I Spent Years Feeling Drained and Losing Myself in Relationships

🎧 “When the Party’s Over” – James Blake

I used to get so frustrated with myself. Why did I always feel drained? Why did I lose myself so completely in the people I loved? Why did some relationships leave me feeling more exhausted than fulfilled?

I didn’t have answers for a long time. I just knew something kept happening — in friendships, in romantic relationships, in family — and I couldn’t figure out how to stop it.

It wasn’t until I understood what was actually going on underneath it all that everything started to make sense.

It started when I was young

Somewhere along the way, I felt like my needs weren’t being met. And when you’re a child who doesn’t feel seen or loved in the way you needed, you find another way to get that love.

For me, that meant pouring myself into the people who did give it to me. From a young age I found myself taking on other people’s emotions, being the one who held space, who made others feel better. It was how I received love and connection, through being needed. Becoming so enmeshed with others that their life was my life. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I was just a little girl trying to feel safe.

But that little girl grew up, and she brought her coping mechanisms with her.

In adulthood it looked like this: losing myself completely in relationships. Fast-tracking friendships from strangers to best friends overnight. Absorbing other people’s emotions, their stress, their anxiety, carrying it as if it were mine to carry. Always rushing in to save, to fix, to help. Staying in dynamics that didn’t make me happy, accepting breadcrumbs, settling for less than I deserved, because the fear of losing them outweighed the fear of losing myself. Giving and giving until I had nothing left, then quietly resenting the people I’d given everything to.

And it wasn’t just friendships. In romantic relationships it looked like losing myself completely in another person, their mood became my mood, their problems became my problems, their happiness felt like my responsibility. With family it showed up as carrying everyone else’s emotional weight, being the one who held it all together, the fixer, the peacekeeper. Always the one giving. Rarely the one receiving.

Codependency and overgiving go hand in hand, they’re two sides of the same coin. The overgiving is just one of the loudest ways the pattern shows up.

A few years ago I didn’t have the language for any of this. I just knew that certain people left me feeling hollow. That some relationships, romantic ones, friendships, even family, felt more like survival than connection. The word codependency had been thrown around, I’d heard it, I’d even recognised myself in it. But knowing the label didn’t fix anything. Nobody tells you what to actually do with it.

Ok, so I’m codependent. Now what?

This is what I’ve learnt

First, it is not something to be ashamed of. Not even a little. Codependency isn’t a character flaw or a personality defect. It’s a coping mechanism you developed as a child because your needs weren’t being met. Your nervous system found a way to get love, and it held onto that strategy for dear life.

For me, the subconscious logic was: if I can help this person, they need me. And being needed, that was how I’d learned to receive love. So I kept doing it, in every relationship, with everyone. If they needed me, they’d love me. And if they loved me, they’d never leave.

So I overgave. And the other person overtook. And I blamed them for draining me, when really, we were both just getting our needs met in the only way we knew how.

The moment I understood that, I stopped seeing myself as a victim of my relationships. And I stopped seeing the other person as a villain.

We were both just two people with unmet needs, finding each other.

Here’s what I also had to learn, the hard way.

Judging myself for it made it worse. Trying to avoid it made it worse. Getting frustrated every time I caught myself falling into the pattern? Made it worse.

The thing that actually helped was compassion.

When I notice myself slipping into codependent behaviour now, the compulsive texting, the urge to fix someone else’s problems, the feeling of being completely consumed by another person’s energy, I stop. I step back. And instead of spiralling into shame, I get curious.

What do I need right now?

Something that also really helped me was learning to check in with my body in those moments. Because when you’re deep in codependent behaviour, the back and forth texting, being pulled into someone else’s emotional spiral, your nervous system is not regulated. It’s overstimulated. Anxious, wired, that almost frantic energy that can even feel like excitement but really isn’t. Your body is in a stress response and it’s trying to tell you something.

So now when I notice that feeling, that buzzy, dysregulated, completely consumed by someone else energy, I use it as a signal. Not a reason to spiral into shame, but a cue to pause and come back to myself.

Because underneath the behaviour is always a need. And nine times out of ten it’s the same need that little girl had all those years ago, to feel loved, to feel safe, to feel seen, to feel like she’s enough.

So I give her that. I talk to myself the way I would talk to a child who was scared. I offer myself the love I was looking for in someone else.

The question that changed everything

And then I ask myself one more question, the one that’s changed everything for me:

How would my healthy adult self act right now?

That question creates a pause. And in that pause, there’s a choice.

Maybe it means slowing down a new friendship or romantic relationship instead of fast-tracking it. Maybe it means putting the phone down instead of texting back and forth all day. Maybe it means letting a friend sit with their own problems instead of rushing in to solve them, because their growth isn’t mine to manage. Not taking on responsibility for solving other people’s problems or easing their stress, because that is not yours to carry.

It’s not about being cold or closed off. It’s about recognising where you end and someone else begins.

Codependency isn’t a life sentence. It’s a pattern. And patterns, once you can see them clearly, can be changed.

You’re not too much. You just learned to love in survival mode.

And you can learn a new way.

Part 2 coming soon: The push/pull, why I started disappearing from the people I loved most when things got too close, and the thing that actually broke the cycle for good.