Relationships followed similar patterns.
For a long time, I couldn’t understand why I kept attracting emotionally unavailable or unhealthy relationships. I thought I simply had terrible luck. But as I began looking beneath the surface, I realised my relationships weren’t just shaped by the people I chose -they were shaped by the beliefs I was carrying long before I met them.
Boarding school didn’t just teach me how to survive. It taught me what to expect from people.
One belief stood out more than any other.
Somewhere along the way, I had come to believe that men would eventually hurt me.
Not necessarily physically, but emotionally. They would let me down, disappoint me, reject me, or make me feel like I wasn’t enough.
That belief became so deeply ingrained that I stopped questioning it.
In fact, I stopped looking for love altogether.
Without even realising it, I had begun distancing myself from men as much as possible. It felt safer that way. I convinced myself I didn’t need a relationship and built a life where I rarely gave anyone the opportunity to get close.
Looking back, I can also see how this belief influenced the advice I gave others.
Whenever a friend came to me with problems in her relationship, I wasn’t as helpful as I thought I was. My perspective was often coloured by my own fears and experiences. I almost expected the man to be in the wrong. I genuinely believed that, in one way or another, most men would eventually become emotionally abusive, controlling, or hurtful.
At the time, I thought I was protecting my friends.
Now I realise I was viewing their relationships through the lens of my own unresolved pain.
As I became more curious about my beliefs, I started asking myself an uncomfortable question.
“Where did this story actually begin?”
Surprisingly, it didn’t begin with my emotionally abusive relationship.
It began much earlier.
I was only a little girl.
There was a boy I adored. We spent so much time together, and in my young mind I thought we were the best of friends and this was love. Then my family moved and we lost touch.
A few years later we found ourselves at the same boarding school.
I remember feeling excited that he would be there. But when I saw him, he barely acknowledged me.
Looking back now, it’s almost funny. He was three years older than me. He was a teenage boy, and I was still just a little girl. Of course we weren’t going to pick up exactly where we had left off.
But children don’t interpret experiences through the eyes of adults.
Children create stories.
Somewhere deep inside, I quietly concluded:
“People leave.”
“People forget about you.”
“The people you care about won’t choose you.”
It seems like such a small moment.
But I don’t think it was the moment itself that shaped me.
It was entering boarding school and spending the next six years learning to hide my feelings, cope on my own, and convince myself that needing people only led to disappointment.
That little story I’d created as a child wasn’t challenged.
It was reinforced.
Year after year.
Until eventually it no longer felt like a story.
It felt like the truth.
Today, I can look back at that little girl with so much compassion.
She wasn’t broken.
She was simply trying to make sense of the world with the understanding she had at the time.
And perhaps that’s what healing really is.
Not judging the stories we once believed.
But lovingly updating them with the wisdom we’ve gained since.
I became attracted to people who confirmed the stories I already believed.
People who made me work for love. People who couldn’t meet my emotional needs. People who reinforced the belief that love was something to earn rather than something freely given.
For years I thought I had terrible luck.
Now I understand something very different.
Our beliefs quietly shape what feels familiar. And familiarity can often disguise itself as love.
Even after those relationships ended, I carried the stories with me.
I found myself believing that most men were emotionally unavailable.
That people would eventually hurt me.
That if I trusted too much, I’d be disappointed.
I thought these were facts.
Now I see they were simply conclusions my younger self had reached in order to protect me.
She wasn’t trying to limit my life. She was trying to make sure I survived it.
The more I healed, the more I realised something extraordinary.
Every belief I carried had once served a purpose.
Every coping strategy had once protected me.
Even my anxiety.
Even my hyper-independence.
Even my people-pleasing.
None of them were enemies.
They were younger versions of me doing the very best they could with what they knew.
How could I hate parts of myself that had spent years trying to keep me safe?
I couldn’t.
For the first time, I felt compassion instead of frustration.
And then another realisation quietly emerged.
These beliefs hadn’t just shaped my romantic relationships.
They had shaped every relationship in my life.
The way I showed up at work.
The friendships I held onto.
The people I trusted.
The people I avoided.
Even the way I interpreted other people’s actions.
I had spent years believing that my experiences were simply a reflection of the world around me.
That people really were unreliable.
That love really did have to be earned.
That if I didn’t work harder than everyone else, I’d be forgotten.
That if I let people get too close, they would eventually hurt me.
But what if I wasn’t seeing the world as it truly was? What if I was seeing it through the stories I’d carried since childhood?
That question was both unsettling and incredibly freeing.
Because if my beliefs had quietly shaped the way I experienced every relationship… then perhaps changing those beliefs could change far more than just my love life.
Perhaps they could change the way I experienced the whole world.
That was the next chapter of my healing.
Not learning to change other people.
Learning to change the lens through which I had been seeing them all along.
