31/05/2026
Think of a time you felt "bored" by a genuinely good, safe person/relationship. If you look closely at the "spark" you usually chase in chaotic relationships, is it actually love, or is it just the familiar adrenaline of an old wound/childhood being triggered?
Our unconscious doesn't look for what is healthy. It looks for what is familiar. If your childhood or past relationships were a chaotic rollercoaster of unpredictability, abandonment, or having to perform to be loved, your nervous system calibrated to that high-stress frequency.
To your body, chaos feels like home. High anxiety feels like passion.
When you finally step into a safe connection, your ego doesn't experience it as peace at all.
Instead it experiences it as an existential threat.
Safe love requires vulnerability. It means the armour you wore to survive the old battlefields is no longer necessary.
But dropping the armor makes our inner child terrified of being blindsided. So, to regain control, your subconscious creates a preemptive strike: it sabotages the relationship before the other person has a chance to hurt you.
Cat O Dowd
Photography- Allan Leinez
