Some people do not trust themselves to enter relationships without getting lost inside them. This is often because they have learned that love requires abandoning parts of the self. If love is tied to particular conditions while we are growing up — if approval comes only when we are useful or successful, and needs and feelings go unrecognised — then we may learn to suppress our authenticity in exchange for connection.
A sense of self-worth is built developmentally through repeated experiences of responsiveness and emotional recognition within our earliest relationships. So some people grow up believing that being “easy” to love is safer than being themselves. In adult relationships, however, this translates into moving away from their own needs and feelings in order to meet other people’s expectations. Unconsciously, the belief is activated that expressing a need will lead to rejection — and so abandoning the self seems the safer option.
From an existential perspective, this experience of losing contact with our authenticity is also connected with the freedom to choose. When a child learns that acceptance depends on performance, compliance or usefulness, then love is experienced as conditional rather than as an existentially given relationship. This creates an inner conflict: on one side the need for connection, on the other the need for authenticity. Gradually, the person lives and develops within a denial of their own freedom, where the choice “to be me” is experienced as threatening to the relationship.
Our identity is not regarded as something fixed and internal, but as something formed within relationships. If a child grows up in an environment where their emotional experiences are not “recognised”, they learn that the self as it is, is not enough. What often develops is what is described as an “adjusted self”: a way of being that is regulated by other people’s needs and reactions. In adult relationships this translates into over-adaptation, fear of conflict and difficulty in expressing and asserting oneself, because disagreement is unconsciously experienced as a possible rejection — a loss of the relationship. Therapy here is not a “return to an authentic core”, but the experience of a new relationship in which the self can exist without being rejected.
For example, an adult may find it hard to say “this doesn’t suit me” in a relationship or at work, and may agree even while feeling under pressure, because disagreement is internally experienced as a risk of rejection.
In Gestalt psychotherapy, this concerns a disturbance of contact at the organism–environment boundary. When a person learns to adapt continuously to another’s expectations, they often develop mechanisms such as introjection — “I have to be this way in order to be loved” — and disconnection from their own needs. Authentic contact is replaced by “false versions” of the self. Gestalt sees change as an experiential recovery of the capacity to recognise what I feel, what I need and what is happening in the present of the relationship. The therapeutic process is the restoration of living contact, in which the person learns that they can remain in a relationship without disappearing inside it. It is very common to ask clients about their emotional needs and to find that they struggle greatly to identify and understand them. It is often far easier for them to name other people’s basic needs than their own.
Abandoning the self is not a “choice made out of weakness”, but often an early survival strategy within relationships where acceptance was conditional. Therapeutic change does not come simply through insight, but through the gradual experience that a relationship can bear my authenticity, and that the worth of the self does not depend on adapting but on the ability to stay in real contact — with oneself and with the other. And even when other people cannot accept our authenticity, it matters that we can recognise that our worth is not something others decide, and that real love does not require us to hide parts of ourselves. In this way we develop faith in ourselves: knowing that even if someone leaves and a relationship ends because we dare to be authentic, that is something we can bear and manage.
