When the people you once looked up to become the people you don’t want to become

Sometimes the strongest people are the ones who decide they will never use their pain as an excuse to hurt others

One of the more confusing attachment wounds can occur when someone—or people—we once looked up to gradually become examples of who we don’t want to become. This may happen with a parent, mentor, therapist, supervisor, teacher, partner, or another person who once occupied a position of authority, safety, or influence in our lives.

At first, we may idealize them.

Not necessarily because we’re naïve.

Attachment and/or power naturally shape perception.

When someone initially feels important to our growth, we may assign meaning to their intelligence, credentials, confidence, authority, or capacity to help us.

Then contradictory experiences begin to accumulate.

Idealization → Emotionally immature, Harmful Behavior → Confusion → Protest & Attempts at Repair → Hyper-analysis → Disillusionment → Grief → Acceptance → Values Integration

You may spend months—or even years—trying to reconcile two internal versions of the same person:

The person I believed you were.

And the person I actually experience when I am the one being hurt.

Acceptance can involve integrating the person for the behavior they’ve been consistently showing us, not who we hoped they could be. From there, we can update what values feel aligned and what doesn’t.

What Attachment Research Tells Us

Attachment research has long suggested that our internal expectations of relationships are shaped through repeated experiences with important others. These internal working models influence how we understand safety, trust, responsiveness, and what we come to expect from the people around us.

Relational wounds may carry particular weight when they occur within relationships involving trust, dependency, or power. Betrayal Trauma Theory describes the unique psychological complexity of being harmed by a person or institution someone depends on or trusts.

Additionally, supervisory relationships are not psychologically neutral. A supervisor may hold influence over evaluation, employment, professional development, access to opportunities, and a person’s sense of belonging within a professional system. This can create a meaningful degree of dependency and power asymmetry, particularly when the person being supervised relies on the relationship for guidance, approval, professional safety, or continued employment. Research examining attachment within supervisory relationships suggests that attachment dynamics can emerge in these professional relationships, meaning experiences of safety, responsiveness, rupture, and trust may carry relational significance beyond an ordinary collegial interaction.

References:

Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press.

Hiebler-Ragger, M., et al. (2021). The supervisory relationship from an attachment perspective. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 28(2), 360–371.

Smith, C. P., & Freyd, J. J. (2017). Insult, then injury: Interpersonal and institutional betrayal linked to health and dissociation. Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 26(10), 1117–1131.

Research and theory on attachment help us understand why unresolved attachment experiences can feel almost like an open wound.

Our minds and nervous systems don’t always experience relational ambiguity as a neatly completed event.

When there has been no clear repair, resolution, or coherent ending, we may continue returning to the relationship psychologically to try to “resolve” it.

Replaying.

Analyzing.

Overexplaining.

Looking for new information.

Trying to make the pieces fit.

We may become preoccupied with getting the other person to reflect.

To become curious.

To actually behave in an emotionally mature manner.

To understand the impact.

To finally behave in a way that restores our original representation of them.

Sometimes what looks like “overexplaining” is partly an attempt to preserve attachment.

If I can just help you understand, maybe I don’t have to lose the person I thought you were.

But eventually, something may shift.

The goal stops being getting them to understand.

We begin asking different questions.

Do I respect how this person handles power and accountability?

Do I admire how they respond when they’ve caused harm?

Do I respect their discernment, judgment, or how they let certain people get a pass while condemning others?

Do their behaviors align with the values I once associated with them?

Would I want to become more like this person today?

And sometimes the truthful answer is painful.

No.

There’s grief in that realization.

There’s grief in wondering:

If I trusted someone who hurt me, does that mean I can’t trust myself?

There’s grief in realizing that intelligence, authority, credentials, or professional identity do not automatically create emotional maturity or relational accountability.

Clinical language doesn’t automatically create self-awareness or make you relationally aware.

The ability to intellectualize doesn’t guarantee the willingness to examine and own harmful behavior.

Factors like being neurodivergent, stressed, or other circumstances don’t give you a pass to harm others.

Professionalism is not the absence of mistakes.

It’s how we respond when our judgment, behavior, or impact is called into question.

Credentials do not protect any of us from emotional immaturity.

Therapists can become defensive.

Practice owners can avoid accountability.

People with extensive clinical training can intellectualize, triangulate, or become overly certain of their own interpretation.

Clinical knowledge does not automatically create emotional maturity.

And professional language should never become a sophisticated hiding place for cowardice, avoidance, or unprofessional behavior.

Because professionalism isn’t only how we behave when we feel confident we’re right.

It’s also how we behave when accountability is uncomfortable.

Every relational experience we move through can teach us something about our values.

Sometimes what we initially label a failure eventually becomes information.

A job that didn’t work out may teach us:

What kind of environment would I want to create if I were ever in a position of leadership?

How do I want people to feel when they make mistakes around me?

What kind of power dynamics do I never want to reproduce?

A relationship that ended may teach us:

What did I abandon in myself to preserve attachment?

What patterns did I normalize because I was afraid to lose someone?

What kind of communication, repair, accountability, and emotional maturity standards do I need in future relationships?

Do I actually respect people or want to be like people who engage in these behaviors?

A disappointing mentorship(s) may teach us:

What kind of mentor do I want to become?

What kind of spaces do I want to create for those under me?

What type of leader do I want to be?

How do I want to healthily model healthy conflict repair and humility when I make a mistake?

Sometimes our values become clearest when we experience their absence.

I don’t want to use someone’s vulnerability and private story they trusted me to protect as leverage or as a form of weaponization, instead of confronting and managing the issue with them directly.

I don’t want to examine and condemn someone’s reactions while remaining incurious about the environment (which I may have created) those reactions developed inside.

I don’t want authority to make me less accountable.

I don’t want my understanding of another person to become so rigid that contradictory information feels threatening.

This may be one of the quieter ways disillusionment becomes identity formation.

We build our integrity partly from the illusion of what we once admired.

And partly from what we experienced and consciously decided never to reproduce.

Sometimes the people who failed us teach us something.

Just not the lesson we thought we were there to learn.

And sometimes the strongest people are the ones who decide they will never use their pain as an excuse to hurt others.

At The Relational Space, some of my clearest values have been shaped by experiences that taught me what I do—and do not—want this healing space to feel like.

I want this practice to be grounded in professionalism, ethical responsibility, humility, and respect for the vulnerability people bring into therapy.

I will protect your privacy and treat the stories you share in therapy with care.

I will remain mindful of power, boundaries, and the responsibility that comes with being invited into someone’s inner world.

I will not treat my clinical interpretation of you as unquestionable truth.

I will always conduct a thorough, grounded, embodied assessment and continue to reassess and reality test before trusting my own, unproven internal story as truth.

If you tell me you feel misunderstood, I will take that seriously.

I may not always get everything right. No therapist will.

But I will be willing to examine my impact, take accountability for mistakes, and participate in repair.

I will strive to examine my impact with the same rigor I ask my clients to examine theirs.

I will take concerns seriously.

I will protect boundaries, privacy, and the integrity of the therapeutic relationship.

I will strive to create a space where every person who enters this practice is seen, heard, and valued—not only when their experience is easy for me to understand.

I will continue to examine my own blind spots with the same curiosity I ask my clients to bring to theirs.

I will never be silent while someone is suffering and let the harmful behavior continue.

I’ll never make any client, friend, colleague, or employee fight to be seen, heard, valued, appreciated, and for your worth to be questioned.

I’ll always examine what the behavior is trying to communicate, not pathologize you for reacting to something that might be harmful.

I will always take countertransference seriously, and if my own feelings or experiences begin to encroach into compromising the therapeutic environment, or may be impacting my discernment, I’ll process with my own therapist or through supervision what the next appropriate steps should be, rather than acting unprofessional and causing more harm or retraumatize a client.

Every employee that works for me will be treated with the same respect and standards, without favoritism. And if I ever cause harm, I will take responsibility for repair rather than carrying an unresolved relational rupture into their future professional or personal relationships, acting as if anything about that behavior is steady, grounded, emotionally intelligent or mature.

I will never make excuses for why any emotionally abusive, emotionally immature, and psychologically harmful behavior should be okay, not thoroughly examined or challenged, but instead encouraged.

And I will never use my own pain, history, or experiences as permission to abandon my professional responsibility to the people who trust me with theirs.

Emotional maturity and integrity are concepts that needs to be embodied, not just spoken about.

They’re values that we practice when accountability is uncomfortable.

Sometimes our values become clearest when we experience their absence.

The Relational Space was built with intention around what I want to help create instead.

Reach out today to begin your healing journey in Philadelphia with a skilled therapist who is also as real as they come.