Personal Reflection on Five Years of Healing

Learning That Love Wasn’t What I Thought It Was

I used to think love was intensity.

If it wasn’t consuming me, I questioned it.
If I wasn’t anxious, I thought I didn’t care enough.
If I wasn’t chasing, I thought I was being abandoned.

My nervous system had learned that uncertainty meant connection.
That love meant working for it. Proving it. Holding on tighter when it started slipping away.

So I kept finding myself in relationships that mirrored that same rhythm.

Push and pull.
Closeness and distance.
Hope and confusion.

Wanting more.
Accepting less.
Calling it love because I didn’t know anything else.

And if I’m honest
I allowed things I should never have had to endure.

I tolerated disrespect.
I excused behaviour that hurt me.
I abandoned my own boundaries to avoid being abandoned by others.

I allowed emotional abuse.
Silence that punished.
Words that cut.
Love that made me shrink.

Not because I believed I deserved it.
But because some part of me had learned that love and pain could exist in the same place.

That if I just loved harder, stayed longer, explained myself better… maybe things would change.

And my body felt every bit of it.

Since 2018, it felt like my body started speaking louder than I could understand.

Chronic Pain

Multiple medical conditions

Mental health diagnoses

My FND.
My PPPD.
The dizziness.
The overwhelm.
The shutdown.
The fatigue that touched everything.
The constant internal fight to stay upright while trying to look okay on the outside.

For so long, I thought my body was just broken.
Too sensitive.
Too reactive.
Too much.

But now I know

My body wasn’t overreacting.
It was responding.

Responding to emotional environments that didn’t feel safe.
Responding to inconsistency.
To mixed signals.
To love that asked me to stay disconnected from myself just to keep it.

I didn’t know then that nervous systems can read what minds try to excuse.

I didn’t know my body was telling me what my heart wasn’t ready to hear.

That not every connection is safe just because it feels familiar.

That sometimes what feels like chemistry is actually dysregulation.

And those patterns didn’t just shape how I loved.

They shaped how I parented.

How quickly I moved.
How often I worried.
How much I carried.
How hard I pushed myself to keep everything together, even when my own body was asking me to slow down.

I parented while dysregulated.
I parented while exhausted.
I parented while trying to hide symptoms, hide fear, hide how much I was struggling.

I wanted to protect my children from everything I had felt.

But I was learning, slowly, that protecting them doesn’t mean pretending I’m unaffected.

It means showing them what repair looks like.
What boundaries look like.
What rest looks like.
What emotional honesty looks like.

It means teaching them that love should feel safe.

And learning what healthy love looks like?

It was uncomfortable.

Because it didn’t feel like anything I recognised.

No chaos.
No guessing.
No emotional chasing.
No wondering where I stood.

Just consistency.

And honestly?

That felt suspicious at first.

Silence without punishment.
Care without conditions.
Closeness without losing myself.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

Because when your nervous system has been shaped by uncertainty, peace can feel boring.
Safety can feel foreign.
Healthy can feel wrong.

But slowly, I started learning something I wish I understood years ago:

Healthy love doesn’t confuse your nervous system.

It doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to keep it.
It doesn’t make you question your worth.
It doesn’t punish your softness.
It doesn’t make your body brace for impact.

It meets you where you are…

Without asking you to disappear to be loved.

That took time to believe.

To stop chasing what hurt me simply because it felt familiar.
To stop confusing intensity with intimacy.
To stop calling emotional instability passion.

Love was never supposed to feel like survival.

And neither was motherhood.

And I’m still learning what it means to be loved—and to parent—without fear.

But I know this now:

The right kind of love won’t make your body beg for safety.