Therapy Won't Fix Those Around You

Understanding Myself Through Therapy

When asked, “What do you know of yourself?” I would say that over the past six years of therapy, I have come to understand myself as kind, ambitious, unexpectedly funny, and compassionate. However, I also recognize my fears—like abandonment—and the ways in which I chase perfection to feel more likable. At my core, I am deeply sensitive to the world around me.

This journey of self-discovery has been both painful and transformative. Confronting parts of myself that I once considered pathetic or unlovable was difficult, but now it feels like an honor. Knowing what aches within me allows me to grow, or at least accept that I am human.

Despite the peace I’ve built within myself, it doesn’t automatically translate into my relationships with others. In fact, my healing has often made these relationships harder to navigate. The progress I make doesn’t necessarily mean others are moving forward as well. This mismatch can be exhausting.

Olamide Ajala, a UK-based therapist, described this feeling clearly when we spoke. She mentioned how tiring it is to be the one doing the work in therapy and relationships, as it often feels like the responsibility to resolve issues lies with you. Her words resonate with my own experience. In conflicts, I often try to decode the hurt beneath someone else’s words while setting aside my own feelings. The more responsibility I take on, the less others seem to contribute.

Family Wounds and Healing

I had a dysfunctional upbringing that shaped complex, often toxic, relationships with many family members. My relationship with my older sister is no exception. We both carry the same wound from our mother’s abandonment. We move through life 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 their love.

While I grew tired of living as someone defined by a past I didn’t design, my sister struggled to do the same. Naming my trauma led to a loss of the unspoken language that once allowed our relationship to function. When she accuses me of being “selfish” or “defensive,” I try to remember that what she's really naming is her own fear of being left behind. Still, the words sting.

Ajala explains that when one person takes so much responsibility for the health of a relationship, the other party never has to do any work. There’s no problem from their perspective because the first person is constantly solving it for them. I see this in my relationship with my sister. Though I've spent years in therapy working toward healthier ways of relating, she has rejected the idea altogether, often leaning on me to unpack what she hasn't yet named or confronted.

The Loneliness of Growth

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 isn’t the same as overcoming it. While my sister has married and become a mother, drawing her back toward our 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.

Therapy has its limits—it can only work with one person’s perspective and cannot resolve the full complexity of a relationship. Part of what I’ve had to face is the loneliness of growth. Ajala describes it as “cocooning”—retreating into solitude to recover and disentangle my own feelings from those of others. She notes that therapy can be as transformative as life milestones like marriage or parenthood, shifting your worldview in ways those closest to you may not understand.

At times, I’ve cocooned too, choosing stillness and solitude over the noise of others. 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.

New Awareness and Choices

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, 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 revealed about his upbringing.

Ajala reminds me that therapy has limits; it can only ever work with one person’s perspective and 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.