A Love Letter to the Woman Who Built My Future: Healing from Hyper-Attunement

By Leila Briggs

Fifteen years ago, I thought I was building a future perfectly aligned with my soul. I was following my intuition, choosing positivity, and creating a life rooted in light. What I didn’t know was that the version of me doing all the building was a woman who equated love with sacrifice.

She was highly intuitive, yes - but she was also exhausted.

She could sense another’s sadness before they spoke, anticipate needs before they were known, and in a way, shape-shift to create harmony. Her gift was empathy; her wound was hyper-attunement. And somewhere along the way, she disappeared beneath the emotions and needs of everyone else.

Then came the breaking point - a violent encounter that tore through the illusion. I found myself face-to-face with someone whose chaos swallowed every attempt at peace. When the dust settled, I saw what I had built from. Before me was a life crafted by a woman who survived by disappearing into others’ needs.

At first, I hated her for it. I blamed her for the choices that led me there. But over time, I began to see her differently. She wasn’t weak - she was brilliant in her adaptation. She built safety in the only way she knew: by reading others before they could harm her.

Now, when I think of her, I whisper thank you.

Thank you for surviving. Thank you for caring. Thank you for holding it all together long enough for me to be born - the me who no longer wants to live from survival.

Healing from hyper-attunement has be so much more then learning to ask “Is this mine?” It’s been an evolution externally and internally. It’s meant reclaiming my intuition - the real kind, the one that begins inside my own body.

Sometimes, I still feel her - the old me - wanting to smooth over tension or take on someone’s sorrow. When she rises, I take her hand and remind her: “We don’t have to disappear anymore. We can have relationships and a life where we exist now.”

Because the future she dreamed of is still mine.

I’m just building it differently - brick by brick, boundary by boundary, breath by breath.