Loving Without Losing Yourself

A 12-Week Live Online Therapeutic Group

Learning to stay connected to others without abandoning your own needs, boundaries and sense of self.

Love can bring closeness, comfort, safety and belonging. But sometimes, in the effort to preserve a relationship, avoid conflict or keep someone close, we gradually begin to move away from ourselves.

We may become overly focused on the other person’s needs, moods and expectations. We may avoid saying what we really think, make ourselves smaller to keep the peace, tolerate things that hurt us or slowly lose touch with the parts of our life that once felt like our own.

Loving Without Losing Yourself is a therapeutic group for people who want to understand how they relate within close relationships and why connection can sometimes come at the cost of their own needs, boundaries or identity.

The aim is not to become more distant, less caring or less emotionally involved.

It is to discover how to love deeply while remaining connected to yourself.

When Love Begins to Cost You Too Much

You may recognise yourself if you often:

  • put another person’s needs before your own

  • find it difficult to say what you really want or need

  • feel responsible for keeping the relationship stable

  • worry that setting boundaries may push someone away

  • avoid disagreement because you fear rejection, conflict or distance

  • change your behaviour to prevent someone from becoming upset

  • struggle to say no without feeling guilty

  • feel responsible for another person’s emotions

  • seek reassurance that the relationship is secure

  • lose touch with your own interests, friendships or priorities

  • tolerate situations that repeatedly leave you hurt, confused or depleted

  • feel anxious when someone becomes emotionally distant

  • give more and more in the hope that the relationship will feel safer

  • find yourself apologising even when you are unsure what you have done wrong

  • wonder where healthy compromise ends and self-abandonment begins

  • feel unsure who you are outside the relationship

Sometimes we do not lose ourselves all at once.

It can happen quietly, through small compromises that gradually become a way of living.

Why Can This Happen?

The way we relate to others does not begin in adulthood.

Through early relationships, family experiences and important emotional connections, we gradually develop ideas about what closeness means, what we need to do to remain loved and what may happen when someone is disappointed with us.

For some people, relationships may become closely linked with:

  • keeping others happy

  • avoiding conflict

  • being useful or needed

  • proving loyalty

  • adapting quickly to another person’s expectations

  • taking responsibility for other people’s feelings

  • believing that love requires sacrifice

  • fearing that asserting a need may lead to rejection

  • confusing intensity with closeness

  • believing that boundaries mean distance

These patterns often develop for understandable reasons.

They may once have helped preserve closeness, reduce conflict or create a sense of emotional safety.

The difficulty begins when the same strategies continue into relationships where they are no longer helpful.

What We Will Explore

Across the 12-week therapeutic cycle, we will explore:

How we learn to relate
Understanding how early relationships and emotional experiences may shape the way we seek closeness, reassurance and safety today.

Love versus self-abandonment
Exploring the difference between healthy compromise and repeatedly ignoring your own needs in order to preserve connection.

The fear of disappointing others
Understanding why saying no, disagreeing or making a different choice can sometimes feel threatening to the relationship itself.

Needs, boundaries & communication
Learning to recognise what you need and communicate it more clearly without excessive guilt, apology or fear.

Why certain relationship patterns repeat
Exploring why we may repeatedly find ourselves over-giving, over-adapting or becoming emotionally dependent on the other person’s response.

Conflict without catastrophe
Developing a healthier understanding of disagreement and recognising that closeness does not require constant harmony.

Identity within relationships
Exploring how to maintain your interests, values, friendships, choices and individuality while being emotionally close to another person.

Giving and receiving
Looking at reciprocity and what it means to create relationships in which care, attention and emotional responsibility can move in both directions.

The need to feel needed
Exploring whether being indispensable, helpful or constantly available has become connected to your sense of worth or security.

Trusting yourself again
Strengthening your ability to recognise your feelings, perceptions, needs and internal limits without constantly looking to someone else for confirmation.

In Positive Psychotherapy

Positive Psychotherapy recognises that qualities such as love, loyalty, patience, flexibility, responsibility, trust and the ability to care deeply for others are valuable human capacities.

Yet even valuable capacities can become unbalanced.

Patience may gradually become tolerating too much.

Flexibility may become constant adaptation.

Loyalty may make it difficult to step away from situations that repeatedly cause pain.

Responsibility may turn into carrying another person’s emotional world.

Care may become self-sacrifice.

Positive Psychotherapy does not aim to remove these qualities. Instead, therapeutic work explores how they can return to greater balance.

The question is not simply:

“How can I stop giving so much?”

It may also become:

“How can I give without disappearing?”

“How can I stay connected without becoming responsible for everything?”

“How can I love another person while continuing to respect my own needs, values and limits?”

Within the Balance Model, relationships are also understood alongside other important areas of life — including the body, achievement, meaning, future orientation and the relationship we have with ourselves.

When one relationship begins to consume most of our emotional energy, other parts of life can gradually become smaller.

Therapeutic work therefore supports the restoration of balance, so that closeness does not require the loss of individuality and love does not require the loss of self.

What This Group Can Help You Develop

The group can support you in developing:

  • greater awareness of your relationship patterns

  • clearer emotional and practical boundaries

  • greater confidence expressing your needs

  • reduced guilt when saying no

  • greater tolerance for disagreement

  • awareness of over-adaptation and people-pleasing

  • a stronger sense of identity within relationships

  • healthier expectations of reciprocity

  • greater ability to distinguish care from self-sacrifice

  • improved awareness of emotional dependence

  • greater trust in your own feelings and perceptions

  • confidence making choices that reflect your own values

  • healthier ways of creating closeness without losing autonomy

  • greater awareness of what you genuinely want from a relationship

  • relationships in which both connection and individuality have space

A Different Way of Being Close

Healthy relationships do not require us to agree about everything.

They do not require one person to constantly adapt while the other remains unchanged.

They do not ask us to silence our needs, abandon our boundaries or prove our love through exhaustion.

A close relationship can include difference.

It can include disagreement.

It can include separate interests, friendships, opinions, needs and ways of seeing the world.

The goal is not independence without connection, nor connection without independence.

It is the ability to remain emotionally close while still being able to say:

This is what I feel.
This is what I need.
This matters to me.
And I can still love you without leaving myself behind.

Love Without Disappearing

Sometimes the deepest change in relationships is not learning how to hold on more tightly.

It is learning that connection can survive honesty, boundaries and difference.

You can love deeply and still belong to yourself.

Group Details

12 Weekly Sessions
Mondays | 18:00–19:30
90 minutes per session
Live Online
18 January 2027 – 12 April 2027

New participants join at the beginning of the 12-week therapeutic cycle, allowing the group to develop continuity, trust and a consistent therapeutic space.

Session Dates

January 2027
18 January
25 January

February 2027
1 February
8 February
15 February
22 February

March 2027
1 March
8 March

15 March – No Session (Clean Monday)

22 March
29 March

April 2027
5 April
12 April

Fees & Payment Options

Pay Per Session
€30 per 90-minute session

Monthly Prepayment
€25 per session when all sessions scheduled for that month are paid together in advance.

The monthly prepayment option applies when all scheduled sessions within the calendar month are paid in advance.

Joining the Group

If you would like to participate, please complete the registration form below.