The Dark Side of Personal Growth: When Healing Costs You “Your” People

There is a concept in economics called switching costs. These are the costs consumers incur when they switch from one product or service to another, and they’re measured in time, effort and psychological burden as well as hard dollars. Switching costs are basically barriers—they keep customers locked in because the costs of leaving often feel higher than the benefits of change. 

Once you understand this, it’s easy to see how the same principle applies to personal change as well.

My transformation came with a hefty price tag. When I began therapy and healing work, I set in motion a machine that changed the terms on which I relate to people. Truth be told, I started the journey for that reason. It was after a brutal breakup and I was thoroughly dissatisfied with my relationships as a whole; work, friendship, family. But I had no idea, then, about switching costs. I thought I'd simply update my relationships, not realizing that personal growth would force me to renegotiate the whole contract, and, as it turns out, sometimes the other party is not up for changing the conditions.

How I Used to Choose “My People”

There were, functionally, two kinds of people in my life. The first were those I perceived as having “more”—more status, more confidence, more of whatever quality I had decided was the measure of a person. Around them, I became who I thought they wanted me to be. I liked what they liked, I dressed the way they dressed. I vividly remember driving with one of these friends when a Nicki Minaj song came on the radio. I loved that song. I reached to turn the volume up just as she said, “This song is so trashy!” Instead of turning it up, I turned it down and agreed with her. Even now, I cringe at how easily I abandoned my own taste just to please her. 

The second group were those I perceived as having “less.” This is a much more uncomfortable confession—I didn’t really value them or their love; I took them for granted. I was careless and dismissive of their opinions, their preferences. It always had to be my way. Where we’d go for dinner, what we’d listen to (oh, the irony). At the time, I didn’t even feel bad about it, because I thought the imbalance suited them as much as it suited me. They were passive, accommodating personalities, relieved to let someone else decide and lead (or that’s how it seemed). 

One situation comes to mind. We were having a BBQ with my (now) ex and my best friend, and I was running like a madwoman, organizing everything while they milled about the house. At one point, I asked my ex to prepare the table—something I had to explicitly ask for, of course—so I could take a shower. A moment later, he knocked on the bathroom door to ask which plates the salad should be served on. My head nearly exploded!  

Here’s an uncomfortable truth I learned about myself. Whatever powerlessness I felt in relationships with the people I “valued more,” I made up for twofold by taking control of those I “valued less”—forcing them into obedience. A powerless pawn in one direction, a tyrant in the other. Two opposite dynamics with the same result: total emotional exhaustion.

Attachment Theory, Or Why I Chose Who I Chose

Unpoetic as it sounds, I wasn’t drawn to certain types of people because of fate or chemistry, but because of family dynamics. 

After five years in therapy and hundreds of hours of listening to Alain de Botton’s soothing voice, I’ve learned that the way we relate to people is shaped early. Families are where we first learn about love, or more precisely attachment, and what it takes to keep it. And no matter how loving and caring our parents were, they may have accidentally instilled in us some flawed ideas about love and its availability. 

In my case, having grown up with a critical mother and a loving but thoroughly boundaryless father, I learned to chase approval in one direction (with the “more than” figures in my life) and take affection for granted in the other (with the “less than” ones). No wonder I absorbed the belief that love had to be earned—and that if it came freely, it wasn’t worth much.

The Performance of Love

The circumstances I grew up in, and the messages I internalized, produced a neurotic, image-conscious achiever who craved admiration and needed control to feel safe. In Enneagram terms, an unhealthy Type 3. 

Unhealthy Threes are quick to reshape their personality to gain approval and admiration. We can be calculating, bossy and cutthroat—I was called those names more times than I can count. But I find that judgment deeply hurtful. Because what is the need for external validation, if not a desperate need to be loved? 

In the Enneagram, each type is linked to a specific childhood wound, an early experience of how love and attention seem to work. For Type 3s, that wound is the sense that you are valued mainly for what you achieve, not for who you are. From that premise, my relationship pattern is almost embarrassingly logical. Of course I put energy into “managing up,” towards the people whose approval felt earned and therefore valuable. Of course I dismissed those who clung to me, because their affection felt too easy, which meant it couldn’t be worth much.

I lived inside that setup for almost 30 years—a loop of frustration, comparison, judgment and dissatisfaction. I resented the people I took for granted when they didn’t follow my script, and I resented them again for their passivity. In the other dynamic, I resented myself for not being exactly who others wanted me to be. I tried to guess what role they expected me to play, and my mood rose and fell depending on how well my performance landed.

In truth, I couldn’t relax with anyone. I didn’t know how to be myself or even who I was. My whole sense of self was built on comparison. Am I better or worse than this woman?  Am I prettier? More popular? Better at my job? And depending on the answer, I decided who belonged in which group.

When I started unpacking all that, a heartbreaking realization dawned on me: I had no idea how to build healthy, balanced relationships. None at all. 

What Healing Actually Did to My Friendship Circle

Saying that my friendship circle shrank in the first phases of my healing journey would be like saying that Hurricane Katrina was a strong wind—a severe understatement. 

Everyone’s obsessed with self-improvement these days, but the narratives that are so neatly packaged and served to us through social media don’t prepare us for what’s hiding behind the pleasant-sounding word “healing.” Setting boundaries, growing and living more authentically should improve things, right? 

Yes. And also no. 

What we tend to assume—as I pointed out at the beginning of this essay—is that we’ll simply update our connections and we’ll all live happily ever after. But that’s rarely how it goes. We forget that relationships are a dynamic between two people. You can’t change one side without putting pressure on the other. And if the other side isn’t ready or willing, the collapse becomes inevitable. 

When I started saying no, asking for reciprocity, and rejecting behavior I used to swallow in silence, I quickly found out what the relationship was made of. 

A friend from high school said something cutting at a dinner, as she probably had a hundred times before. This time, though, I told her then and there that it had hurt me and I didn't wish to be treated that way. She never spoke to me again. After nearly 20 years of friendship, I was simply erased from her life.

Another friend—someone I considered my closest—slowly disappeared once I started showing up with needs. She was fully on board when I was at my best, organizing nights out and planning vacations. She was always up for that version of me. But the moment I asked her to get more involved, to take something off my plate, to decide for once which movie we’re going to watch—that became an inconvenience.

This was annoying, but not a friendship-breaker. What was much harder to swallow was what happened when I needed her emotionally. 

For years, it had been me holding her through her pain and frustration, but when I fell apart after my breakup, she was nowhere to be found. I’ll never forget it: she came over, brought a pack of Oreos (which, by the way, I don’t even like), stayed for an hour, and left. I didn’t see her again for another month. I needed her.  Not a courtesy visit and a snack—I needed her to be with me, physically by my side. And the thing is, she could have been. I would have done it for her without a second thought. No, I have done it for her. But my raw, messy emotions were too much.  

Variations of these stories played out with others, too. Over the course of a few short years, I lost all of my closest friends. 

The Light I See Now

So what’s the lesson in all of this? In the end, the pain of those losses peeled away my old attachment patterns and forced me to choose differently. Here’s what I learned.

• Where there’s a loss, there’s also a gain. Every person who left my life made room for someone new, someone more aligned. Acquaintances slowly became friends. A university friend who used to be just a birthday message is now someone I see several times a year. A colleague I once dismissed as dull became my tennis partner, and we discovered a shared love of alternative movies.

• Rejection is not mine to control. The only part I can control is whether I reject myself. Relationships will come and go; some people will seem great at first and prove incompatible over time. My job, in any relationship, is to show up as my truest, most unapologetic self, so that if hurt or abandonment happens, I know I did not abandon myself.
• My energy is precious. It is better to invest it in a few people who are genuinely aligned with me than scatter it among many who will trample over it. I now see the cost of getting entangled with people who trigger my oldest wounds. These days I’m more cautious, more “stingy with my love,” as Beyoncé puts it. Not withholding affection, but valuing my resources far more than before.

I  choose differently now. I pay closer attention to how I feel around people—when I feel the urge to perform or put on a mask, and also the other way, when someone starts to lean on my energy too much. In those moments, I simply set a boundary or step away. I embrace authenticity over image. I allow myself to be ordinary, boring even. I repeat in my head: “Milena, you don’t have to be special to be loved,” and trust that my people will find me. That, it seems, is a healing path for a Type Three. We move away from making things happen and allow ourselves to let go, receive, just be.