When Love Feels Like a Loop: How Childhood, Attachment, and Somatic Healing Intersect

You’re not crazy. You’re not broken. You’re just repeating what your body memorized a long time ago. This is about the love patterns we don’t even realize we’re in—until our body starts screaming no more.

I used to think I was just attracted to emotionally unavailable people. As it turns out, I was chasing my mother’s silence and my stepfather’s volatility and my biological father’s absence. 

It took until recently for me to realize I had never actually been in love—I had never experienced it. I was subconsciously trying re-create my childhood to earn live from people who couldn’t give it.

And like a lot of people with trauma, I thought I could turn pain into intimacy if I just tried hard enough.

It wasn’t love—I was just deeply familiar with abandonment.

And sometimes, your nervous system doesn’t crave love—it craves what it recognizes.

We Don’t Date Based on Preference. We Date Based on Pattern.

Most of us don’t consciously choose partners—we recreate dynamics our nervous systems have rehearsed since childhood.

• If you had to work hard for love, you probably over-give.
• If love felt inconsistent, you might cling to people who send mixed signals.
• If love wasn’t safe, you might be drawn to those who feel just a little bit dangerous.

And because the body learns through repetition, we keep choosing the same type of person in a different body, hoping maybe this time it’ll end differently.

But healing doesn’t come from repeating the pattern.

It comes from breaking it.

Attachment Styles Aren’t Just Buzzwords—They’re Survival Maps

Let’s talk real-life attachment styles:

• Anxious attachment feels like walking on eggshells to avoid being left. You overthink texts, replay conversations, and bend over backwards just to keep someone close.
• Avoidant attachment feels like needing space even when you crave closeness. You pull away as soon as things feel too good. Vulnerability feels unsafe.
• Disorganized attachment is both. You love hard, but you’re scared the entire time. You chase and then shut down. You don’t trust love, but you also can’t live without it.

These aren’t personality traits. They’re nervous system strategies.

They’re the ways your body learned to survive intimacy.

Safe Can Feel Boring When You’re Used to Chaos

This is where people get stuck in toxic relationship patterns they can’t seem to escape. We say we want peace, but we feel drawn— even addicted to people who activate our wounds.

Because if your nervous system is wired for survival—not connection—then healthy love can feel unfamiliar… and unfamiliar can feel unsafe.

So we call calm people “boring.” We miss the thrill. We call it chemistry when our body is really in fight-or-flight.

Somatic Therapy Changed Everything for Me

This is the part no one told me: your body knows the truth before your brain does.

Your gut will tighten.

Your chest will clench.

Your voice will catch.

Your body will try to speak.

Those “butterflies” you get when you’re around person? Yeah, that’s your nervous system ringing the alarm bells.
But most of us were conditioned to override it. Especially if we were raised in environments where survival required disconnecting from our feelings.

Somatic therapy taught me to reconnect to my internal signals.

To notice when I felt tense, when I was fawning, when my desire to fix or please was really a trauma response.

Somatics Gave Me Language My Body Always Had

Through somatic work, I learned:

• That the tightness in my throat meant I wasn’t being heard.
• That the pressure in my chest meant I didn’t feel safe.
• That my numbness wasn’t “chill”—it was dissociation.

And the wildest part? My body always knew.

It was screaming the whole time. I just wasn’t listening.

What Healing Looks Like

Healing doesn’t mean you never get triggered.

It means you catch the spiral faster.

It means you don’t abandon yourself to keep someone around.

You pause. You breathe. You feel. You ask your body: do I actually want this, or is this just familiar pain again?

I’m No Longer Romanticizing Chaos

I’m not chasing high-intensity “love” that makes me sick to my stomach.

I’m not gaslighting myself into staying in situations that hurt because they remind me of home.

I want my love to feel safe in my body.

Not like a battlefield I keep surviving.

Affirmation:

My body is not a liar.

My patterns are not my destiny.

I am allowed to choose love that doesn’t hurt.