What Happens When No One Taught You How to Be Cared For
There’s a particular kind of loneliness that doesn’t come from being alone.
It comes from not knowing how to let care land — how to actually receive it.
We talk a lot about how to give love, how to be kind, how to show up for others.
But we don’t talk nearly enough about the quieter struggle:
the moment someone offers warmth and your whole body subtly pulls away.
Not out of rejection.
But out of unfamiliarity.
Out of a lifetime of not knowing what to do when tenderness is directed at you.
As a therapist who works largely with attachment, many of my adult clients come into the space with wounds that stretch way back to their childhood days. But there is often a resistance to naming the relationship between themselves and their parents as the source of their current patterns.
Unless there are clear, tangible, traumatic memories, the focus is often shifted away from parents. Here’s what I commonly hear:
“My childhood was great — I was fed, had a roof over my head.”
“We always had everything we could ask for; we were never left wanting.”
“Dad could be distant at times, but he was busy — we understood why.”
But here’s the 101: physical comfort and emotional care are two very different things.
I remember Philippa Perry’s line in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, where she describes the relationship between parent and child as the soil.
The soil supports, nurtures, allows growth.
Without rich soil, a plant can still survive — but its roots will be tentative, its growth cautious, its sense of security compromised.
So when a client rushes to reassure me that their physical needs were met, I become gently curious. Because what often accompanies this is something quieter, softer, and far more painful:
an inability to accept love or care from the people in their life now.
Not because they don’t want it.
But because receiving care requires a skill they were never taught.
For many of us, having someone cook for us, make us a cup of tea, or remember our preferences doesn’t register as comfort — it registers as threat. Not a dramatic, panic-filled threat, but a subtle one:
A tightening in the throat.
An instinctive, “Oh no, really, I’m fine.”
A sudden urge to prove we don’t need anything at all.
Growing up with caretakers who were physically present but emotionally distant often teaches a child two things:
Your needs are inconvenient
It’s safer not to have any
So we become adults who excel at independence.
Adults who can feed ourselves, soothe ourselves, care for everyone else — yet flinch when someone tries to care for us.
We mistake self-sufficiency for strength, when often it’s simply a well-practiced form of protection.
Being fed is one of the earliest languages of love.
But if our version of being fed was purely functional — a plate placed down with no warmth, attunement, or presence — then being tended to as adults feels unfamiliar to the nervous system.
Receiving requires:
Slowing down
Letting ourselves be seen
Trusting someone else’s timing
Relinquishing control
Believing our needs won’t push someone away
If no one ever modelled that, the body doesn’t know how to do it.
The good news is: it can be learned.
Not through big, dramatic breakthroughs, but through tiny acts of allowing.
Letting someone pour you a drink.
Eating something they cooked without apologising or shrinking yourself.
Sitting with the quiet warmth of being remembered.
Practicing the courage of letting care in, even just an inch at a time.
Healing doesn’t begin with needing less. It begins with learning that your needs don’t endanger connection.
And sometimes the first step is something as simple, and as revolutionary, as letting someone feed you.