment wounds can heal. Growth rarely moves in a straight line. Some days you’ll feel strong. Other days the ground will give way again. Both are part of the process.
You can come through this with more self-respect, clearer boundaries, and a deeper capacity for connection. The work is slow, but it’s possible.
If you’d like company and guidance along the way, counselling offers that safe place to land. You don’t have to face this alone.
Common Questions
Can my attachment style really change, or am I stuck with patterns formed in childhood?
Change is possible. Many people develop earned secure attachment through awareness, practice, and healthy relationships. Therapy helps you notice patterns, calm your nervous system, and try new ways of relating. Your default style can shift toward security with time and support.
Helpful practices: Name your triggers and rehearse kinder self-talk. Choose steady, respectful people to spend time with. Practice small boundaries and safe closeness, again and again.
How long does it take to heal from a relationship ending when attachment wounds are involved?
There’s no universal timeline. When old wounds are touched, healing takes longer because you’re working through multiple layers of pain. Progress isn’t linear. You can have setbacks and still be moving forward. With support and intentional work, many people begin to feel noticeably better over several months to a year.
Signs you’re healing: Fewer urges to contact the person during emotional spikes. More capacity to sit with feelings without shutting down or panicking. Clearer boundaries and more balanced self-talk.
Is it normal to feel devastated even when the relationship wasn’t healthy?
Absolutely. We often bond most strongly where old patterns are replayed, even when the relationship isn’t good for us. Inconsistent closeness can actually intensify attachment. You’re grieving the person, the hope, the imagined future, and perhaps the validation you were seeking. Feeling devastated doesn’t mean you should have stayed. It means you’re human and you cared.
Should I reach out for closure, or is that unwise?
We often want contact for relief, especially with anxious patterns, but it can extend the pain. Closure is usually an internal process. It’s about accepting the ending and making peace with questions that won’t be answered. Before reaching out, ask what you truly need and explore it through journaling or therapy first.
Try this: Write a letter you don’t send. Use a 48-hour pause before acting on any urge to contact them. Talk it through with a counsellor to plan contact, if truly needed, with clear limits and realistic expectations.
