When Love Lets Go - Part 1

Ananya’s hands were shaking as she hung up the phone. Her sister had just confessed she’d been to an unqualified doctor and had a terrible reaction to a prescription. The words erupted before Ananya could stop them: “I told you this would happen. Why don’t you ever listen?”

Her sister went quiet. Then: “I called because I felt ill and scared. I needed you to just… be with me.”

The call ended shortly after. Ananya sat with the knot in her stomach, the tightness in her chest. She loved her sister fiercely - that’s why she’d been so angry, wasn’t it? She was trying to protect her. To help her make better choices.

But in that moment, her sister hadn’t needed protection. She’d needed presence. And Ananya’s worry had translated into judgment at the exact moment her sister was most vulnerable.

“Isn’t this what love is supposed to look like?” Ananya asked me in our session. “Caring enough to tell people the truth?”

This is the question at the heart of so much unnecessary suffering - the belief that love means taking responsibility for another person’s choices, that caring deeply requires managing, fixing, protecting. It’s the moment when love becomes entangled with control, and real connection is lost.

I see this pattern often; it appears in many guises but always carries the same energetic signature.

It shows up in the mother who lies awake worrying herself sick over her adult children’s choices.

In the partner who quietly absorbs their lover’s moods, trying to anticipate and soothe them before conflict arises.

In the friend who takes on everyone’s struggles as her own, mistaking emotional fusion for care.

I’ve heard versions of this in countless workplace conversations - colleagues gathering to discuss a mutual friend’s struggles, their concern quickly morphing into complaint: “Why can’t they see what they’re doing wrong?” The impulse feels like care, but underneath it runs frustration, even judgment. When we can’t tolerate watching someone make choices we wouldn’t make, when their struggle becomes our problem to solve from a distance, we’ve crossed from empathy into enmeshment. We’re no longer holding space for their journey - we’re trying to manage it from outside, managing our own discomfort in the guise of helping them.

These are people with generous hearts - people who love deeply, feel acutely, and genuinely want to make things better. Yet again and again, that tenderness becomes tangled in a subtle confusion: the belief that love means taking responsibility for the other. The desire to see our loved ones thriving becomes entangled with the need to manage or protect them.

 When love becomes entangled with control, real connection is lost. It starts to tighten instead of open, to absorb instead of witness.

The Inheritance of Porous Boundaries

This confusion between love and control rarely begins in adulthood. Most of us learned it early, long before we could name what was happening.

As children, many of us grew up in homes where healthy emotional boundaries simply didn’t exist - not out of malice, but because they weren’t modelled for our parents either. They did their best, yet often unconsciously leaned on us to meet their own emotional needs.

For a sensitive child, this can be overwhelming. We learn to read moods before words are spoken. We become attuned to every flicker of tension, every shift in tone. We internalise the belief that love means responsibility for another person’s feelings.

I remember feeling it viscerally as a child - the way my own system would constrict when someone I loved was upset. I would do anything to make it better. Smile brighter. Behave perfectly. Anticipate needs that hadn’t yet been voiced. All at the cost of my own voice, of my own needs.

I learned to perform the role of the perfectly behaved, bright, helpful child to avoid parental disappointment and withdrawal. I learned that any intense emotion - happy or otherwise - would have consequences that threatened connection. So I learned to shut down. I remember I didn’t have a good cry for several consecutive years. I took pride in my lack of emotion, without realising the sacrifice I was making: my aliveness in exchange for safety.

That’s how so many of us become emotional caretakers: we lose touch with our own centre in order to keep others comfortable. As children, this is often a matter of survival, at a time in our lives where the loss of connection feels like a threat to our very existence. And without healthy, embodied guidance, what begins as empathy slowly evolves into self-abandonment.

When Empathy Becomes Enmeshment

This pattern almost inevitably persists into adulthood. We fall in love and mistake merging for intimacy. We equate worry with devotion. We take responsibility for our partners’ choices or our children’s emotions, believing that to love someone means to carry their pain.

When we are flooded by another’s emotions, we are no longer present in our own body. Our system leaves its centre and orbits around the other person, trying to restore balance. It leads to tension, exhaustion, and resentment.

A friend recently called me while on a waiting list for an operation - long weeks of feeling ill and vulnerable. Her mother had come to stay to help her through it. The intention was loving, of course. But when we spoke, my friend was exhausted - not from her illness, but from her mother. Her mother controlled everything: what she ate, how she slept, when she slept, who she saw, how she spent her energy.

A gesture meant to be loving had become one that disconnected. Her mother couldn’t tolerate seeing her daughter in distress without trying to manage it away. Every attempt to control the situation was, at its root, an attempt to soothe her own anxiety. My friend wasn’t being cared for - she was being managed. And in the process, she lost access to her own wisdom about what her body needed during a tender, frightening time.

The paradox is that loving this way takes us away from the very impulse it is meant to serve - to be in connection - because it is impossible to be truly present with another person while disconnected from ourselves.

Empathy is the capacity to step into another’s world - to sense and share their feelings as if they were our own. It’s the foundation of deep connection and understanding, yet when unregulated, it can lead to what psychologists call empathic distress - when we absorb another’s pain so fully that it overwhelms our own system.

Compassion, by contrast, holds empathy within awareness. In the therapeutic sense, it means feeling forsomeone with warmth and care while staying grounded enough to act wisely. In Buddhist teaching, empathy is seen as a relative or emotional compassion - a necessary starting point - while karuna, true compassion, integrates wisdom. It is expansive, courageous, and sustainable because it includes self-awareness.

Compassion is clear, grounded, embodied. It allows love to flow without collapsing into responsibility. It says: I am here with you, witnessing your journey.

It invites curiosity rather than control: What do you need right now? What feels true for you in this moment?

It’s the difference between jumping to the rescue and holding a safe space for the other person to take responsibility - and to discover who they need to become in order to meet themselves where they are in that moment.

This movement from enmeshment to embodied compassion marks a profound developmental threshold - from love defined by fusion to love rooted in differentiation. It’s the moment we begin to understand that true connection doesn’t arise from sameness, but from two whole beings meeting, each standing in their own ground.