The Edges of the Self

Notes from the Therapy Room - Sarah Ryan

I’ve worked for years with clients who carry something difficult to name. It isn’t always trauma in the conventional sense. But something in the system feels distorted - out of reach, hard to name, and often harder to locate in language.

They arrive in therapy thoughtful, perceptive, often highly capable. And yet they often feel guilty. Responsible. Focused on others. Unsure whether their own energy, desire, or direction is even appropriate to prioritise. As if their inner world has always had to adjust itself around someone else’s gravity. They’re not sure what they feel. Or if they’re allowed to have their own experience at all.

These are patterns I’ve seen in many different contexts - where boundaries were unclear, roles unspoken, and emotional space felt occupied rather than shared. What’s left is often a kind of low-grade possession - quiet, structural, and hard to name.

Something that quietly occupies your psychic space over time. In this context, it describes a relational atmosphere where:

• Someone else’s emotions, needs, or desires are always in the room, even when unspoken
  

• You’re never fully free to feel what you feel, because you’re unconsciously tracking them
  

• You don’t get to exist cleanly inside your own boundaries - there’s always a kind of residue of the other
  

• You begin to live in reference to them, not from within yourself

It’s a bit like being slightly haunted, but by something that calls itself love, care, or closeness.

It doesn’t take over all at once - it seeps in. Your choices, feelings, even your sense of self become shaped around someone else’s rhythm. You learn to feel what the room needs before you feel yourself.

I’ve worked with both women and men who have experienced this dynamic - where emotional availability is expected, boundaries are unclear, and it becomes difficult to locate an inner sense of self that hasn’t been shaped in response to others.

Some had parents who were seductive in tone, overly invested in how they looked or how others responded to them. Others were simply so emotionally unboundaried that the child became a stand-in: for a partner, for a mirror, for a better version of self. The literature calls it enmeshment. Parentification. Codependency. Sometimes, covert incest.

I don’t tend to start with those terms but with a question:

Who were you allowed to be in that house? And what did it cost you?

What’s often lost in these relational structures is access to your own source.

The part of you that moves with clarity, direction, and innate rhythm.

In Jungian terms, we might call it libido - the life force. The instinctive drive toward form, creation, expression, autonomy. That force is supposed to animate you from within - to move through you as your own, shaping a path that feels real, felt, alive.

But in these dynamics, something happens. That life force gets co-opted. You’re admired for your energy. Praised for your insight. Relied upon for your brightness, your sensitivity, your gifts. But only so long as they move in service of someone else’s need.

And so the libido never fully takes shape inside you. You don’t get to become. You get to facilitate other people’s becoming.

You become a stand-in. A proxy. A site for un-lived desire.

What looks from the outside like a functional adult life - education, achievement, relationship - can carry an unbearable hollowness underneath:

None of this came from me. I don’t know what I want. I’m performing something I didn’t write.

And that’s not dysfunction. That’s survival inside possession.

It can become a way of moving through the world - shaping your life around being helpful, available, emotionally useful. Often, it looks like care. It looks like professionalism. It looks like love. But underneath, it can reflect a deeper structure: I exist most safely when I am in service. That belief can solidify into identity. Not just something you do - but someone you believe you are.

And when that happens, it often means you were sacrificed (usually unconsciously) - quietly, structurally - so that someone else could feel whole. There is often an unconscious loyalty at work - one that keeps you orientated around the needs, moods, or projections of others, even when it takes you away from your own direction.

Desire gets muted. Instincts blur. And the self becomes organised around survival, not emergence. It becomes difficult to feel what’s real. You may look like you’re thriving - but inside, something remains absent. Not broken. Just lost.

Therapy can be a way back to that lost territory. Not to blame the people who shaped us,

but to recognise that something essential was deferred - and now requires reclamation.

To trace the moments you left yourself. And begin to return.

Because without that return, there can be no authentic or secure relationship with anyone else. If you are not orientated in your own realm - if you are not home in your own experience, then others can only relate to the version of you that survived. Not the one who is real.

This work is not about repair. It’s about recovery and returning to yourself. And it’s possible.