You don't miss them, you miss how it felt to be wanted.

When someone loves us, they can make us fall in love with ourselves a little too. Not just because it feels good to be wanted, but because we see ourselves through their eyes. They laugh at our jokes, so we must be funny. They can't keep their hands off us, so we must be attractive. We catch them looking at us with that sparkly look in their eye like we're the best thing ever, and for a second, we believe that we just might be. Until, that is, they leave. Psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut had a really interesting theory that we use other people to regulate our self-esteem. He called these relationships 'self-objects', because another person (the object) is providing something for ourselves - making us feel important, attractive, worthy, special, and generally giving us a sense of who we are. This starts in childhood. When we're little, we don't have a fully formed sense of ourselves. We come to know ourselves partly through the way other people respond to us. When we're sufficiently loved by a parent, we see ourselves through their eyes, and internalise the positive perception they have. Mummy thinks I'm brilliant, so I must be brilliant. But if your parents didn't make you feel loved or special enough, you might never have internalised a positive self-esteem. Instead, you might have internalised a low self-esteem, a belief that you're bad or not liked or [insert explicit or implicit message you received here]. Sometimes its not that you were directly made to feel bad, but perhaps your parent was simply misattuned, wasn't able to understand you of see you fully. When we're kids, we develop our sense of self through the filters of our parents. When parents are attuned to us, they help us to understand how we're feeling, who we are. We cry, and someone understands that we're sad. We're frustrated, and they recognise it. We're excited, and they share in our excitement. They see something in us and reflect it back. Over time, we begin to internalise these experiences. We don't need someone else to tell us what we're feeling every time. We become able to recognise ourselves. This doesn't stop when we become adults. We continue to need other people to see us, understand us, admire us, reassure us, and reflect parts of ourselves back to us. Being loved can provide a kind of evidence about ourselves - they think I'm funny, so maybe I am funny. They find me beautiful, so maybe I am beautiful. They choose me, so maybe I am someone worth choosing. Subscribe now This is entirely normal and ordinary. We are beings made up of relationships, and it's okay that being loved does something for our confidence. The problem comes when you don't have a strong sense of yourself, because you can become more dependent on other people's perceptions of you. This can leave us untethered, floating in the wind of the ever-changing perspective of the other. This is why love can feel so powerful. Someone comes along and sees you in this incredibly positive way. They think you're funny and beautiful and fascinating and sexy. They want you. They choose you. And suddenly, you have this new, wonderful version of yourself, almost providing evidence that you're a person worthy of love. You can imagine, though, for people without that strong core, things go quickly awry when the love breaks down. Breakups or rejections become a disaster, not just because we're rejected, but because we no longer have their love confirming that we're good enough. You don't just lose not just them, but the desirable version of yourself that existed in their eyes. That overwhelming feeling of longing, when you miss them so much it hurts, might be for them, but it also might be for yourself, for the way they made you feel about yourself. This is especially true if you know logically they aren't right for you, or you don't even really want to be with them. It can often be that what you really want back is not them, but your self-esteem. You want the version of you who felt beautiful because they thought you were beautiful. The version of you who felt funny because they laughed at your jokes. The version of you who felt special because they looked at you like you were the best thing that had ever happened to them. You want the way you saw yourself when they loved you. Share Now the obvious solution here would be to tell you to develop your own sense of self, so you're not so dependent upon others to feel good about yourself. This is a great avenue to pursue, but unfortunately I don't think it's that simple. We can't not need people. Part of Kohut's theory is that we need people; we need self-objects even as adults. We need other people to see us, respond to us and help us feel that we are real, valuable and worth knowing. If this didn't happen fully in childhood, it can still be worked on throughout your life. Perhaps a friend who gets you, a colleague who sees how hard you work, someone who appreciates something about you. This is one of the ways that therapy works. We enter into a relationship with someone who will be reliable, who will attune to our needs, and see us with unconditional positive regard. It gives us a positive self-object that, over time, we can internalise, and start to hold onto that version of us for ourselves. So the aim isn't to need people to make us feel good about ourselves. We don't live in vacuums. A softer, and more realistic goal, is to be able to internalise people's positive beliefs about us enough that we aren't fully dependent upon one person's view of us.By doing so, we can develop enough of a sense of ourselves that another person's changing perception doesn't completely change our own. So that when someone loves us, it feels wonderful, yes, but when that person goes away, they don't take our self-esteem with them. You can know you're funny even if they stop laughing, know you're attractive even if they stop being attracted, know you're worthy of love even if they don't love you. That doesn't mean it won't hurt if you lose love once again. It doesn't mean you won't miss them. But it might mean that you can hold onto your goodness, even when they stop reflecting it back to you. Subscribe now