Learning to Survive: How Childhood Shapes Our Adult Relationships - Storytelling Part 2

The Loneliness of Being Surrounded

When you grow up not getting your basic fundamental needs met, you learn to stop expecting them to be met. At a very young age, I felt that deep, heavy, sickening feeling of being alone—a loneliness that seemed to have no logical explanation. I was typically surrounded by family: aunts, cousins, grandparents, and relatives who filled every corner of our home. Yet paradoxically, I was lucky when I had even a bit of space to myself.

I used to snake my way into my room or find any empty space where no one else was, desperately seeking some quiet grounding. I was reaching for a kind of peace I wasn't even sure I knew how to recognize. The house could be full of voices and laughter, but inside I felt like I was drowning in silence.

It wasn't until I was in my first healthy relationship later in life that I realized the loneliness was emotional, not physical. The lack of genuine connection, meaningful communication, and being truly understood had created a chasm inside me. I felt lonely in my thoughts, isolated in my dreams, and abandoned with my fears. No amount of physical presence could fill that void because what I needed wasn't bodies in a room—it was emotional presence, attunement, and the security of knowing someone truly saw me.

Finding Safety with My Grandparents

My tween years brought a reprieve when I lived with my grandfather on and off throughout several years. For the first time, I began to feel a bit safer and heard. My grandmother had died when I was nine, so I didn't get much time with her—but her death became my first experience with the process of dying and what happens after we're gone.

She had endured so much: a form of cancer, struggles with her weight, and raising nine children (which still boggles my mind to this day). She died young at sixty-five, and after all those demanding children and her own tough upbringing, I cannot blame her for leaving us so soon. The weight of her responsibilities must have been crushing.

There was a family portrait of my grandmother that moved around between my aunts, and whenever I saw it, my stomach would sink. Within the image were my great-grandparents and my grandmother's siblings—they all looked happy and bright-eyed, hardworn but well. But my grandmother stood a step away from them, a gaping space of about a foot separating her from the group, with a deep sadness etched in her eyes.

I would stare at that photograph for what felt like hours, searching for answers to her life, her experiences, and her struggles. She looked as though she didn't belong, as if she carried some invisible burden that set her apart from everyone else. Perhaps she felt the same emotional isolation I would later recognize in myself.

Despite all her unique hardships, she was a loving woman in her own way—tough as nails, but loving. She had a special affection for babies and children, so my cousins and I were typically loved and cared for by her. During this time, my mother was mostly absent, crawling into bed late at night mumbling about something or other. My grandmother instinctively stepped in to make sure I was clean and fed.

Looking back now, I realize she was the first person in my life to ever truly parent me. I never understood this as a child, of course, but once I was grown with my own children, I recognized what she had been doing: holding boundaries and holding them firm. She was teaching me that I mattered enough to have standards applied to my care.

I remember one evening when she told me it was time to bathe, and I refused. My grandmother was not to be messed with—we all knew this—but I was feeling tough and independent, or so I thought. With one stomp of her foot, I knew I was in trouble for disobeying her. I ran as fast as I could, but with her strong, heavy body, she chased me all the way down the long hallway and into the bathroom.

I leaned against the counter, out of breath and wide-eyed. She walked right up to me with such powerful energy, pointed one finger in the air, and scolded me before storming out and locking me in. After I took a minute to catch my breath, I noticed my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Peering closer, I saw long black lines across my neck—almost like tiger stripes—earned from all my hard outdoor play. I sighed, quickly filled the tub, and got in.

I felt a sense of defeat, but she was right. She was always right about these things. My grandmother knew how to take proper care of your body, how to "be a lady," as she called it, and she wasn't about to let me go wild and feral under her care. In her firm but loving way, she was teaching me that I deserved to be cared for properly.

My Grandfather: The First Safe Man

My grandfather was a master storyteller, a spiritual man, a hardworking fellow, and the most clever person I have ever known. He could take any string of words and transform it into a puzzle to be solved or a joke to make you laugh until your sides hurt. He spoke French like his mother and insisted I learn the basics too. At random moments throughout the day, he would simply stop speaking English, and I would have to navigate my way through our conversation in French.

I would stomp my feet in frustration, then laugh, then feel exasperated, and he would look at me with a knowing smile before returning to whatever he was working on. These moments taught me resilience and adaptability in ways I wouldn't appreciate until much later.

He taught me important lessons that I still carry with me today. He always made me grilled cheese sandwiches, sometimes accompanied by tomato or split pea soup. Somehow, he made the most simple foods taste like the most decadent delights. Comfort food was new to me then—I was about eight years old, and for the first time, I felt like I had a friend, someone I could ask weird questions to and talk to when I felt scared.

One late night during a terrible lightning storm, I woke to the loudest thunder I'd ever heard—it literally shook my bed. I ran down the hall to the kitchen in a fright, and there was my grandfather, making a hot cup of tea and whistling away as if there wasn't the scariest storm ever happening right outside the window in front of him.

He asked me what was wrong, and I told him I was terrified of the lightning. He stirred his tea with a spoon, sat down at the kitchen table, and without a care in the world simply said, "If it's going to hit you, it's going to hit you, Diana."

I stood there completely perplexed, and after a full minute or so, he continued. "Everything that is meant for you has already been written. Before you and I came here, we wrote up a contract with our angels and guides—we designed our own path. So if it's already written, then why be afraid?"

At the time, I didn't fully grasp the depth of his philosophy, but those words planted a seed of acceptance and faith that would grow within me over the years. He was teaching me that some things are beyond our control, and finding peace means learning to trust in something larger than our immediate fears.

The Armor of Hyper-Independence

Living in survival mode, swallowing the need for help, and learning the kind of hyper-independence that keeps you isolated—these were skills I was unknowingly becoming a master at. I look back now and cringe, feeling that familiar pit in my stomach just like I used to.

This hyper-independence wasn't strength; it was a trauma response. When you learn early that needing others leads to disappointment or abandonment, you develop an armor that keeps everyone at arm's length. I told myself I was self-sufficient, that I didn't need anyone, that relying on others was weakness. But what I was really doing was protecting myself from the crushing disappointment of unmet needs.

The tragedy of this defense mechanism is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. By expecting nothing from others, by refusing to be vulnerable, by maintaining emotional distance, I was ensuring that my relationships would remain shallow and unsatisfying. I was recreating the very emotional isolation I was trying to escape.

The Lens of Dysfunction

As I became a young adult and moved into my first intimate relationships, I carried with me all these dysfunctional patterns. They became the lens through which I viewed potential friends and partners—a lens clouded by the assumption that I didn't need anyone, that others were inherently dangerous, particularly men, but especially women.

This distorted lens made it impossible for me to recognize healthy love when it was offered. Instead, I was drawn to what felt familiar: emotional unavailability, inconsistency, and the challenge of trying to earn love from people who were incapable of giving it. I mistook intensity for intimacy, chaos for passion, and the anxiety of insecure attachment for the excitement of romance.

It took me a long time to begin shifting this lens, and during that time, I had relationships with men who were not only emotionally unavailable but were downright scary, abusive, and completely untrustworthy. I experienced a long saga of people who abandoned me, lied to me, and left me writhing in heartache and pain.

I remember once thinking that maybe intimate relationships just weren't for me, maybe they were all like this. The pattern was so consistent that I began to believe the problem was with the very concept of love itself, rather than recognizing that I was unconsciously choosing partners who would confirm my deepest fears about relationships.

The Journey Toward Awareness

Yet I was also approaching the horizon of understanding patterns—why we carry them and how they shape our choices. I spent many years in therapy, but it wasn't until my mindset coach training that I really began to become aware of what I was choosing to carry and how to begin shifting it.

This awareness was both liberating and overwhelming. On one hand, understanding the "why" behind my patterns gave me hope that change was possible. On the other hand, I realized how much work lay ahead of me. I was essentially learning to parent myself, to provide the emotional attunement and security I had never received as a child.

I am still learning the layers of healing around emotional abandonment and neglect. As they say, the layers of the onion peel back one at a time, and healing is not linear. Some days I feel like I've made tremendous progress, and other days I find myself falling back into old patterns, wondering if I'll ever truly break free from the past.

The Moment of Recognition

At 42 years old, I am really finding the moment where you fully realize that all your experiences in relationship to your parents come shining through the relationships you choose as you go forward in life. The codependency, the self-sabotage, the compulsive caretaking of everyone but yourself, the devastatingly low expectations, the sheer ability to always expect the worst—these patterns don't just disappear because you become an adult.

This recognition was simultaneously heartbreaking and empowering. Heartbreaking because I could see how I had been unconsciously recreating my childhood wounds in every relationship. Empowering because awareness is the first step toward change.

The Narcissist's Perfect Target

It was this combination of low self-worth and unconscious patterns that led me to a relationship with a true narcissist. You see, it was the lack of self-value that became the thread this narcissist grabbed onto like a snake in the dark. He took one look at me and identified me as his next target.

He was already in a relationship—a long one—yet somehow his manipulation and charm fooled me into accepting that first major red flag. Looking back, I can see how perfectly I fit his requirements: someone who was used to emotional crumbs, who would accept inconsistency as normal, who would make excuses for bad behavior, and who would blame themselves when things went wrong.

He continued to succeed at gracefully sugar-coating the many red flags that followed, and I just kept going with it. Each boundary crossed was explained away, each lie was justified, each moment of disrespect was reframed as something I had misunderstood. I became complicit in my own deception, desperate to believe that this time would be different, that this person would finally see my worth.

This is part of an ongoing series about my journey of healing and self-discovery. In my next post, I'll explore how this relationship with a narcissist became both my greatest teacher and my wake-up call to begin the real work of healing.

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Unmasking the Rage: A Midnight Awakening