People often ask how someone can keep returning to something that hurts them.
A relationship, an addiction, a habit; a version of themselves they promised they had left behind.
“I just don’t understand,” they say.
And maybe that’s a privilege. Because if you’ve never experienced it, of course it makes no sense to you.
Why would someone miss what broke them?
But I don’t think the body asks that question. The body isn’t always searching for what is good. It’s searching for what is familiar.
Our nervous system doesn’t wake up every morning asking,
“What will help me flourish today?”
It asks,
“What has kept me alive before?”
Sometimes those are the same thing but sometimes they couldn’t be more different.
That is why healing often feels so uncomfortable; not because we’re walking away from something good, but because we’re walking away from something known.
When we hear the word addiction, we often picture substances.
Alcohol, drugs, gambling. But addiction wears many faces. Sometimes it’s achievement, sometimes it’s being needed, sometimes it’s perfectionism, sometimes it’s chaos and sometimes it’s love.
Or at least what we have mistaken for love.
For a long time, I believed love was my addiction. Even when it hurt me. Even when it asked me to become smaller. Even when I left conversations feeling lonelier than when I entered them.
I couldn’t understand why letting go felt impossible.
Now I think I do.
Maybe I wasn’t addicted to love. Maybe I was addicted to hope. To potential. To believing that if I loved hard enough someone would eventually choose me the way I had always chosen them.
Children don’t choose the rules they grow up with, they absorb them.
Mine sounded something like this:
Be who someone else needs. Not who you are. Not what you need.
Whenever I showed myself instead of becoming what someone else wanted from me, there were consequences.
My needs were inconvenient. My feelings complicated things. My voice disrupted the peace.
So I adapted; my needs were silenced and my silence was celebrated.
People called me mature, selfless, helpful, reliable; I became exceptionally good at sensing what everyone else needed before they had to ask.
I could read a room before I understood my own emotions. I could carry someone else’s pain while quietly abandoning my own. From the outside, it looked like kindness. From the inside, it was survival.
The hardest part about survival strategies is that they don’t disappear just because childhood ends.
They follow us.
A child who learns that love must be earned often becomes an adult who keeps earning long after love should have become safe.
Suddenly, becoming exceptional isn’t ambition; it’s attachment.
Working harder isn’t passion; it’s protection.
People-pleasing isn’t generosity; it’s fear.
You begin believing that your value lives in what you provide, not in who you are.
So you become indispensable: the employee no one can replace, the friend everyone calls, the partner who keeps giving, the coach who pours into everyone else’s cup while quietly wondering why hers is empty.
And everyone applauds.
Because self-abandonment is often rewarded before it’s recognized.
This is where I think compassion is misunderstood.
People confuse compassion with permission, as though understanding someone’s behavior means excusing it. It doesn’t.
Compassion doesn’t say,
“What you did was okay.”
It says,
“Help me understand how you got here.”
Understanding explains behavior. It doesn’t justify it.
In fact, understanding is what makes change possible.
Every behavior solves a problem. Addiction numbs pain. Perfectionism protects against criticism. Control quiets uncertainty. People-pleasing preserves connection.
The strategy may become destructive but that doesn’t mean it was born out of weakness. Sometimes it was born out of survival.
You can hold someone accountable while still being curious about the wound beneath the behavior.
For years, I thought I was choosing love. Looking back I think I was choosing familiarity.
If your nervous system learns that love requires disappearing, then disappearing starts to feel like love. Not because it is but because it’s recognizable.
Leaving doesn’t feel peaceful; it feels like withdrawal.
The body has to learn that unfamiliar doesn’t always mean unsafe.
That takes time. More time than we often give ourselves.
Sometimes you’re the hammer. Sometimes you’re the nail.
For a long time, I thought I was holding the hammer.
I believed I was making choices. That I could stop whenever I wanted. Then I realized I wasn’t swinging the hammer anymore. The habit was. Whether it was overworking, overgiving, overloving, proving, performing or becoming what everyone else needed before asking myself what I needed.
I wasn’t in control. I was being shaped by patterns I hadn’t questioned.
There is something I’ve started asking myself lately.
Who am I when I stop earning my place in other people’s lives?
Not when I’m exceptional. Not when I’m useful. Not when I’m needed.
Just me.
It’s a terrifying question when you’ve spent a lifetime believing love had conditions.
Because choosing yourself doesn’t initially feel empowering. It feels dangerous.
Your body remembers when having needs threatened connection, when speaking up created distance, and when silence kept the peace.
Your nervous system doesn’t know you’re thirty years old now.
Sometimes it’s still trying to protect the child who learned that disappearing was the safest way to belong.
Writing has become my way back.
I started writing when I was five years old. It was where I could breathe and where I could say everything I couldn’t say out loud.
Then one day I stopped.
Not because I ran out of words but because someone told me my words made them uncomfortable.
So I folded that part of myself away.
For years, I became what other people needed. The teacher. The instructor. The coach. The employee. The helper. The listener. The dependable one. The exceptional one.
And somewhere beneath all of those identities, my own voice waited patiently.
Every essay I write now feels less like creating something new and more like uncovering someone who was always there.
Every time I publish, I tell that little girl something she should have heard long ago.
You don’t have to disappear to deserve love. You don’t have to earn your place. Your needs are not interruptions. Your voice is not too much. And silence is no longer the price of belonging.
Maybe healing isn’t becoming someone new. Maybe healing is teaching your nervous system a truth it never had the chance to learn.
That love doesn’t require self-abandonment. That compassion isn’t weakness. That understanding isn’t permission. That boundaries are not rejection. That your needs deserve a seat at the table. And perhaps the bravest thing we can do isn’t learning how to love other people better. Perhaps it’s learning how to remain ourselves while we do. Because I don’t think I was ever addicted to love. I think I was addicted to disappearing inside it.
And for the first time in my life I’m beginning to understand the difference.