There’s something haunting about the way Taylor Swift sings, “I remember it all too well.” It’s not just memory, it’s something your body gets pulled back into.
The kind where your body doesn’t seem to understand that something is over. Where a look, a place, a moment can bring everything rushing back like it’s happening again. And for some people, that’s not poetic, it’s physiological. Because when you carry deep attachment wounds, you don’t just remember relationships, you re-experience them. And when they end, it doesn’t feel like loss. It feels like something inside of you has been reopened.
There are people who go through a breakup, and then there are people who aren’t just going through it; they’re reliving something. From the outside, it can look the same. A relationship ends. Someone leaves. Something falls apart. But for some people, this is not an ending. It’s an eruption.
This is not heartbreak. This is something being reactivated.
When a client carries deep abandonment or neglect wounds, the end of a relationship doesn’t stay in the present. It reaches back.
It pulls forward everything unresolved, everything unmet, everything that was never held, never processed, never understood. And when that happens, the body doesn’t say: “This relationship is over.” The body says: “This is happening again.”
And the response is immediate. Tight chest. Racing thoughts. Loss of appetite or inability to stop eating. Sleeplessness. Panic. A deep, aching sense that something is very wrong.
This is not intellectual. This is physiological. This is what I’ve called an attachment storm: a full-body activation that makes no sense to the thinking mind but total sense to the nervous system.
Not Everyone Withdraws. Some Reattach.
We often talk about withdrawal as the aftermath. But that’s only part of the story. Because for many clients, the pain is so intolerable…they cannot be alone with it.
So instead of withdrawing, they reattach. Quickly. Urgently. Sometimes desperately. They find themselves back with the same person they know isn’t right, or in a new relationship they don’t actually want.
And if you listen closely, what they’re really saying is:
“I don’t care who it is. I just can’t feel like this.”
This is not about love. This is about relief.
People move quickly from one relationship to another to avoid the pain of being alone. The behavior can look compulsive, an urgency to attach, a difficulty tolerating separation, or a pattern of reaching for connection to regulate overwhelming emotion. In that way, it mirrors addiction.
Just calling it addiction can also be misleading and, for some, deeply shaming. Because love is not the problem. The desire for connection is not the problem. In fact, it’s one of the most human, beautiful, and essential parts of being alive. What we’re really seeing is a relationship to pain that hasn’t yet been understood. And when we reduce that to a label alone, we risk missing the deeper truth: these are people who aren’t chasing love, they’re trying to escape the unbearable feeling of losing it.
There’s another version of this that doesn’t get talked about enough, and that’s when two people are still in the relationship, but they’re caught in the storm together. The threat of the relationship ending gets expressed, but they don’t leave. They don’t resolve. And over time, something subtle but significant begins to happen; they become more and more distant from one another.
When attachment repair hasn’t been done, even a small threat to the relationship can feel massive. One partner’s insecurity or fear gets activated. The other partner feels it and reacts. What might look like a manageable conflict from the outside quickly escalates into something much deeper, old wounds of abandonment, neglect, not being seen, not being chosen. And instead of moving toward each other, they begin to protect themselves from each other. The storm passes, but nothing actually gets repaired. So the distance remains… and quietly grows.
The Oscillation: anxious to depressed.
There’s another pattern that’s harder to name in withdrawal, and I see it in clients all the time. This is what I call The Swing.
One day: Anxious, Activated, Reaching, Trying to fix, Solve, Reconnect
The next: Shut down, Numb, Disconnected, Hopeless
This fluctuation can be so intense that even the people closest to them say, “You don’t seem like yourself.” And the truth is, they’re not. Because when the system is this dysregulated, identity becomes unstable.
Add in medication changes, which are often introduced in the middle of this storm, you can see what looks like a complete personality shift. But underneath it all, the driver is the same: A system trying to survive pain that it does not yet know how to process. I’m not suggesting that meds aren’t helpful; however, it’s important that the prescriber understands attachment wounds and the medications you are on allow you to feel and work through the withdrawal process.
There is also the experience of being in relationship with someone who is in that swing. One moment, they’re reaching for you, needing reassurance, closeness, connection. Next, they’re shut down, distant, or emotionally unavailable. And if you’re the partner on the receiving end of that, it can feel disorienting. You don’t know which version of them you’re going to get. You may start questioning yourself about what you said, what you did, and what you missed. You may try harder, pull back, or walk on eggshells just to keep things steady. But the truth is, you didn’t create the swing, and you can’t regulate it for them.
Without understanding what’s actually happening beneath the surface, both people can end up exhausted, misunderstood, and alone… experiencing withdrawal even while still in the relationship.
Relational withdrawal: a painful reality few understand
For those who go through withdrawal, let’s be clear: This is not peaceful. This is not a clean, grounded step back. This often feels like:
- Emptiness
- Loneliness that borders on panic
- Questioning everything
- Losing interest in things that once mattered
Clients will say:
“I feel like I’m in a dark hole.”
And that’s the right language. Because this phase, when done consciously, is what many describe as a dark night of the soul. Not because something is wrong. But because something is being stripped away. The illusions. The patterns. The ways they’ve been relating that no longer work.
This is the part most people want to skip
They want relief. They want the pain to stop. They want to feel like themselves again.
There’s something else happening right now that I think is important to name. Many people are turning to psychedelics in search of relief, hoping for a breakthrough, an emotional release, a way to finally access and discharge the pain they’ve been carrying. And for some, those experiences can feel profound. They can open something. They can create insight. If the journey is not facilitated by a guide with experience in internal family systems or attachment work, the insight, without integration, doesn’t change your life. And a moment of emotional release is not the same as sustainable change.
If you don’t understand what shifted, if you don’t know how to regulate yourself when the feeling comes back, and it will, you can find yourself right back in the same place, looking for the next experience to take you out of it again. The work isn’t just accessing the wound. The work is learning how to stay with yourself once you are sitting with the activation again.
Here’s the truth: If you bypass this phase, you will recreate the same relationship in a different form. Because the pattern is still intact.
This is where change becomes possible
What this phase is actually asking of someone is profound: It’s asking them to stay. Not in the relationship. But in themselves.
To begin to:
- Feel what they’ve spent years avoiding
- See the patterns that have been running their life
- Understand how their past is shaping their present choices
- Build the capacity to regulate without reaching for immediate relief
This is not fast work. And it’s not easy. For someone with deep attachment wounds, being alone in their own emotional experience can feel like abandonment itself.
Time is not the enemy here
One of the most important things to understand is this process takes time. Not because something is wrong. But because something real is happening. You are:
- Rewiring how you attach
- Rebuilding your sense of self
- Learning to tolerate feelings you’ve never been taught to hold
That doesn’t happen in a weekend. Our brains are pattern-seeking devices, and we need to participate in that rewiring. Knowing that the storm will move through and learning how to lean into it and prepare for its return changes everything. Over time, you do learn that you DO have the right equipment to weather the storm.
And when people rush this, when they jump back into relationships, numb out, or override their experience, they interrupt the very process that would set them free.
Who you surround yourself with matters more than ever
During this phase, sensitivity is at an all-time high. Everything lands deeper. Everything matters more. And this is where people can either move toward healing…or reinforce their patterns.
Because if they are surrounded by people who:
- Minimize their experience
- Push them to “move on.”
- Encourage distraction over understanding
- Or worse, benefit from their dysregulation
…it will keep them stuck. What they need instead is:
- Grounded, emotionally responsible support
- People who don’t over-function or under-show up
- Environments where they can be honest without being judged or rescued
- Time with yourself to begin having healthy, corrective experiences that aren’t dependent on another romantic relationship
In this phase, they are learning to rebuild trust in themselves.
Support groups can be incredibly valuable during this time. There is something deeply human about sitting in a room with others who are also in pain, who understand, who relate, who can say, “me too.” That kind of shared experience can reduce isolation in a powerful way. It’s also important to understand that not everyone in that room is experiencing the same storm. The origin of the wound is often different. The intensity of the activation is different. The patterns driving behavior are different.
So while advice is often shared with the best of intentions, not all of it will apply to you. And the challenge is that during this phase, your ability to think clearly and discern what’s right for you is often compromised by the very activation you’re in.
For example, someone who goes into withdrawal after being raised in an engulfing environment will often need something very different than someone whose system was shaped by abandonment. The behaviors may look similar on the surface, but what’s driving them, and what will actually help, are not the same.
I found myself in a storm decades ago and reached for support. I had a sponsor in a 12-step program who helped me begin to understand the abandonment and unmet longing I felt after a breakup. But what I didn’t yet see was that I wasn’t just grieving the relationship, I was carrying the loss of my father from a very young age. I was trying to replace something that could never be replaced, and it was driving me into relationships that were almost guaranteed to fail.
At the same time, I was working with another sponsor in a different program to address what looked like codependency with the man who had just left. But underneath that was something else entirely; growing up with an alcoholic mother had shaped my inability to trust relationships in the first place.
The problem wasn’t the support. It was that I didn’t yet understand how these pieces fit together. The messages were fragmented, and instead of clarity, I felt more confused, trying to make sense of something my system didn’t yet know how to organize.
And underneath all of it was one question that wouldn’t let go:
Why?
Why did I do what I did?
Why didn’t he want me back?
Why am I like this?
This is why having someone who truly understands attachment, can see what’s happening beneath the surface, and can help you navigate it in real time can make all the difference. Not to replace community, but to ensure you’re not trying to find your way through something this complex without a clear and grounded guide. The complexities with each individual story vary. For some, they need to have contact with someone who wounded them because they have children, shared assets, etc.
What this means for you
If you are here, in the withdrawal, in the reaching, in the confusion, I want you to know that you are not lost. You are in the middle of something. Something that feels like it’s taking you apart…but is actually asking you to come back to yourself.
This part takes time. It will feel unfamiliar. At times, it will feel unbearable. And you will be tempted to leave it; to distract, to attach, to override what’s happening inside of you.
But if you can stay…if you can let this season do what it’s here to do, you won’t come out the same. You’ll come out clearer. More grounded. More honest about what you need, what you choose, and what you will no longer tolerate. And most importantly, you will learn not to abandon yourself.
What begins to change everything is when you start to understand that it’s not just “you” reacting, it’s parts of you. Parts that learned, at different stages of your life, how to survive loss, disconnection, and unmet need. And when those parts get activated, they don’t need to be silenced or pushed away; they need to be seen, understood, and repaired. Whether you are alone in withdrawal or sitting across from someone you love and struggling to stay connected, the work is the same: learning to turn toward yourself rather than abandoning yourself in the moments that matter most.
This is where real strength is built. Not in avoiding the darkness, but in learning how to find yourself inside of it. To stay. To listen. To respond differently. And over time, to realize you are not as lost as you thought. You are becoming someone who can walk through the dark and still find your way back to your own light.
There’s a line in Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising, “Come on up to the rising.” The song was written in the aftermath of collective loss, and it speaks to something deeper than grief; it speaks to what it takes to stand back up inside of yourself after you’ve been brought to your knees. And this is what I’ve witnessed over and over again in people as they move through an attachment storm. At some point, the reaching stops, the running slows, and there’s a moment, often quiet, often hard, where they begin to turn inward instead of outward. Not to collapse, but to meet themselves. To feel what’s there. To stay. To rise, not by escaping the pain, but by becoming someone who can hold it.
That’s the rising. It’s not external. It is internal. And when it happens, it changes everything.
