What Happens Inside Me When I’m With You

An LCA Reflection on attachment, closeness and the patterns we bring into our relationships.

Today, we meet at The Round Table. A place for conversations about connection. About what happens between us, but also about what happens inside us when we are with other people.

Because relationships do not only bring us closer to others. They can also bring us face to face with ourselves.

A delayed reply can suddenly feel much bigger than a delayed reply.
Someone needing space can feel like rejection.
A disagreement can make us want to explain ourselves until we are understood.
Closeness can feel comforting to one person and overwhelming to another.

Sometimes, what is happening in the present touches something we learned about connection long before this moment.

And that is where attachment can help us understand a little more.

We learn about connection through connection

Our earliest relationships are some of the first places where we learn what it feels like to need someone.

We learn whether comfort tends to come when we reach for it. Whether emotions are welcomed.
Whether closeness feels predictable. Whether we can be upset and still remain connected.
Whether there is room for us to have needs, boundaries and a voice of our own.

These experiences can shape expectations about relationships. Not as a fixed blueprint for who we will become, but as early lessons about what connection might require from us.

Some of us may learn:

“I can reach for someone and trust that they will still be there.”

Others may learn:

“I need to pay attention so I know where I stand.”

Or:

“It is safer not to need too much.”

Or even:

“I want closeness, but closeness does not always feel safe.”

As we grow older, these lessons can travel with us.

Old lessons can show up in new relationships

We do not leave everything we learned about connection in childhood. Sometimes it appears in the way we relate to partners, friends, family members and even colleagues.

We may become especially sensitive to distance.
We may need reassurance when something feels uncertain.
We may pull away when someone gets too close.
We may scan someone’s tone, expression or behaviour for signs that something has changed.
We may find ourselves pleasing, explaining, fixing, shutting down or holding tightly to connection.

And sometimes we do not realise any of this is happening. We simply know that something inside us has been activated.

This is one reason attachment is more useful as a lens for curiosity than as a label.

Instead of only asking:

“What attachment style am I?”

We can ask:

“What happens inside me when connection feels uncertain?”

Sometimes we move closer

For some of us, uncertainty creates an urge to restore connection quickly.

We may reach out more, seek reassurance, replay conversations, notice small changes in someone’s behaviour or become preoccupied with whether the relationship is okay.

Underneath that reaction may be a very human question:

“Are we still okay?”

The behaviour may look like overthinking, explaining, checking or holding on.

But underneath it, there may simply be a longing to know that the connection is still there.

Sometimes we move away

For others, closeness itself can begin to feel uncomfortable.

We may become quieter when emotions deepen. We might minimise what we need, retreat into ourselves, intellectualise what we feel or create distance when someone wants more connection.

Not necessarily because we do not care. Distance may have become one of the ways we learned to feel safe.

The question underneath may sound more like:

“Can I stay close without losing myself?”

And sometimes we do both

There are also times when we deeply want connection and simultaneously feel unsafe inside it.

We move closer, then pull away. We want to be seen, but being fully seen feels vulnerable.

We long for reassurance, yet struggle to trust it when it arrives.

We may find ourselves caught between: “Please stay” and “Please do not come too close”.

That contradiction can feel confusing, both for us and for the people who love us.

But contradiction does not always mean something is wrong with us.

Sometimes two different protective responses are trying to answer the same question:

“Is it safe for me to be here with you?”

The pattern between us

At The Round Table, we would not only look at what each person does individually.

We would also become curious about what happens between people.

One person feels distance and moves closer.

The other experiences that closeness as pressure and moves away.

The first person notices the distance and reaches even harder.

The second feels even more overwhelmed and retreats further.

Before long, both people may be reacting to each other’s reactions.

The conversation becomes:

“Why are you pulling away?”

“Why won’t you give me space?”

But underneath it, there may be two people trying to protect connection in very different ways.

This is where a relational pattern can begin to take on a life of its own. The person is not the pattern.

The pattern is what we can place on the table and look at together.

Attachment is not a life sentence

The ways we learned to navigate connection can become deeply familiar. But familiar does not mean fixed.

New relationships can teach us new things. So can reflection, healthier boundaries, repair after conflict, honest communication, therapy, coaching and repeated experiences of being met differently.

We can learn that disagreement does not always mean abandonment.

That someone needing space does not automatically mean rejection.

That closeness does not require us to disappear.

That having needs does not make us too much.

That boundaries and connection can exist in the same relationship.

And that we can care deeply about someone without abandoning ourselves to keep them close.

This does not happen because we simply decide to “be securely attached.”

It happens through experiences, awareness and practice.

Little by little, we can build different ways of being in relationship.

A question for The Round Table

At LCA we believe the most meaningful question is not:

“Which attachment style am I?”

But:

“What happens inside me when I’m with you?”

“What happens when I feel close to someone?”

“What happens when I sense distance?”

“What do I reach for when I am afraid of losing connection?”

“What do I do when closeness feels uncomfortable?”

“And what would help me remain connected to another person without losing connection with myself?”

At The Round Table, we do not have to judge the ways we learned to protect ourselves.

We can bring them into the conversation. We can listen to what they have been trying to do for us.

And from there, we can begin to ask a different question:

What kind of connection are we learning to build now?

With warmth,
LCA Coaching

© LCA Coaching 2026