Echoes of the Heart: The Shape You Learned to Hold
There's a particular kind of discovery that happens in therapy, usually not all at once, but in fragments across many sessions. A client begins to notice that the thing they always thought was just their personality, their independence, their anxiety, their tendency to give until they're empty, is actually a shape they learned to hold. A posture they adopted so early it feels like bone structure.
I'm just not good at intimacy. I'm just anxious. I'm just independent. I just give a lot. These declarations come with a shrug, as though they're fixed traits, like height or eye color. Part of my work is getting curious about that "just." Where did you learn that? What was happening around you when that shape became necessary?
The answers live in the body, encoded before language, before conscious memory. Decades later, they're still running the show.
The Template
Bowlby called it the "internal working model." Based on our earliest attachment relationships, we form a template for how relationships work: what we can expect from others, what we have to do to maintain connection, whether our needs will be met or ignored or punished. This template operates largely outside awareness. It tells us who we need to be in order to be loved.
A child whose caregiver was consistently attuned learns that relationships are a source of comfort. They can reach out when distressed and expect a response. They develop what Bowlby called a "secure base," an internal foundation that allows them to explore the world and return to safety.
When attunement is inconsistent, the template adjusts. A child might learn to amplify distress to get a response, or to suppress needs entirely because expressing them led nowhere. They might become hypervigilant to a caregiver's moods, learning to read the room before they learned to read words. These aren't conscious strategies. They're survival adaptations, and they're brilliant in context. The child is solving a problem with the only tools available.
The difficulty is that the template persists. It generalizes. It starts to feel like the truth about all relationships, not just the ones that formed it.
Internal Objects
Melanie Klein takes this further in a direction I find useful. She wrote about "internal objects," the idea that we don't just learn patterns from early relationships; we internalize the relationships themselves. We carry our early caregivers inside us, not as memories exactly, but as living presences that continue to shape how we experience ourselves and others.
This means the critical voice in your head may not be simply "low self-esteem." It may be an internalized object, a version of someone who once commented on your body, dismissed your feelings, or needed you to be smaller so they could feel adequate. The way you collapse when someone is disappointed in you, the way you puff up when challenged, the way you disappear in conflict: these responses are often relational. You're not just reacting to the person in front of you. You're reacting to the person inside you.
I see this in my practice constantly. A client will describe a fight with their partner in vivid detail, clearly in the wrong, clearly being mistreated. I'll ask what they did next, and they'll say they apologized. When we slow down and get curious, we often find that the partner in the room has merged with an internal object. The client isn't responding to what actually happened. They're responding to an old relationship that got activated.
The Loops
As adults, far removed from the childhood experiences that shaped us, these patterns surface everywhere: with friends, partners, colleagues, even strangers who happen to carry some trace of the original wound.
You might notice yourself feeling anxious the closer someone gets to you, or pulling away right when intimacy reaches a peak. There's the familiar loop of conflict or distance that plays out with different people but follows the same script. Dating the same person over and over, sometimes literally, sometimes just metaphorically. Seeking reassurance compulsively, or refusing to ask for anything because you learned that needing was dangerous. Giving endlessly, avoiding conflict at a personal cost, because somewhere along the way you learned that your needs were too much, or simply not worth mentioning.
These patterns are not character flaws. They're adaptations that kept you safe in a relational world that wasn't attuned to what you needed. In adulthood, though, these same strategies can keep you tethered to old scripts, replaying loops that no longer serve you.
Mary Main's research on adult attachment found something striking: the coherence with which adults narrate their early experiences, not the content of those experiences, predicts their children's attachment patterns. Parents who have made sense of their own histories, even painful ones, tend to raise securely attached children. Parents who haven't, who dismiss, idealize, or remain confused about their early relationships, tend to transmit that unresolved quality to the next generation.
What this suggests is that the pattern doesn't have to be destiny. The shape you learned to hold can soften. It requires making sense of the story, not just knowing what happened, but understanding how it lives in you now.
Why Change Feels Dangerous
When attachment patterns get triggered, your body and mind react as if the past is happening now. Logic tells you a relationship is safe, or warns you it isn't, but your nervous system responds as if you're still a child navigating uncertainty. This is why people stay in emotionally unavailable relationships long past the point of reason. It's also why safe, steady connection can feel boring or suspicious when you're not used to it.
There's a bind here that I think is important to name. The patterns feel like protection. Staying independent means never being abandoned. Anticipating rejection means never being blindsided. Giving excessively means earning your place. Letting go of these strategies can feel like stepping off a cliff, even when you can see clearly that they're not working.
The internal objects don't want to be evicted. They've been running things for a long time. Change requires not just insight but a kind of renegotiation with parts of yourself that are deeply invested in the status quo.
What Therapy Offers
Healing attachment wounds isn't about declaring any attachment style as wrong. Anxious attachment isn't a defect. Avoidant attachment isn't a failure. These were intelligent responses to your early environment. The question is whether they're still serving you, and whether you want to expand your range.
Therapy offers a place to make the unconscious template conscious. To notice your patterns in real time, not just in retrospect. The therapeutic relationship itself becomes a kind of laboratory: here is a relationship where you can feel the old pulls, the urge to perform or withdraw or caretake, and experiment with doing something different. Over time, this builds a new kind of internal object. A relationship characterized by attunement and repair that you carry with you.
This is slow work. The shapes we learned to hold took years to form, and they don't release all at once. What I watch happen with clients is not dramatic transformation but something quieter. They start approaching relationships with curiosity instead of bracing for impact. They notice the old pattern arising and feel some space around it, a moment of choice where before there was only reflex. Connection begins to feel less like a threat to manage and more like something they can actually rest in.
The shape softens. It doesn't disappear, not entirely. You can still feel the outline of it, the posture you once had to hold to survive. The difference is that now you can set it down.
If This Resonates
I work with adults and couples who want to understand their relational patterns and build connections that feel more free. If you recognize yourself in any of this, I'd welcome the chance to talk.
