The Space Constraint: How We Learn to Contain Ourselves

By Brooke Levy

Let's take a moment to think about a houseplant. For our purposes let's think of a pothos (just in case you don't have the visual - a pothos is pretty hard to kill, grows in most conditions, wants to vine out and spread if you let it).

Most of the time taking care of a houseplant looks something like this: You find a pot that fits your space, you water it on whatever schedule works for you, you put it somewhere with decent light. You want it to grow. You're just not necessarily thinking about what it needs to grow fully. You're thinking about what fits the shelf. What you can manage. And the plant adapts. It grows to within the limits of its conditions.

A lot of our upbringings looked like this. Parents who genuinely wanted us to grow, but who could only hold so much. Not because they were bad people, but because nobody taught them how or provided enough space for them either. So without meaning to, they set a pot size. They communicated, consciously or not, how much space was acceptable to take up.

We learned which emotions were tolerated and which ones were too much. Maybe anger got shut down fast in your house. Maybe sadness was okay but only to a point, and then someone told you to cheer up or move on. Maybe you could be funny and easy and light, but the moment something heavy came up you felt the shift in the room. As Masur (2024) writes in Psychology Today, a parent's ability to stay with a child's difficult feelings, whatever they may be, is one of the most formative things a caregiver can offer. When that capacity isn't there, the child learns to make their feelings smaller instead. Buss (2024) puts it this way: parents communicate their values about emotional behavior, teach children to understand and manage emotions, and model what appropriate emotional responses look like. Sometimes that modeling is expansive and allows for a full range of emotions. And other times, it's just a smaller pot.

When There's No Space Left For You

Topics like abuse and neglect often get discussed, but what may not get enough airtime or validity is the question of available space. One of the more common ways this plays out, and one that doesn't get talked about enough, is through what is referred to as emotional parentification. This is when a child ends up in the emotional caretaker role for their parent. Not just comforting them sometimes, but something more ongoing. This can look like becoming the confidant, the stabilizer, absorbing stress and learning to manage someone else's emotional climate before they've had a chance to figure out their own. Hooper (2007) describes this as a kind of role reversal, one where the child is asked to take on emotional responsibilities that are developmentally out of order, and that over time can quietly shape how we see our place in relationships.

When that's the pot you grow in, you understand pretty early that there isn't space for your full range. So what happens next? You make yourself smaller. You learn to contain yourself, not because anyone sat you down and explained it, but because that's what the environment required.

Space doesn't always look limited from the outside. Some people take up a lot of space. They're loud, they have a big personality, they fill a room. But emotionally? They might be really struggling with vulnerability and allowing themselves to experience their full feelings. We're not talking about how much you talk or how big your presence is. We're talking about whether you let yourself actually feel things, need things, without immediately managing it away. For a lot of people, that distinction shifts how they understand themselves in relationships.

Attachment Is Really a Story About Space

You've probably heard of attachment styles at this point. Secure, anxious, avoidant. This topic is everywhere. But a lot of the time what attachment theory is really describing underneath all of it is our relationship with space. Responsive caregivers gave their kids room to explore, to feel things, to come back. The message being: you can expand and I'll still be here. Emotional parentification is linked to both avoidant and anxious attachment styles (Hooper, 2007), which are really just two different strategies for surviving a world where emotional space wasn't fully available or reliable. When that message didn't come through, we adapted, and then we grew up and we kept the pot.

So what does that actually look like? Anxious attachment tends to develop from inconsistent caregiving, where a child couldn't predict whether their caregiver would show up emotionally or not (Ainsworth et al., 1978). In the context of space, this can look like someone who learned that emotional space is unpredictable, so they reach for more of it constantly, just to feel okay. Like a plant never sure when it would get enough water or sunlight, you learned to never stop monitoring for signs of change.

On the other end, avoidant attachment tends to develop when a caregiver was consistently emotionally distant or unresponsive, leading the child to learn to minimize their need for closeness altogether (Ainsworth et al., 1978). Independence became armor. The moment real intimacy or emotional need is present; the pot gets smaller again.

And then there's disorganized attachment. This is someone who wants closeness and simultaneously pulls away from it, moving between anxious and avoidant strategies sometimes within the same relationship (Drescher, 2025). They want the space, and they're also terrified of it. This often develops when a caregiver was both the source of comfort and the source of fear, which means the nervous system never got a clear answer about whether space was safe to begin with. Emotional parentification, and other forms of inconsistent or role-reversed caregiving, can contribute to all of these patterns (Hooper, 2007).

I've also noticed, in myself and in people I work with, that this shows up in the body too. This can look like panic attacks in more extreme cases, and anxiety that spikes when someone asks more from you emotionally, or when you're suddenly expected to take up more space than you're used to. When the nervous system has spent years learning that emotional expansion means something's wrong, it makes sense you would register something as off or alarming when things start to shift.

We Recreate What We Know

We don't just carry these patterns internally. We reproduce them. We find dynamics that feel familiar, and familiar often means the same pot size we grew up in. If you were the caretaker, there's a good chance you keep finding yourself in that role. Internally managing, instinctively making yourself smaller. Having learned somewhere along the way that being needed is the price of being close. Hooper (2007) notes that parentified individuals often maintain their caretaking position well into adult relationships, sometimes without ever realizing it. 

If the pot is all you've known, it doesn't feel like a limitation. It feels like home. It feels like the right size. The work isn't about blaming the people who set the conditions, it’s about noticing that you've been growing around constraints that were never really yours to begin with.

It's important to keep in mind that most of us are on autopilot, until we're not. Rather than judge us for this adaptation, let's illuminate our limitations and see if it's possible to allow ourselves to grow past our initial limits. This might be uncomfortable, but maybe we can provide ourselves with more sun, more light, to see what we're really capable of and what it actually feels like to live fully.

So How Do We Repot Ourselves?

It starts with noticing.

Try talking to yourself out loud. Actually out loud. Your voice existing outside your own head is its own kind of space. Practice being heard even when the only audience is you.

Start tracking when your thoughts sound familiar. What's the story that keeps reworking itself? Notice - are we casting the same characters subconsciously out of comfort? 

Try to separate the physical sensation from the narrative, the plot, the characters. If your chest is tight or you have tension in your shoulders, those feelings are real. The story you've built around them might not be. For many people the physical sensation automatically triggers the story. We want to try to separate the two, to see what a genuine reaction is versus what is our mind mowing the same old path.

Notice what happens in your body when you do take up space. When you say what you want, set a limit, let yourself be seen. That discomfort is information. Try not to judge yourself for it.

Get genuinely curious about yourself. Not critical, not analytical. Curious. The way you'd be with someone you actually wanted to know. What do you want? What do you feel? When do you need to feel heard and seen?

Think about someone you give space to easily. A friend, a pet, a sibling. What does that actually look like for them? You likely already know how to tend to something. You've just been watering everyone else's pot. Or maybe you've learned that you are the only one who can water your own, and that lack of space has produced over-reliance on yourself and a distrust of others. This is absolutely worth naming too. Sometimes we can let others tend to us.

The goal isn't to suddenly take up unlimited space with no regard for anyone around you, or to become hyper independent. It's to stop shrinking yourself down before anyone has even asked you to, and to allow others to meet you in your newly defined growth conditions, the ones you've discovered actually let you thrive.

Try sitting with this: You weren’t too much. You were just in the wrong sized pot.

References

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Lawrence Erlbaum.

Buss, K. A. (2024, June 17). The role parents play in shaping children's emotion regulation. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/growing-hearts-and-minds/202406/the-role-parents-play-in-shaping-childrens-emotion-regulation

Drescher, A. (2025). Disorganized attachment style: Traits and ways to cope. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/disorganized-attachment.html

Hooper, L. M. (2007). Expanding the discussion regarding parentification and its varied outcomes: Implications for mental health research and practice. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 29(4), 322–337. https://doi.org/10.17744/mehc.29.4.48511m0tk22054j5

Masur, C. (2024, June 16). Translating psychoanalytic terms into everyday life: Containment. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/202406/translating-psychoanalytic-terms-into-everyday-life-containment