Before I figured out what detachment actually meant, I was honestly just a piece of driftwood in the ocean, getting tossed around by whoever happened to be near me that week, and if you’ve ever felt like your entire emotional state depends on whether someone replied to your message in under two hours, then I think you already know exactly what I’m talking about.
My whole nervous system used to live in other people’s pockets, which is a wild thing to admit out loud, but it’s true, and I think a lot of us are walking around like that without really clocking it until something forces us to.
So this is kind of a long voice-note of an article for anyone who has anxious attachment, or who reads a dry “ok” text and spends the next forty minutes mentally rewriting the entire relationship, because I’ve been there, I lived there for years, and I want to tell you what actually got me out.
What Detachment Actually Means…
First of all, I need to clear something up, because when people hear the word detachment they immediately picture some cold, emotionally unavailable person who doesn’t care about anything and quotes stoic philosophy in their Instagram bio, and that’s really not what we’re talking about here at all.
What it actually means is that you stop trying to control things that were never yours to control in the first place, which sounds simple but is genuinely one of the hardest mental shifts I’ve ever made in my life, and I still have to practice it pretty much every day.
The truth is you cannot control another human being, no matter how much you analyse their behaviour or check their phone or try to read their tone, and the more you try, the more you’ll drive yourself completely insane while still not actually being in control of anything at all.
And what’s wild is that the thing we’re chasing when we do all of that, that feeling of safety and stability and being okay, is never going to come from the other person, it has to come from you, which I know is the most annoying sentence in the world but it’s also kind of the whole point.
The Cake Theory – Or Why You Were Confused About Your Own Ingredients
The way I think about this now is that you are a cake, like a whole, finished, perfectly nice cake sitting on the counter, and the people and the relationships and the jobs in your life are just the cherries and the icing on top.
They make the cake better, obviously, nobody is saying that toppings don’t matter, but if a cherry rolls off, the cake is still a cake, and that’s the part that took me years to actually believe in my body and not just in my head.
For the longest time I had it completely backwards, I genuinely thought the cherry was the cake, so when a cherry rolled off I’d feel like a sad pile of crumbs on the floor, and I’d attach myself to the next thing as fast as humanly possible just to feel like a cake again.
The shift that changed everything was realising that I’m the whole cake, I always was, and the toppings are nice but they were never the thing holding me together in the first place.
The Cheating Story
Okay so I want to tell you a story, and it’s a slightly embarrassing one, but I think it’ll make all of this make more sense than any theory I could give you, so bear with me.
About ten years ago I was in a relationship I absolutely should not have been in, and looking back, the signs were everywhere, like little red flags doing a whole parade down the street, but I just kept walking past them with my eyes closed because I’d decided this was going to work.
That’s the thing about being someone with anxious attachment, you don’t just see a problem and walk away, you see a problem and think “okay, I can fix this, I just need to communicate better and try harder and maybe read another self-help book”, and so you stay in something for way longer than you ever should have.
And then he cheated on me, and I know how this is going to sound, but I’m genuinely grateful for it now, because it was the only thing big enough to actually knock me out of the loop I was stuck in.
I’m not saying cheating is fine, please don’t take it that way, it’s a real boundary violation and it hurt like nothing else at the time, but the truth is I was so committed to making it work that nothing subtle was ever going to save me from that situation.
The Universe didn’t whisper at me, it didn’t send me a gentle nudge or a meaningful dream, it basically grabbed me by the shoulders and went “babe, you have to go, now”, and honestly thank god, because if that hadn’t happened I’d probably still be in some sad parallel timeline trying to carry that man up the hill of my own life on my back like an emotional support donkey.
Why We Snoop
Let’s talk about checking phones for a second, because this is something I get messages about all the time, and I really want to say this gently because I’ve been there too.
I’m not going to lecture you about trust or boundaries, I just want to ask you one honest question, which is whether you’d rather detach a tiny bit from the idea that this one person is your entire reason for being on the planet, because that’s the energy that’s actually driving the snooping in the first place.
The thing nobody tells you about going through someone’s phone is that if you want to find something you absolutely will, because you’ll find a heart emoji from 2019 and decide it’s evidence, or you’ll find a “haha” that feels a bit too enthusiastic, or you’ll find a contact called “work Sarah” and decide that work Sarah is your nemesis.
It’s not really detective work at that point, it’s just a mood you’ve already committed to, and your brain is going through the motions of collecting proof for a verdict it already reached at three in the morning when you couldn’t sleep.
And underneath all of that frantic scrolling is the belief that without this person you’ll collapse, which isn’t true, because you are one hundred percent of a person on your own, you and your partner are two whole apples making up a fruit bowl, not two sad apple halves trying to glue yourselves into one weird Frankenstein apple.
The Sneaky Side Effects
Here’s where it gets kind of fun, because once you actually start practicing this thing, the side effects are honestly wild and not what I expected at all.
The first thing I noticed was that my anxiety just dropped, like noticeably, and I think it’s because so much of anxiety is the low-level constant effort of trying to manage everyone else’s feelings and predict their moves and keep them happy enough to stay near you.
You also stop chasing people, and I don’t mean this in some performative game-playing way where you wait six hours to reply on purpose, I mean you genuinely lean back because you’re actually okay with whatever happens, and the right people get drawn toward that and the wrong people drift off, which is honestly the most efficient screening process I’ve ever come across.
And the other thing, which I think is huge for women especially, is that you stop disappearing into other people, because you know that thing where someone mentions they love hiking and suddenly your weekend involves boots and a brand new water bottle? Detachment really does kill that habit, and it’s one of the most freeing things ever.
If he tells you his favourite cake is chocolate, you don’t sprint to the kitchen and try to recreate his mum’s exact recipe to win him over, you just say “oh that’s cute, I’m actually more of a cheesecake person” and then you bring the best cheesecake he’s ever had to the table, because that’s who you are, and that’s the version of you he should be getting.
What I Actually Do When My Brain Starts Spiralling
I want to be really honest here because I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve got this completely figured out, I really don’t, I still have moments where I stare at my phone and think “why hasn’t he replied, has he died, does he hate me, am I a bad person, should I move countries”, you know how it goes.
The thing that’s different now is what I do with that feeling once it shows up, because instead of acting on it immediately, I just sit with it and ask myself one specific question, which is what would genuinely happen if this person walked out of my life right this second.
Usually when I actually trace it through honestly, the answer is something like “I’d be sad for a while and probably eat too much pasta and cry on the couch and then I’d be fine”, and sometimes the answer is even “I’d actually be more than fine”, and that little reality check pulls so much of the air out of the panic balloon.
You don’t always get to choose what happens to you, but you almost always get to choose the frame you put around it, and that’s a lot more power than most of us are using on a daily basis.
Detaching From Your Own Thoughts – The Bit Nobody Warns You About
Something I didn’t realise for a long time is that detachment isn’t only about other people, it’s also about your own brain, and once I figured that out it changed a lot for me, especially after I had my baby.
My brain went into full disaster-prediction mode for months, every staircase felt like a threat, every chair was suspicious, and I’d carry him down the stairs while my brain helpfully offered up these vivid little horror scenarios that I won’t repeat here, but if you’re a mum reading this then you already know exactly what I mean.
The thing that helped was this idea I came across in a book about being like water, where instead of standing in the river of your own thoughts and getting swept around by every single one of them, you step out and sit on the bank and just watch the river go by without jumping in after each fish.
And once I started thanking my brain for those scary thoughts instead of fighting them, the volume on them genuinely turned down, because all my brain was really doing was trying to keep us safe in its own slightly chaotic way, and once it felt heard it kind of relaxed.
The Magnet Thing – Why Letting Go Pulls Everything Closer
This is the part that feels like a cosmic joke, but I swear it’s real, which is that the less tightly you grip something, the more of it shows up in your life, and I’ve watched this play out so many times now that I’ve stopped questioning it.
Desperate energy is heavy, people can feel it from across a room, jobs can feel it through a screen, and that guy you’re trying so hard to convince to like you can absolutely feel it through every text you send, because nothing in the world really wants to move toward something that needs it like oxygen.
The weird magic of detachment is that when you genuinely stop needing a specific thing to happen, you become kind of magnetic without trying, and it’s not because you’re playing it cool or running some clever strategy, it’s because your nervous system has actually settled down and people can finally meet the real you instead of the performance version.
I’ve seen this happen in my career, in my friendships, in completely random moments on completely random Tuesdays, and the pattern is always the same, the thing I was gripping so hard never showed up, and the thing I let go of months ago is now knocking on the door asking if I’m free for coffee.
Final Thoughts – You’ve Always Had You, And That’s The Whole Thing
If you take one thing away from this whole long ramble, please let it be this, which is that you have always had you, and you will always have you, and that’s honestly the only contract in your life that’s truly airtight.
Detachment isn’t some personality transplant where you stop caring or you become emotionally distant or you turn into one of those people who replies to everything with “k”, you’re still going to feel everything, you’re still going to care about people, you’re still going to occasionally cry at a song that wasn’t even that deep.
The only real difference is that you stop getting tossed around by every little thing that happens to you, because you’ve built this quiet inner centre that stays standing while the weather outside does whatever the weather outside is going to do that day.
And the best part is that once you’re standing on solid ground, you can actually start walking toward the life you want, instead of spending all your energy just trying to get back on your feet after every little wave, and honestly, past-me would have killed for someone to explain this to her, so I really hope it lands for you the way it eventually landed for me.
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Xoxo Louisa
― Enjoy Looking Your Best!
