Going To Therapy Doesn’t Heal The People Around You

If I were to ask, 'What do you know of yourself?' How would you answer? After six years of therapy and countless iterations of being, I’ve come to know myself as kind, ambitious, unexpectedly funny, and compassionate. But in the same breath, I’d also admit that I’m afraid of abandonment, that I chase perfection because I believe it makes me more likable, and that I am, at my core, deeply sensitive to the world around me.

This is what I’ve come to learn about myself in the years I’ve committed to therapy. Facing the parts of me I once called pathetic, desperate, and unlovable was painful, but that awareness now feels like an honor. To know what aches within me means I can try to grow, or, when growth isn’t possible, simply accept that I am human.

Still, in committing to unlearning harmful patterns, cultivating emotional awareness, and taking responsibility for my healing, I’ve realized that the peace I’ve built within myself doesn’t automatically translate into my relationships with others. In fact, if I’m speaking frankly, my healing has often made these relationships harder to navigate, because my progress doesn’t mark the progress of others.

That mismatch is exhausting. UK-based therapist Olamide Ajala described the feeling clearly when we spoke over the phone. “It can be so tiring to be the one who's doing the work in therapy and in relationships… it feels like the responsibility to resolve issues often lies with you,” she shared.

Her words echo my own experience. In conflict, I often find myself trying to decode the hurt beneath someone else’s words while setting aside my own feelings. And the more responsibility I take on, the less others seem required to do.

I had a dysfunctional upbringing, one that shaped complex—often toxic—relationships with many family members. In my relationship with my older sister, it’s clear that we both carry the same wound left by our mother’s abandonment. We move through the world feeling unsafe in intimacy—whether with family, friends, or partners. We wrestle with similar anxieties about our worth and how we’re perceived. And perhaps most tragically, we often feel alone, even when surrounded by people who have proven, again and again, that they love us.

Yet while I grew tired of living as someone defined by a past I didn’t design, my sister struggled to do the same. And in naming my trauma, I realized we lost the unspoken language that once allowed our relationship to work. At times, this loss has shown up in ways that feel painful but not personal. When my sister accuses me of being “selfish,” “defensive”, or reaches for whatever word suits her in response to my newfound boundaries, I try to remember that what she’s really naming is her own fear of being left behind. Still, it doesn’t make the words sting any less.

“By taking so much responsibility for the health of the relationship, the other party never has to do any work,” says Ajala when considering her own family. “There’s no problem from their perspective because I’m constantly solving it for them.”

I recognize this in my relationship with my sister. Though I’ve spent years in therapy, working toward healthier ways of relating to people I love, she has rejected the idea altogether, often leaning on me to unpack what she has not yet been able to name or confront.

The distance between us is, in many ways, a reflection of the same absence we both grew up with: our mother’s abandonment. Naming what ails you is not the same as overcoming it. Where my sister has married and become a mother herself—a bridge that has drawn her back toward our own mother—I remain unmarried, childless, and still learning what it means to live with a mother who has been absent for most of my life.

Part of what I’ve had to face in therapy is the loneliness of growth. Ajala describes it as “cocooning” —  retreating into solitude to recover and disentangle her own feelings from the feelings of others. She also notes how therapy can be as transformative as life milestones like marriage or parenthood, shifting your worldview in ways those closest to you may not understand. “Going through something so transformative that other people in your life can’t relate to can bring about loneliness,” she comments, and I’ve felt that acutely.

At times, I’ve cocooned too, choosing stillness and solitude over the noise of others. And I’ve seen how growth creates distance—some relationships adapt, others dissolve. I’ve lost connections that couldn’t stretch to hold the person I was becoming. My relationship with my mother, for instance, has reached an impasse: I am no longer the wounded child who longed for her, but a woman who needs a different kind of connection altogether. Like Ajala, I’ve felt the sting of being seen only as the old version of myself, while the new one remains invisible or dismissed.

In coming into awareness of myself, I’ve also gained an unshakable awareness of others. During the months I dated the last man I cared for—and even as we stayed in touch after he moved away — I came to know him well. More importantly, I became aware of how his ways of relating to me shaped how I saw myself.

The last time we were intimate, he confessed that he’d never truly liked a woman, but had chosen partners out of expectation. In that moment, I saw not only him, but everything he had revealed about his upbringing: the conflict avoidance, the stoicism, the emotional repression. And I realized that years of therapy had brought me to a place where I no longer wanted to be chosen simply to soothe my fear of abandonment. I wanted to be loved because I could be loved. What he was describing, though it hurt to hear and though I grieved the cage of his limitations, wasn’t enough for me anymore. Once, it might have been.

Ajala reminds me that therapy has limits; it can only ever work with one person’s perspective, and it cannot resolve the full complexity of a relationship. Healing doesn’t erase the silence of a family, or the repression in a man I once cared for. But it has given me the clarity to choose how I respond, and the courage to walk away from what no longer nourishes me.

If you were to ask me again what I know of myself, I’d say this: I am no longer content to be chosen out of fear. I want to be loved, because I can be loved. And that, for now, is enough.