Why Does Healthy Love Feel Uncomfortable After Abuse?
You're in a relationship with someone kind. Someone stable. Someone who shows up. And yet, something inside you keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or worse, you find yourself bored, restless, even repelled by their consistency.
Healthy love isn’t supposed to feel frightening, but for many survivors of abuse, it does. When your body has spent years scanning for danger, reading micro-expressions, and bracing for impact, peace can feel suspicious. Calm can feel empty. Kindness can feel like emotional distance.
If you’ve ever wondered why the relationship that should feel safe instead feels unsettling or why “good people” don’t create that spark while unpredictable partners do, you’re not broken. Your nervous system is simply reacting to a lifetime of conditioning.
One day, Sarah sat across from me and asked, frustration layered beneath her voice, “Why am I still attracted to ‘bad boys’ even after everything I went through? I thought once I recognised the pattern, I'd be free of it.”
I explained what I’ve come to understand through years of working with survivors: her attraction to chaos wasn’t a character flaw or a sign she was “choosing wrong.” It was her nervous system doing exactly what it had been trained to do.
Survival Mode and the Nervous System
During an abusive relationship, the brain and body don’t simply experience stress — they adapt to it. Your nervous system recalibrates itself around constant threat.
To understand this more deeply, see:
Why You React Differently on Different Days: Your Window of Tolerance Explained
Adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol become your baseline state. Hypervigilance becomes your norm. You learn to read every shift in tone, every silence, every glance. This sensitivity once kept you safe.
But here’s the crucial part: once your nervous system adapts to danger, safety feels wrong. Calm feels like something is missing.
Sarah put it this way: “When I met someone insanely charming and unpredictable, I felt an instant spark. But the kind guys? Nothing. It’s like I was broken.”
She wasn’t broken. Her body was simply seeking what felt like home.
Mistaking Intensity for Love
When you’ve spent years equating intensity with passion, it becomes nearly impossible to recognise love in its gentler forms.
For a deeper dive into this, read:
Understanding Trauma Bonds: Why Chaos Feels Like Chemistry
Sarah had learned a particular language of love — one written in emotional chaos. Jealousy felt like devotion. Explosive reunions felt like passion. Being pursued after arguments felt like proof of love.
She had never learned the language of respect.
“He doesn’t get mad when I walk away from an argument,” she said about the kind man she’d met. “He just lets me have my space. It almost feels like he doesn’t care.”
This is the painful irony:
To a dysregulated nervous system, respect can look like indifference.
Chaotic vs. Healthy Relationship Conflict
Chaotic relationships often involve:
• raised voices
• accusations
• slamming doors
• silent treatment
• punishment
• following you during conflict
Healthy conflict looks more like:
• “I’m struggling. Can we talk about this?”
• taking space without punishment
• returning to repair
• staying on the same team
To someone conditioned by chaos, the healthy version can feel strangely flat — even uncaring.
For more on how early experiences shape these patterns, see:
Unpacking Childhood Trauma and Its Impact
Therapy offers a safe space for healing and support after experiencing abuse.
Why Healthy Love Feels “Wrong”
When you’ve spent years in survival mode, peace doesn’t feel like relief. It feels foreign. The nervous system develops what we might call a chaos template; it knows how to navigate unpredictability, but not how to rest in safety.
Regulated vs. Dysregulated Partners
A dysregulated partner might:
• react instantly
• escalate quickly
• blame or withdraw
• make you responsible for their emotions
• expect you to soothe them
A regulated partner often:
• pauses before responding
• owns their feelings
• gives space without punishment
• returns to connection without drama
To a trauma-conditioned system, the regulated partner can feel emotionally distant when they’re actually emotionally stable.
To understand more about what emotional maturity looks like in practice, see:
When Emotions Run High: Emotional Immaturity in Action
The Body’s Adaptation to Trauma
Just as the body adapts to high sugar or nicotine, it adapts to chronic stress. Once activated becomes “normal,” stability feels off-balance.
Some survivors unconsciously recreate chaos:
• picking fights
• testing boundaries
• doubting commitment
• checking whether a partner will leave
Not because they want chaos, but because their nervous system only recognises intensity as connection.
The Healing Process: Retraining Your Nervous System
Healing isn’t about forcing attraction toward stability. It’s about helping the body learn that safety is real.
1. Awareness and Differentiation
The first step is naming the pattern: “I’m seeking intensity because that’s what I learned to associate with love”.
Naming creates space for choice.
Differentiation means asking:
Is this person offering something real, or am I recreating a familiar wound?
For more support with recognising self-abandoning patterns, read:
People-Pleasing Isn’t a Choice
2. Nervous System Regulation
Teaching your body that calm is safe may look like:
• staying in a healthy relationship long enough for your body to adjust
• grounding skills during urges to create chaos
• noticing "glimmers" of safety
• somatic practices like breathwork, movement, or self-touch
• working with a trauma-informed therapist
Learn more about glimmers here:
Glimmers: How Small Moments of Safety Create Change
At first, healthy relationships feel foreign. But with time, the absence of chaos begins to feel like the presence of safety.
Redefining What Love Really Means
Part of this healing involves consciously redefining love—not in your head, but in your body.
Real love isn't about chasing. It's about respect.
Real love isn't about jealousy. It's about trust.
Real love isn't about someone not being able to keep their hands off you. It's about someone honouring your boundaries and your autonomy.
Real love doesn't leave you questioning your worth. It grounds you in it.
Sarah is learning this now. It's slow. Some days she still feels the pull toward chaos. But she's also beginning to notice something else: the steady warmth of being held, the peace of being known, the safety of being allowed to be exactly who she is without needing to prove her worth through drama.
This is what she's learning to call love.
For a deeper look at how attachment wounds shape attraction, see:
Attachment After Trauma: Why Safety Feels Complicated
You Deserve a Love That Doesn't Hurt
If this resonates, know that your patterns are not defects; they were adaptive.
You can learn to recognise healthy love.
You can experience passion that doesn’t require pain.
You can build relationships grounded in stability, not survival.
If you'd like support with retraining your nervous system or understanding your relationship patterns, I’m here.
📧 Email: kat@safespacecounsellingservices.com.au
📞 Phone: 0452 285 526
