Chasing the Thrill That Hurts
Imagine a fire alarm. When there’s a real fire, it blares, and you react immediately. You run. But what if your fire alarm went off constantly for no reason? What if every time you cooked toast, it kept dinging, or every time a car drove by, it shrieked? Eventually, you’d tune it out. Maybe you might even find strange comfort in the constant noise.
The Love Reward System That Keeps You Hooked
Emotional danger in relationships can be like that faulty alarm. It doesn’t always scream DANGER but it can be a subtle hum, a constant low-level tension. So even when someone is inconsistent with their affection, or their behavior is unpredictable, your brain doesn’t always register “danger.”
Instead, it might register “excitement,” “challenge,” or “passion.” And the rare moments of kindness or attention become intensely rewarding, like winning a small prize after countless losses.
This is why we often tolerate emotional pain that we would never accept as physical pain.
If someone physically pushed us to the edge of a cliff, our bodies would scream a clear warning. But emotional pain builds slowly, disguised as longing, as hope, as the “spark” that keeps us coming back for more.
Breaking Toxic Love Patterns Starts With Awareness
All of these forces- your attachment style, your family patterns, your cultural conditioning, the modern pressure to turn relationships into projects- they weave together to create the story of who you choose and why.
So, No. You are not broken for loving people who couldn’t love you back properly. You were trained to normalize emotional hunger.
However, just by understanding these invisible threads, you cannot make them disappear overnight. But it at least gives you the power to pause.
Healing doesn’t mean you won’t still feel that familiar pull toward the wrong ones. It means you’ll recognize the feeling for what it is – your trauma recognizing its reflection, and not your heart registering it as a match.
Learning to Choose Love Differently
Slowly, you’ll start choosing people who make your nervous system feel calm instead of constantly activated. People who surprise you with their consistency instead of their cruelty. People who don’t make you question your worth but inspire you to know it more deeply.
The goal was never to eliminate all emotional risk from love. The goal is, rather, to choose risks worth taking, with people worthy of that vulnerability.
Here’s what I want you to remember: You were never addicted to the person. You were addicted to the emotional pattern they offered you. The highs. The withdrawals. The feeling of being needed, chased, abandoned, and chosen again.
And when it comes to the “right” person, don’t mistake it to be someone who completes you or fixes the broken parts of your story. The RIGHT PERSON is the one who sees all of you.
By this, I mean all the parts of you, including the parts that learned to love through chaos, the parts that still flinch at tenderness, and the parts that are learning to trust safety. The right ones will choose to love you not despite these parts, but including them. They will create space for your healing without making their love conditional on your progress.
What You Actually Deserve In Love
You deserve a love that doesn’t require you to abandon yourself.
And you deserve someone whose presence feels like coming home to a house you actually want to live in. You deserve to discover what your heart feels like when you stop bracing for impact. And the child in you deserves to experience love as rest, as safety, as someone cherishing you exactly as you are.
So now that we know your patterns brought you here, to this moment of recognition, you finally get to choose what you do with that awareness. You get to write a different ending to this story- one word, one choice, one boundary at a time.
