When my great-grandmother was ninety-five, she was moved into a locked memory care unit because it was no longer safe for her to live on her own. My great-grandfather could not bear being separated from her. He cried every day and pleaded with my grandmother and my mother to let him care for her himself.

For a month our family comforted him and tried to help him accept that she needed a kind of care he could not give her. He then stopped sharing his sadness and one day he went to the facility late in the evening and brought her home, without telling anyone. He knew he would die if he could not be with her every day, and he was convinced he could do the hard work of caring for her. My mother took her back, because she knew a ninety-seven year old man simply did not have the ability to give her the care she needed. My great-grandmother died a short time after returning to the facility, and, just as he had said he would, my great-grandfather died a few months later.

That is still one of the purest pictures of love I carry from my childhood. They wanted to be together, they respected each other and they felt lucky to have found one another. And yet that kind of devotion was something I witnessed from the outside, a few times a year when I visited. It was not the relationship pattern my body lived inside day after day.

The love that surrounded me every day felt very different. It felt like tension and disappointment and emotional distance. It felt like walking on eggshells and never knowing when the air in the room was about to change. It felt like abandonment and honestly neither parent really gave me the message that I was lovable. I had two versions of love in front of me, the beautiful devotion I saw now and then and the fear and unpredictability I breathed in daily, and my nervous system learned the one it lived with. That became the frequency I carried into every relationship I had, and it is the one I kept calling in until I finally stopped long enough to heal it.

I want to walk you through my story so that you understand the wounds and definition that love became for me. At the end I ask some questions that I answered in my story, as you read, let each one turn gently back toward your own life. You will find your definition of love as you reflect on the questions and see what programming you recorded long before you were old enough to choose it.

What did my earliest relationships teach me to expect from love?

My first lessons in romantic love came from watching my mother and father. My father was often gone in the name of building a company, and so much of what I learned about love in those early years was shaped by his absence. I did not find out about his affair until I was a teenager, and in some ways I could understand it, but I had always known he was not really there. He would see me off and on into my twenties and always tell me he loved me but mostly my body recorded that I was rejected. My father now chooses the path of least resistance and chooses to not engage with my life. Every year that silence continued, it reinforced the lesson I learned as a little girl, that love equals abandonment. As I grew, I also watched the adults around me bicker, complain, blame and withdraw from one another, and none of it looked like the tenderness I saw between my great-grandparents.

My mother remarried when I was eight, and her load only got heavier. She took on responsibility for my stepfather and his children on top of everything she was already carrying, and what I absorbed from watching her was that love meant responsibility, sacrifice and unhappiness. Her moods shaped the entire house. All of us learned to monitor the emotional temperature and stay ready for whatever might happen next, and that constant readiness became so normal that I did not recognize it as fear until much later in my life. This did not feel like love but felt like a version of survival and always being on guard.

I remember as a child being so excited to come home and tell my mother something exciting that had happened at school. Only to find her laying in bed with a headache or in a bad mood. What mattered to me didn’t seem to matter to any of the adults in my life. All the messaging said that I was in pain and there was no room for good feelings or excitement. Love also came with conditions. If I cleaned, picked up after myself and made the choices that were considered good, I might be told I was loved, and even then my work was often redone and criticized. I was expected to bring home good grades without much help getting there, and religious rules decided which of my choices made me good and which ones made me wrong. Love felt like something I was always working toward and never quite allowed to rest inside.

There was affection, and I want to honor that. My grandparents and great-grandparents hugged me, and my godparents adored me and believed I was a wonderful child. But that affection could not erase the deeper confusion of hearing that I was loved while so often experiencing criticism, dismissal and emotional withdrawal. Over time the unspoken message settled into my bones. You were lucky if anyone loved you at all, you could not expect to be happy in love, and you took what you could get even when it was not a good match. Then you complained, blamed and projected your pain onto each other, because that was simply what love looked like.

Pause here and ask yourself:

What did the relationships surrounding me teach me to expect from love? Did people seem to enjoy and respect one another, or did love appear to mean tension, sacrifice, control, abandonment or emotional distance? What beliefs got stored in me from what I was experiencing? Did I feel that love was something I had to earn?

Who did I become in order to feel safe?

In a home where the feelings of the adults took up so much space, there was very little room left for mine. Conflict was never repaired. The adults exploded, blamed, withdrew or acted as though nothing had happened, and apologies were rare. My needs were met mostly at the level of food, shelter, water and sleep, and the deeper needs of being seen, comforted and understood were left for me to figure out on my own.

So I became independent very young. Part of that independence was healthy and resourceful, and I am grateful for it, but another part came from knowing deep down that I could not rely on anyone else to notice what I needed. To feel powerful in a world that felt so out of my control, I became controlling and angry. I was the strong one and the mature one, and eventually I became the rebellious one, because rebellion was one of the only ways I knew to say that I was not being heard or seen.

I also learned to read everyone else. The intuitive and empathic gifts I use in my work today developed right alongside hypervigilance, and I could sense another person’s needs and emotions long before I ever checked in with my own. Being useful gave me a sense of purpose. With men and romantic partners, I truly believed that if I made myself useful enough I might finally count, I might finally be heard and I might finally become lovable. At the same time, I assumed that people would eventually leave, so when someone offered me a healthier form of love I often pushed them away before they had the chance to abandon me.

Ask yourself:

Who did I learn to become in order to receive love? Did I become useful, strong, pleasing, invisible, controlling, independent or responsible for everyone else’s feelings? What happened to my own needs while I played that role? What emotions did I learn to operate from, and which ones did I learn not to show at all?

What did familiar love feel like in my body?

Familiar love felt like rejection and like never being acknowledged for who I really was. It felt like tension, waiting and begging. When someone became distant, I chased, and I would pursue and overthink and assume the worst until I sank into a despair that eventually turned into anger. When someone was emotionally available, I felt a completely different kind of discomfort. I wanted to leave, and I went searching for problems that would justify going. I called nervous system activation chemistry and passion, while emotional safety felt boring, unattractive and even threatening. When there was no chaos, I honestly did not know who to be, and for the first half of my life I sometimes created chaos myself because it made a relationship feel like home.

I want you to really hear this part, because it is the heart of everything I am sharing. I never consciously wanted to be rejected or hurt. My mind wanted love, but my body recognized tension, and I had learned to call activation attraction and to call anxiety chemistry. This is what I mean when I talk about frequency. When we grow up feeling unloved, that feeling becomes both the signal we send out and the signal we recognize, and we keep drawing in people and situations that match it. Nothing about that is a punishment or a flaw in who we are. It is simply what the body knows, and it keeps repeating until we stop, turn toward the pain and heal what we did not receive.

Ask yourself honestly:

What does familiar love feel like in my body? Does it feel calm and open, or does it feel like tension, urgency, waiting, proving and fear? Have I ever called anxiety chemistry or mistaken emotional unpredictability for passion?

When did the pattern become impossible to ignore?

In my forties, I found myself in the most unloving, abusive and terrifying version of what I had learned to call love. I had a child with this man, and our relationship played out nearly every pattern I had grown up around. His moods mattered most. I walked on eggshells, I could not be myself and I lived with constant anxiety and fear. My body felt exactly the way it had felt around my mother when I was growing up. He was unable to see himself clearly or take responsibility for the pain he caused, and because he did not know how to love himself, he could not love anyone else in a healthy way. By then the recording from my childhood was no longer playing quietly in the background. It was playing at full volume.

The moment that changed me came when I gave birth. Fear and stress had already affected my pregnancy, and even with the medication I needed to help keep the pregnancy going, my baby came early. He was yelling at me in the hospital, and the doctors and nurses wanted to keep him out of the room. I also had a three year old child whose behavior he yelled and screamed about, and lying in that hospital bed I could see the pattern beginning to move into the next generation. I knew with absolute clarity that I would not allow it to continue.

That was the moment I stopped living as a victim of my circumstances and started choosing differently. I hired an attorney and began putting protection in place for myself and my children. By then, what I had once experienced as attraction had become pure fear, and I could finally see the truth of it. The chemistry I thought I felt at the beginning had been activation all along. My body had recognized a familiar emotional environment and confused that familiarity with love.

Even though that was the moment I decided this definition of love would not transfer onto my children, the road to unravel everything that had been programmed into me was still a long one. It was actually eight years before I dated again or met Nick. I spent those years committed to changing this pattern from the inside out, learning what it meant to love myself and slowly becoming someone who could accept love instead of bracing against it. Leaving was only the beginning. The real work was everything that came after.

Ask yourself:

Is there a relationship in my life that recreates the emotional atmosphere of my childhood? Do I feel anxious, afraid, unseen or unable to be myself? Am I staying because the relationship is loving, or because some part of me recognizes the pattern and does not yet believe I can choose something different?

What happened when healthy love arrived?

I met my partner, Nick, when I was forty five. He brought love, generosity, gifts, patience, space and honesty, and he knew how to both give and receive. You would think I would have melted into all of that, but instead of relaxing into his love, I wanted to run from it. His consistency felt threatening to my nervous system, and I kept looking for what was going to go wrong. The more reliably he showed up, the more anger sometimes rose inside me, and it felt as though I were at war with myself. One part of me wanted this love so badly, and another part was certain it could not be trusted.

Nick told me to work through it, because he was not going anywhere. He allowed me to drop into the relationship safely, piece by piece, without ever abandoning or rejecting me along the way. The moment I knew I could begin to let down my guard was when I watched him include my children and treat them as his own. Something in me that had been on high alert for so long finally exhaled, because a man who could love my children that way was not someone I needed to protect myself from.

Even so, receiving fully took time. When he bought a new home for me, my child and his children, I would not even go over there at first. I did not feel that I deserved it, and withholding myself became a way to punish myself for being unworthy while pushing him away before he could hurt me. But he kept showing up, and over time I surrendered. When we finally moved to New York together with both of our families, I walked into our new home and began to accept that it was mine and his, and that this was real. I had to teach myself and my nervous system that it was safe to be loved, and that home could finally mean safety.

Ask yourself:

What happens when someone offers me patience, consistency, generosity and emotional availability? Can I receive it, or do I become suspicious, critical, angry or ready to leave? Could healthy love feel uncomfortable simply because it is new? Do I begin to create problems and look for a way out?

How did I teach my body a new definition of love?

I had to learn to receive everything I once believed I could not have, and that meant letting in love, attention, fun, money, intimacy, kindness and patience without bracing against them. Much of that began with acceptance. I had to accept that the validation I had waited my whole life to receive from my parents was not coming, and I had to stop waiting for it and learn to validate myself. I had to accept that the extreme independence and strength I relied on for survival could also push love away. And I had to accept the hardest truth of all, which was that I was actually being loved, right now, by someone who meant it.

When love felt uncomfortable, I practiced breathing into my heart. I used permission statements to create a new internal experience, and I would tell myself, I give myself permission to be loved and for love to be safe. Underneath so much of my behavior was the limiting belief that I was not lovable and did not deserve to be loved safely, and I did the belief work required to release it. I also began to truly listen when my partner shared his feelings or told me I was hurting him by creating distance, instead of defending myself or disappearing.

I also had to grieve. I grieved the little girl who learned such a painful definition of love, and I grieved the thoughts and feelings I had attached to safety, intimacy and relationships. I even had to grieve being constantly on guard, because vigilance had once been part of my identity and part of how I survived. Receiving love felt frightening in the beginning and I wanted to run, but I taught myself to stay. Even today, I practice remaining present during intimacy instead of leaving emotionally or scanning the room for danger.

Ask yourself:

What belief would I need to release in order to receive healthy love? What would I have to grieve? What permission could I give myself today?

What does healthy love feel like now?

Healthy love now feels safe and exciting, and sometimes it feels boring in the very best way. It no longer requires me to live in a state of emergency, and I no longer believe that I must be rejected or abandoned in order to be loved. I can be on a trip with Nick having an adventure, or I can be in the kitchen at 6:45 in the morning making breakfast and cleaning up, and both feel like love to me now. The ordinary, steady moments that once would have felt boring now feel exciting in their own quiet way, because they are proof that love can be calm and still be alive. My body finally understands that love can hold both giving and receiving. I do not have to fix, perform, prove or earn my place. I simply get to be myself.

That still feels extraordinary to me, and some days it feels almost unbelievable. Mostly it fills me with gratitude, because I know the difference now between a childhood relationship pattern and healthy adult love, and I no longer have to keep playing out the old story.

Now ask yourself:

If love did not have to be earned, chased or feared, what could it feel like? Could it be safe and still exciting? Could consistency become attractive? Could you allow yourself to be fully known without performing for your place in someone’s life?

Your relationship check in

This reflection is not an invitation to blame your parents or point fingers at every person you have ever loved. It is an invitation to understand what your body recorded so that you can decide whether you want to keep living from it. If love had to be earned in your childhood, or if love felt unsafe, unpredictable or conditional, that does not mean you are destined to recreate it. It does mean that healthier love may require awareness and practice before it begins to feel natural.

The frequency of being unloved has a way of showing up again and again until we name it. Sometimes it is loud, in relationships that leave you anxious, fearful, unsafe or feeling unable to leave. Sometimes it is much quieter, and you find yourself choosing someone who makes you earn their affection, pushes you away and then pulls you back, withdraws whenever you have needs or makes you feel that wanting consistency is asking for too much.

Use the Relationship Foundation Check In to look honestly at how you are being treated, and then turn toward a second question that matters just as much.

Ask yourself: 

Can I receive the kind of relationship I say I want?

You are allowed to move beyond your childhood programming. You are allowed to create a relationship in which you feel safe, respected, seen and loved, and you are allowed to teach your body that this kind of love belongs to you.

Understanding your relationship patterns is the first step. The next is learning how to shift them.

Subscribe to my Substack and Download the Relationship Shift exercise, a practical tool to help you stop fighting what you don’t want and get clear about the connection you would love to experience.

Subscribe here:

Use it to reflect on the patterns you want to leave behind, what matters most to you in a relationship, and the kind of connection you want to create moving forward.