The Push-Pull of Love: How Early Wounds Shape Adult Intimacy

If you were raised by a mother who had unresolved issues, you may find yourself unknowingly carrying patterns of fear-avoidant attachment into your adult relationships. This attachment style often stems from a deep sense of uncertainty caused by your primary caregiver, particularly your mother, being emotionally unavailable or inconsistent. When your primary source of care is unpredictable, it leaves you questioning how to trust and rely on others and the world around you.

Unresolved trauma or emotional wounds in your mother may have prevented her from fully meeting your emotional needs, which can leave you navigating childhood with confusion and unmet longing. As a result, your self-worth may not have been able to fully develop. Perhaps you learned to retreat into yourself for comfort, to suppress your emotions because expressing them wasn’t always safe, or to protect yourself by keeping others at a distance.

If your mother had unresolved emotional issues, her responses might have been unpredictable—loving one moment, distant or critical the next. This emotional whiplash creates fear, not of intimacy itself, but of what intimacy might bring: obliteration of the Self.

This type of emotional turbulence would have been difficult for you to manage as a child. You may have felt an overwhelming need to connect with her, to seek comfort, but learned that doing so often led to disappointment, rejection, or the annihilation of your sense of self. Over time, you might have developed patterns of withdrawing from emotional closeness to protect yourself from the instability, or perhaps you learned to overtake responsibility in relationships, attempting to manage others and situations to maintain a sense of control.

As an adult, these patterns show up in your relationships in subtle ways. You might feel an intense desire for connection, but as it gets closer, more real, or more intense, you instinctively pull back. You want to feel loved and supported, but the vulnerability required to truly open up feels terrifying due to the way your emotional needs were handled growing up. You may struggle with expressing your feelings openly, or you may even worry that the people you're with might not be able to meet your needs—even when they are emotionally available.

Recognizing this pattern is the first step to breaking free. Acknowledging how your mother’s unresolved issues influenced your approach to emotional intimacy can help you understand why you feel hesitant to allow others in. But it’s important to remember that you are not bound to these patterns forever. Through self-awareness and healing, you can unlearn these behaviors, rebuild trust in yourself and others, and cultivate healthier, more balanced relationships. Not all relationships will mirror the instability you once experienced.

You are deserving of safe, consistent love, and when you find a good fit it is absolutely possible to embrace it without fear.