can you love without losing yourself?

on attachment, identity loss, and how the people we contort for often reflect our wounds, not our worth

i used to think losing yourself was a singular event. a moment you could name, point to, and blame. here’s when it happened. here’s who made it happen. here’s the wreckage i pulled from. i would trace the outline of my own absence and wonder, where did i go? how long have i been gone? and try to recall the moment it began.

but the truth is, there was no moment. there never is.

you don’t wake up one day and say, today i will become less of myself. instead the self wears away like shoreline. a tide of small concessions, a slow giving up. you call it understanding, compromise. you call it love. you let things go.

the way you don’t speak your preferences. the hobbies you stop mentioning. the truths you swallow. the silence you learn to sit in. you don’t want to upset them. you don’t want to seem difficult. it felt as if i became whatever the person in front of me needed me to be. wearing my adaptability like perfume, alluring but vanishing.

i didn’t know how not to become the people i loved. i would absorb them the way paper absorbs ink, instantly, permanently. with no clean way to separate what’s theirs from mine. their moods would stain me. their opinions reshape me. their indifference, empty me.

for most of my life i carried the remnants of disorganised attachment. the fragile push-pull of craving intimacy and fearing it at once. where your earliest blueprint for love is someone who hurts and holds you in the same breath. your nervous system learns confusion as its mother tongue. and in adulthood relationships can feel like walking barefoot across glass, each step laced with doubt. you want to move closer but your body flinches. you want to open up but your mouth forgets how. when someone leans in you prepare for loss. when they leave your whole system is overwhelmed with panic.

but for others, the disappearance looks different.

self-loss comes cloaked in independence.

avoidant attachment doesn’t erase the self by fusing with another, but by burying all need for connection. you become so used to shrinking your desires that you forget how to feel them. love becomes a performance of control, not intimacy. you don’t become someone else, you become no one at all.

trauma carves neural pathways of contradiction. the prefrontal cortex, governing logic and emotional regulation become hijacked by survival instincts. the body becomes a battleground with no exit. and in that war the first casualty is often the self. we learn who we have to become to stay loved, or at least tolerated. and those versions calcify. the caretaker, the achiever, the quiet one, the good girl, the easy-going partner, the emotionally low-maintenance friend. your sense of self becomes contingent, relational.

instead of looking inward you look outward for your reflection. are they smiling? am i okay? are they bored? am i too much?

that’s how you lose yourself, in the delicate balancing act of abandoning yourself to stay loved.

your earliest caretakers are your first mirrors, reflecting your emotional signals back to you, teaching you which parts are safe to express and which you must hide. if those reflections are consistent and warm, you learn security. but if distorted, ignored or punished, this fractured mirror becomes a fractured sense of self. a child doesn’t think, this love is broken, they think, i must be.

love shouldn’t require self-abandonment, yes. i feel like this is a statement we can all agree with. but what do you do if that’s all you’ve ever known? if love without self-loss feels suspicious, even boring. if presence makes your skin itch. if receiving feels like debt. outsourcing your reflection becomes addictive.

even after healing, even after all the work, you still chase the emotional environment you were shaped in. the nervous system is loyal like this. it seeks what it recognises, even if it hurts. you navigate love like a maze and every relationship after mirrors that same labyrinth. but abandoning yourself is a temporary strategy with long-term consequences. you lose track of your preferences. you second-guess your gut. you forget how to want something without someone else’s permission.

psychologists call it self-loss. the erosion of identity and service to someone else. but that word feels too clean, too clinical. it does not capture the pain of vanishing while still being looked at. it does not capture the horror of someone saying i love you when you’re not even there. you become scaffolding for someone else’s becoming. so when they leave, there’s nothing left to hold you upright.

externalising self-worth is a recipe for burnout, disillusionment, and fragmentation. when left untouched, it runs in the background for years. it happens in romantic relationships, but also in friendships, in family dynamics, in work cultures that reward obedience and punish authenticity. it happens to people pleasers, perfectionists and high achievers. it happens to the ones who pride themselves on being reliable. it happens when love is equated with sacrifice or presence earned, not offered. it happens when you feel more at home in someone else’s needs than your own.

in the absence of a solid core, you start building your sense of self from borrowed parts.

sometimes it’s hard to tell where you end and they begin. neuroscience explains this through mirror neurons, cells in the brain that activate both when we act and when we observe others acting. they help us understand emotions, mimic behavior, form attachment. they help humans to form culture. but when your sense of self is fragile, mirror neurons don’t just create empathy, they create enmeshment. they make us porous, vulnerable to emotional contagion. you start picking up their laugh, but also their fears and their insecurities. and if you don’t have a strong anchor, you start to mistake their view of you as truth. you bend to their reality and your own becomes blurry.

it’s everywhere, this framing that to love is to disappear into someone else, that giving up everything is the most romantic thing you can do. these stories tap into something deep in how culture imagines love. they show love not as something that expands you, but something that consumes you. characters aren’t whole without each other. their identities shrink and blur until they ache, die, or give up everything just to hold on. and somehow that’s meant to feel beautiful, even heroic. they romanticise the surrender of your whole being as if that’s the ultimate proof of feeling. why is that?

maybe because in a world where connection feels scarce, loneliness haunts us. the idea of complete surrender is seductive. and the narrative keeps replaying, because it’s gripping, painful, and undeniably human. it holds up fractured mirrors for us to see not just what love is, but what it can do when we forget to hold ourselves close too.

it’s not just media, it’s culture. in many families, blood is sacred, non-negotiable. you’re taught that family comes first, even if that family hurts you. that obedience is loyalty. that questioning the system is betrayal. in some cultures, being a good daughter means silence. a good wife means sacrifice. a good son learns to swallow his pain. a good father carries weight without words. and a good mother means erasure. the child becomes your compass, your cause, your only reflection. your needs are secondary. you stop being a person and start being a role.

if you already struggle with identity, if you’ve never had the space to know who you are, these messages don’t feel oppressive, they feel correct. of course you give yourself away. that’s what love means. that’s what makes you good.

but most things in life are impermanent.

relationships shift, children grow, parents age. and when you’ve staked your entire selfhood on someone else, when they leave, change, or no longer need you, you’re left standing in a version of your life that no longer fits, and a version of yourself that never really existed. it feels meaningful while it’s happening, it feels holy. but the most painful part isn’t losing the relationship, it’s that you abandoned yourself somewhere inside it and didn’t notice until it was too late.

you’re left standing in a life that no longer fits. in a self that never truly existed. with the realisation that you were never really there to begin with.

in friendships where one person’s needs quietly fade to avoid loss. in workplaces where worth shrinks to the measure of your output. in art, where your expression becomes a shadow, shaped more by praise than truth. the mirror follows you. not just in childhood, but everywhere that approval is currency. you don’t just vanish in one place, you vanish in all of them.

a nervous system forged in instability or neglect dissolves the boundary between connection and self. and in that slow vanishing you become a stranger in your own skin.

life, however, has a habit of sending you the same mirror in a new face, not to punish but to give you another chance to see clearly. most people don’t just repeat their patterns, they relive them, until awareness interrupts the cycle. a lesson dressed in affection, some mirrors show you what’s still unhealed, others who you’re capable of becoming, and they will urge you towards curiosity. do you see it now? will you choose differently this time?

until eventually you come to realise that to be chosen is not the same thing as being cherished. one is about their need, the other your worth.

secure attachment isn’t something handed to most of us, it’s something we build. the ability to reach without erasing, even when old fears surface, grows in the daily practice of choosing yourself, especially when it’s hard. every time you stay with yourself, instead of banning your needs to keep someone else close, you stitch a new thread into your sense of self. strengthening the truth that although you may know, still feels like a distant ideal. the truth that anyone who requires you to contort is not a soulmate, they’re a mirror of your wounds, not your worth.

your sense of self is the compass that keeps you upright when everything else eventually falls away. sometimes my voice still trembles, sometimes i still wonder if i’ll be too much, but i don’t lose myself as quickly. the old, familiar instinct to shape-shift is now not a compulsion but a pause, a reflex i can watch from a distance. oh, there i go again, trying to pre-empt disappointment by vanishing first. there i go, thinking i’ll only be loved if i’m useful, soothing, low-maintenance.

i used to think losing someone was the worst outcome, but now i think losing myself again would be worse, and i say again because it’s happened so, so often that i barely noticed the pattern. initially, it will feel like biting the hand that once fed you, like setting fire to the house you built with your own exhaustion. these are the moments you will remind yourself, that you will survive losing them, but can you survive forgetting who you are?

it’s not about building walls, it’s about refusing to be scaffolding for someone else’s life. walking away from those who only loved you when you held them up.

but lose as many people as you need,

just don’t lose yourself again.