On the Difficulty of Being Yourself in Relationships

Today, I choose to write about one of the many aspects of the complex relationship between parenting style, attachment patterns, early experiences, and psychological development: the way parental anxiety, hypervigilance, and overprotection can influence the development of autonomy, self-trust, and the child’s capacity to feel safe in the world and in their own inner resources.

I will focus especially on those adults who live with the persistent feeling that they “cannot manage on their own,” who struggle to express themselves authentically, who experience anxiety around many of life’s decisions and challenges, who feel a constant need for control, reassurance, or anticipation of danger, and for whom mistakes, uncertainty, separation, or vulnerability can become intense sources of emotional and bodily activation.

Beyond the visible symptoms, behind these difficulties there are often complex relational histories, adaptive strategies developed very early in life, and nervous systems that have learned to organize the world more around safety and survival than around exploration, spontaneity, and trust.

This article brings together reflections born from clinical experience and from working with children, parents, and adults who are trying to understand their own emotional and relational difficulties, alongside perspectives from attachment theory, developmental psychology, neurobiology, somatic psychology, psychodynamics, and relational trauma. I also write these lines from my personal experience as a mother, aware of the complexity and vulnerability of this role.

The purpose of this article is not to blame parents or to reduce a child’s development to simplistic explanations. On the contrary, I believe that most anxious or overprotective parents deeply love their children and are often trying to protect them from what they themselves could not manage or contain.

However, sometimes, without conscious intention, the parent’s fear, hypervigilance, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty become part of the emotional and neurobiological environment in which the child develops.

When parents themselves do not receive enough emotional support, space for reflection, or the possibility of becoming aware of their own wounds and relational patterns, these tend to be passed on, sometimes subtly, from one generation to the next.

This article is an invitation to reflection and awareness.

Dependency and Separation

One of the central ideas of attachment theory is that a child needs both connection and autonomy. Children need both to depend and to separate and explore. They need both safety and freedom. Both connection and differentiation.

Emotional regulation develops in relationship. Through repeated and sufficiently consistent contact with a calm, available, and relatively predictable adult, the child gradually begins to internalize the felt sense of safety.

Ideally, the parent becomes an emotional refuge to which the child can return when frightened or overwhelmed, but also a secure base from which the child can move out into the exploration of the world.

In other words, healthy development involves a natural rhythm:

I feel safe → I explore → I encounter challenges → I return → I regulate → I go out again.

In this way, the child develops self-trust not only because they are protected, but because they repeatedly experience: “I can move away, try, make mistakes, explore, and still remain safe and loved.” This repetitive cycle, in which the child’s needs — adapted to each developmental stage — are met often enough, contributes to the development of a stable and coherent sense of self.

The Development of Autonomy Begins Very Early

The development of autonomy is usually situated approximately between one year and two and a half to three years of age, as the child begins to move, walk, and try to do more and more things independently.

During this stage, exploration, curiosity, initiative, and numerous impulses to experiment, assert oneself, and differentiate become more visible, including the frequent tendency to say “No.”

This is a period in which parents need patience and understanding in order to provide the necessary space for safe exploration and experimentation. The child needs protection, guidance, and co-regulation in order to discover who they are and what they are capable of, while attuned parents support the development of age-appropriate independence and autonomy.

During this period, an important capacity develops: the ability to say no, to set boundaries, and to express oneself without fear. And when autonomy is sufficiently supported, will begins to emerge.

The child needs: to try, to make mistakes, to repeat, to learn through experience, to feel competent.

Healthy development means neither total dependence nor rigid independence, but the capacity to remain connected and in relationship without losing the self.

When Autonomy Becomes a Problem

The problem appears when excessive protection and intervention begin to replace exploration and the development of autonomy. When parents are frequently anxious, tense, hypervigilant, overprotective, or excessively controlling, they may undermine the child’s need for independence, preventing age-appropriate development.

A parent who constantly anticipates danger, intervenes too quickly, solves difficulties on behalf of the child, or struggles to tolerate frustration and separation may unintentionally communicate the message: “I don’t believe you can manage on your own.” Over time, the child may begin to doubt their own resources before even having the chance to discover them.

This can happen both because of the parent’s own unresolved fears and because of their difficulty seeing the child as a separate being, rather than as an extension of themselves, projecting onto the child their own needs, emotions, and life scenarios.

Some parents may feel abandoned by the child’s developing independence and may use guilt or fear to keep the child close and “safe.” In this way, sometimes without conscious intention, the parent communicates that the world is dangerous and that separation is risky.

Over time, the child may begin to organize their emotional, relational, and bodily experience around the need to please, to restrict their curiosity, their need for exploration and independence, and to become compliant — the “good child” — in order not to disappoint, disturb, or worry the parent. The child comes to inhibit their curiosity and autonomy in order to protect the parent’s emotional equilibrium. Gradually, the child gives up the direct expression of their independence and authenticity, responding instead with what they believe is expected of them in order not to feel abandoned or rejected. Implicitly, the child understands: “If I separate, I lose connection.”

For the child, preserving attachment is a biological priority. Therefore, when certain parts of the self seem to threaten the relationship with the parent, the child may begin to inhibit them or give them up. If parents are not aware of these needs and do not adapt as the child grows, the child may come to face the dilemma of choosing between being themselves or pleasing parents and others in order to preserve love and avoid abandonment.

At the opposite pole, the child may develop resentment toward authority, anger, rebellion, and even a certain satisfaction in doing the opposite.

Most often, however, self-expression, spontaneity, needs, initiative, or authenticity may be sacrificed in order to preserve connection and relational safety.

The “good enough” parent gradually allows frustration, separation, and contact with reality. But when the environment becomes too intrusive, anxious, or psychologically invasive, the child may organize more around compliance and protecting the relationship than around their own spontaneity and vitality.

The child develops adaptive strategies to maintain attachment under conditions of parental anxiety or relational insecurity. Because parental anxiety can invade the child’s inner world, the child may internalize the parent’s fear, guilt, or need for protection, and the relationship may become one in which the child ends up psychologically protecting the adult.

From a neurobiological perspective, healthy autonomy develops when exploration occurs within a context of relational safety. The child explores when the nervous system is not dominated by danger, when co-regulation is present, and when the adult can support and tolerate separation.

But when the parent is anxious, the child detects micro-signals of alarm, and their nervous system begins to organize around monitoring danger. Exploration is reduced, and hypercontrol or inhibition appears. In practice, the child learns that the unknown is dangerous, mistakes are threatening, separation is dangerous and autonomy is a relational risk.

What Happens Later in Adult Life?

Often, the child who becomes an adult does not explicitly remember certain experiences, yet psychologically and somatically may become predominantly oriented toward hypervigilance, anxiety, and heightened activation or, at other times, toward inhibition, passivity, and helplessness.

Sometimes the effects are not visible from the outside, but they may appear as:

• difficulty asking for help;
• fear of being invaded and avoidance of intimacy;
• loss of contact with one’s own impulses — difficulty knowing what one truly and authentically wants;
• avoidance of decision-making;
• avoidance of risk and novelty;
• excessive analysis;
• oscillation between submission and rebellion;
• procrastination;
• a constant need for reassurance;
• the feeling of being stuck in different dilemmas and choices;
• fear of control and closeness;
• difficulty with commitment;
• the feeling that responsibility is overwhelming;
• difficulty relaxing;
• guilt when separating or prioritizing oneself.

Some adults become compliant and dependent, while others develop a defensive independence. From an attachment perspective, the first pattern may resemble anxious-preoccupied attachment, while the second may resemble avoidant attachment. Yet, at a deeper level, both may have the same root: difficulty feeling safe in autonomy and relationship at the same time.

Why Do Some Children Become Anxious and Dependent Adults, While Others Become Hyper-Independent?

Not all children react in the same way. Temperament, biological sensitivity, relational experiences, the child’s role in the family, and attachment organization profoundly influence adaptation.

Some children identify with the parent’s anxiety: “The world is dangerous.” “I cannot manage on my own.” “I constantly need someone.” Others organize themselves against the anxiety: “I will not need anyone.” “Dependence is dangerous.” “I must manage on my own.” In both cases, the nervous system often remains oriented toward survival, control, and protection, rather than toward relaxation, spontaneity, and deep safety.

Many adults raised in such environments intellectually understand that they are competent, capable, or safe. And yet, the body continues to react as if autonomy, mistakes, separation, or vulnerability were dangerous.

This is one of the reasons why healing developmental trauma often involves more than cognitive insight. It may involve the gradual reconstruction of embodied and relational experiences of safety, autonomy, agency, self-regulation, self-trust, and authentic connection.

It may involve learning that: you can separate without losing love, you can make mistakes without catastrophe, you can need others without collapsing, you can act without hypercontrol and you can exist as a separate self and still remain connected.

Connection and Autonomy

Perhaps one of the most important experiences for a child is not to grow up in a perfectly controlled world without risk, but in a relationship safe enough to allow them to explore life, make mistakes, return, and gradually discover: “I can be myself and still remain loved.”

From this perspective, healthy development means neither emotional fusion nor rigid independence, but the capacity to remain in contact with others without losing one’s own identity, vitality, and dignity. The child needs to feel that they can exist as a separate person — with their own emotions, rhythms, boundaries, needs, and initiatives — without losing the relationship or love.

In relationships where anxiety, control, or overprotection become dominant, the child may begin to feel that they must choose between connection and authenticity: either they remain close and over-adapt, or they separate and lose the relationship.

In this way, many adults come to oscillate between compliance and withdrawal, between dependence and hyper-independence, without truly experiencing a relationship in which they can be both connected and autonomous.

Emotional maturation does not mean no longer needing others, but being able to exist simultaneously as autonomous and connected human beings.

What Can Help Moving Forward?

For many people, simply understanding these dynamics intellectually is not enough. Even when the adult “knows” they are capable, valuable, or safe, the body and nervous system may continue to orient toward constant protection, tension, vigilance, fear, and shame.

This is one of the reasons why the therapeutic process cannot be reduced only to explanations or cognitive insight. In many forms of relational, psychodynamic, somatic, or developmental trauma-oriented psychotherapy, the aim is not only “to understand what happened,” but to gradually begin experiencing oneself differently in relationship with oneself and with others.

Often, people come to therapy with already well-developed adaptive strategies: hypercontrol, compliance, perfectionism, rigid self-sufficiency, avoidance of vulnerability, a constant need for reassurance, difficulty sensing what they truly want, or the tendency to over-adapt in order to preserve relationships. These strategies do not appear “out of nowhere.” At some point, they represented intelligent and necessary ways of maintaining attachment, safety, or belonging.

From the perspective of NARM — the NeuroAffective Relational Model — and other modalities that work with emotional, relational, and developmental trauma, many of these difficulties are connected to the ways in which the child learned to organize their identity, emotions, body, and relationships in order to function within a particular relational environment.

The therapeutic process often involves exploring these adaptations without shaming them and without trying to “get rid of them” too quickly. Instead of being seen as personality defects, they can be understood as expressions of a nervous system that tried to preserve connection, safety, and relational continuity.

Gradually, therapy can become a space in which the person begins:

• to notice how they adapt in relationships;
• to recognize what they feel and what they need;
• to differentiate the past from the present;
• to recognize their authentic impulses;
• to tolerate uncertainty, autonomy, and vulnerability more fully;
• to discover who they are beyond the survival strategies developed very early in life.

In somatic and relational approaches, we do not work only with the cognitive story, but also with the way these experiences are organized in the body, in the nervous system, in tensions, inhibitions, automatic reactions, and relational patterns. Healing does not mean no longer needing others or becoming completely independent, but being able to remain connected without losing oneself.

From this perspective, therapy is not only about the symptom, but also about the gradual recovery of the capacity to live with more authenticity, flexibility, vitality, and inner safety — both in relationship with oneself and in relationships with others.