Self-Love and Healing: Embracing Your Brokenness Without the Need To Be Rescued

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For much of my life, I believed—deeply, painfully—that I needed to be saved.

Not in the dramatic, fairy-tale sense. I didn’t expect a white horse or a sweeping gesture.

(That's a lie. I did.)

But somewhere inside, quietly stitched into the lining of my nervous system, was the unshakable idea that I could not survive life on my own. That I needed someone wiser, stronger, more stable to find me in the rubble, lift me out, and make it all make sense.

I spent years—decades, really—trying to earn that rescue. I’ve over-functioned in relationships, stayed when I should have left, and adapted myself in a hundred subtle ways just to stay chosen.

It wasn’t conscious, at first.

That’s the thing about these patterns—they’re often so familiar we mistake them for personality. But underneath the people-pleasing, the perfectionism, the deep need to be chosen, was a younger self, terrified and tired, who had learned early that she couldn’t hold herself together without someone else's help.

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I know I'm a little biased, but that’s normally where it begins: in childhood.

Maybe there was too much chaos, or not enough comfort. Maybe love was inconsistent, or conditional. Maybe we were made to feel that our feelings were too much—or that we were too much.

And so we learned to outsource our safety.

When we're children, our brains and nervous systems are still developing. We're not born knowing how to regulate our emotions, soothe ourselves, or make sense of what's happening around us. That capacity comes through co-regulation — the consistent, attuned presence of a caregiver who helps us feel safe, seen, and soothed.

As children, we have no choice but to depend on others, so when those caregivers are inconsistent, distant, or unsafe, we often internalise the belief that we weren’t capable of keeping ourselves safe.

If that presence is unreliable, emotionally unavailable, or frightening, we don’t just experience momentary distress — we begin to form core beliefs about ourselves and the world, because our brains are constantly trying to make meaning, to make sense of it all.

We learned to scan the room for someone who might know better, someone who could carry the weight we didn’t know how to hold.

Someone who can rescue us.

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I became a therapist not because I didn’t understand people, but because I did. Intimately. I had studied them my entire life. People had always been a kind of puzzle I was desperate to solve—not just out of curiosity, but necessity. I had watched carefully, learned the rules of engagement, tried to predict the unpredictable.

I knew how to read the room before I knew how to read books. It has continued to be both a blessng and a curse.

Understanding others on a deep psychological level felt like the only way to stay safe.

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So when I trained as a therapist, I already knew how to hold others, or at least in a way that I had thought was holding at the time.

I was the person who always ended up hearing a stranger’s life story at the pub, or who’d been told countless times, “You're so easy to talk to.” That’s great now because it’s my job, but back then, I distinctly remember wondering, when is it my turn to be heard?

While I knew how to help others feel understood, I didn’t really know how to understand myself.

I’d never learned to listen to myself.

And because of that, I never learned to expect it from others, either.

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My training was a self-imposed, organised, alchemical rescue — if you will. And, in many ways, that's exactly what happened.

But not in the way I expected. Not in the way the Old Me wanted it to happen.

No one carried me out of the wreckage.

Trust me, I tried to delegate that role many times, but they were having none of it.

Instead, piece by piece, I began to reclaim the parts of myself I had disowned. And those around me walked alongside me, witnessing my pain, but they didn’t rescue me from it.

They let me find my own way out, and that's exactly what I needed.

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Nearly 15 years previously, when I began my Level 3 training, one of the first things I was taught was not to rescue someone in their suffering.

I remember it very clearly.

A woman in our group burst into tears, and someone rushed across the room to comfort her. But before she could reach her damsel in distress, a firm, steady voice from the tutor cut through the air:

“STOP RIGHT THERE! Do NOT rescue her.”

The woman froze mid-circle, then sheepishly turned and sat back down — a little startled, like the rest of us — but we understood the point immediately.

It’s such a natural instinct, to want to comfort someone in their distress. And that’s completely ok.

But we must always ask ourselves:

Am I doing this because it’s what they need, because it’s what I need, or because it's what I think they need?

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And as I sat with my own brokenness, I began to see it in others too — the ache beneath the annoying behaviours, the child beneath the maladaptive coping strategies.

But those strategies were never truly maladaptive — they kept you alive.

There comes a time, though, when we have to look at them honestly — those old strategies — and ask which ones no longer serve us.

Like the ones that keep us defensive, for example.

And when we start to let go of some of them, naturally, a little brokenness will rise to the surface and spill out.

But you don’t need to be afraid of it.

Your brokenness just wants to be heard.

The more I softened toward my own brokenness — toward my now integrating Self — the more I realised I didn’t need to be saved.

What I needed was to stop abandoning myself.

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There’s a strange grief in letting go of the rescue fantasy.

It’s quiet and heavy and oddly tender. all at the same time.

You realise no one is coming—not because you're unworthy, but because this work, this becoming, was always yours to do.

These days, I work with others who are in the same place I was: exhausted from trying to earn love, quietly terrified of being left behind, holding out hope that someone will come and make it all ok.

And I don’t promise them that it will be easy. I don’t offer fixes or formulas.

But I sit with them in the brokenness. And I remind them—gently, honestly—that they’re not alone in it.

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We don’t always get the rescue we imagined.

But sometimes, in the absence of rescue, we find something else.

A steadiness. A softness. A strength we never knew we had.

And maybe that’s not the ending we wanted.

But it’s a beginning, all the same.