When Connection = Survival

There are times in our lives when we cling to a relationship, not because it feels nourishing, but because our system equates connection with safety. It doesn't matter if the dynamic is exhausting, painful, or fundamentally misaligned.. something in us holds on tightly. Because losing that bond, even a toxic one, feels like losing everything. This isn't irrational. It's adaptive.

From an IFS lens, this clinging is often driven by parts that formed in childhood, when our nervous systems were still learning how to stay safe. For some of us, safety was never a given. It was earned. Earned by being easy, quiet, helpful, beautiful, agreeable, high-achieving. Earned by anticipating other people's needs before our own. As a result, we developed parts that believe we must maintain connection at all costs. Even the cost of myself. If I were just better/healed/thinner/more patient, I wouldn't be in this situation. If I'm fixable, then I'm lovable.

These parts aren't the problem. They're protectors. They learned how to keep us close to the people we depended on, even if those people couldn't offer unconditional love. But now, as adults, these same strategies keep us stuck in dynamics where we shrink ourselves, silence our needs, and abandon our boundaries just to avoid being alone.

We find ourselves triggered, jealous, over-functioning, over-apologizing, spinning in anxiety when a text goes unanswered. We tell ourselves it's because we're too sensitive, too needy, too much. But really, it's the survival part of us panicking that love is about to be lost and with it, our sense of self-worth.

Deep down, we know we don’t need to earn love through perfection, thinness, sex appeal, or submission. If you feel like you do, it’s because a part of you still thinks you’re only safe when you’re desirable or easy to be with. That’s not your truth. That’s a wound. But what happens when we begin to unblend from those parts?

We begin to feel the grief. The grief of how long we've spent trying to be lovable instead of feeling inherently loved. The grief of being misunderstood. The grief of how deeply we've abandoned ourselves just to keep someone else from leaving.

But with grief comes freedom. Freedom to choose partners who see us, not just our bodies. Freedom to express discomfort without being punished for it. Freedom to walk away from what contracts us. Freedom to finally ask what if I didn’t have to maintain connection at the cost of myself? What if being loved didn’t require being less?

Your system may not believe it yet. That’s okay. Healing is slow, gentle work. But the more you befriend these parts and show them they don’t need to work so hard to be lovable, the more space you make for love that doesn’t ask you to abandon yourself to receive it.

Love that isn’t a reward, but a right. Love that feels like home, not survival.