The First Silo Was Built at Home

Before I ever ended up siloed in a relationship, I was siloed as a child.

I grew up in a family where I was emotionally and physically abused, throughout my whole childhood, and into my twenties. And it wasn't until my last relationship ended, and I finally sat in a therapist's office, that I understood how deeply that shaped everything that came after. (If you missed it, that's the story I told here.)

That was where I realized something I'd never let myself believe: I didn't deserve any of what happened to me.

What abuse teaches you about love

When you grow up in a home like that, you don't just get hurt. You get taught. You learn lessons about love that follow you for decades.

You learn that love is contingent, that it has to be earned, and can be taken away. You learn to walk on eggshells. You learn to read a room before you enter it, to sense a mood before anyone speaks, to shrink yourself down small enough that maybe, this time, you won't set anyone off.

You learn to deprioritize your own needs so completely that you barely know you have them, because your job was to meet the needs of the people around you. People who, honestly, should never have asked those things of a child in the first place.

And here's the part that does the deepest damage: you believe it. Because the people telling you that you're too much, that something's wrong with you, that you don't deserve love, those are the people who are supposed to love you the most. The ones you're supposed to be able to trust. So when they tell you there's something wrong with you, you don't question it. You just... absorb it. You build your whole sense of self around it.

That's the first silo. The one built at home. The one where you learned to compartmentalize your own feelings and needs so you could please the people who were hurting you, because you thought if you could just make them happy, they'd stop.

How the first silo becomes the second

Here's what nobody tells you: you carry that silo straight into your relationships.

You become someone who represses her own needs to keep the other person happy, because more than anything, you want the people you love to be okay, and you'll do anything to make that happen. So when you meet a partner who compartmentalizes you, who keeps you on the porch, who can only love from behind a wall, some part of you doesn't even flinch. It feels familiar. It feels like the love you were raised on: earned, conditional, always just out of reach.

Two wounded people, two silos, locking together. One person avoids closeness to stay safe. The other shrinks herself to keep the peace. And you call it love, because it's the only shape of love you've ever known.

The beautiful part, and the line

I want to say something gently here, because it matters: the part of you that learned to love this hard, to give this much, to put others first, that part is not broken. It's beautiful. The capacity for that much love and self-reflection makes you an extraordinary, deeply caring person. That's real, and it's worth honoring.

But love without boundaries isn't love, it's self-erasure. And the work, the whole work, is learning to draw the line. To keep the beautiful part, the loving, the giving, the empathy, and to finally be able to say: I don't deserve this. I never did.

Because you didn't. Not the abuse. Not the porch. Not a single moment of being made to feel like love was something you had to bleed for.

The first silo was built for you, by people who should have known better. But you get to decide you're not going to live in it anymore, and you get to stop walking into new ones.

And that, learning you never deserved it, keeping the love but drawing the line, refusing to shrink into someone else's walls ever again, that is how you break the pattern.

You're allowed in the house. You were always supposed to be.

If any of this resonates, please consider therapy. Healing the first silo is how you stop building the second. Check out my support page for therapy platforms and resources to help you get started.