You were never too much. You were carrying too much.
The Breaking the Cycle™ series is for anyone who has ever wondered why love feels harder than it should — why you overthink the silence, brace for the goodbye, or disappear a little every time someone gets close.
Written by licensed therapist and addiction specialist Courtney Murphy, each book takes a pattern that once kept you safe and traces it back to where it began. Not to assign blame. To make sense of it. Because the patterns that protected you were never proof that something was wrong with you — they were proof that something happened to you, and that you found a way to survive it.
These are not books about becoming someone else. They are books about becoming whole.
Every title stands on its own. Together, they follow one arc: understanding the pattern, healing what shaped it, forgiving yourself along the way, and finally coming home to yourself.
The Books
Breaking the Cycle
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/breaking-the-cycle-expanded-edition-courtney-murphy/1151100301?ean=9798182568371
Understanding Anxious Attachment, Healing Survival Patterns, Ending Self-Abandonment, and Building the Relationships You Deserve
If you have ever read a message twelve times looking for what you did wrong, this is where the series begins.
Breaking the Cycle explains anxious attachment the way it actually feels from the inside — the reaching, the reassurance that helps for an hour and then wears off, the sense that love is something you have to keep earning. Through the stories of Maya, Michael, Erica, and Nicole, it traces the fear back to the first house your nervous system ever called home, and shows how what was built in fear can be rebuilt in safety.
You are not too sensitive. You learned to read the weather because reading the weather kept you safe.
Come Close, But Not Too Close
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/breaking-the-cycle-courtney-murphy/1150925093?ean=9798182544627
Understanding Anxious-Avoidant Attachment, HeLaling the Push-Pull Cycle, and Building the Relationships You Deserve
Do you crave closeness but pull away when it feels too real? Do you long to be chosen, yet fear losing yourself when someone gets close?
Come Close, But Not Too Close is about the push-pull — the exhausting rhythm of reaching for someone and then retreating the moment they reach back. It maps the anxious-avoidant cycle across five movements, from the pull to the return, and shows how two people can love each other deeply and still keep missing each other.
You are not too much, and you are not too sensitive. You were protecting the parts of you that didn't feel safe. Now you get to choose differently.
Guilt, Shame & the Courage to Forgive Yourself
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/guilt-shame-the-courage-to-forgive-yourself-courtney-murphy/1151050103?ean=9798182559928
Facing What Happened, Accepting Grace, and Learning to Live Beyond Your Worst Moments.
Some things you can forgive in everyone but yourself.
This book is for the moments you still carry — the decision you'd undo, the years you lost, the relationship you couldn't repair. It draws a clear line between guilt, which tells you that you did something wrong, and shame, which whispers that you are something wrong. One can be repaired. The other has to be released.
Written with scripture woven throughout and grounded in the promise of Romans 8:1, it is a gentle companion for anyone learning that grace is not something you earn back. It is something you accept.
The Child I Never Stopped Carrying
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-child-i-never-stopped-carrying-courtney-murphy/1151021825?ean=9798182555623
Healing Childhood Trauma, Reclaiming Your Voice, and Learning to Feel Safe Again.
A journey from survival to self-love.
Some of us grew up quickly because staying small was not safe. We learned to read rooms, keep the peace, and need very little. Then we became adults still carrying a child who never got to put anything down.
The Child I Never Stopped Carrying is about that child — how to find them, hear them, and finally give them what they needed all along. Across seventeen chapters, it moves from the carrying to the setting down, closing with a letter from the adult you became to the child you once were.
You survived it. Now you get to live.