⏰ Parent Working Long Hours/Multiple Jobs Trauma

Survivor Love Styles You May Have Developed

🏚️ Emotions Without a Home

Your feelings were treated like unwelcome guests in your own home. When you were hurt, scared, or angry, the adults around you were too busy, too tired, or too overwhelmed to notice. You struggle to know what you're feeling or needing since no one helped you understand or validate your emotions growing up.

🛡️ Braced for Independence

Vulnerability became dangerous when your family couldn't afford for you to have needs. You built an impressive fortress of self-reliance because it feels safer to be self-reliant than to need others—disappointment hurts less when you don't expect support.

💓 Love and Hate Intensely

In your household, people disappeared without closure—whether through work demands, emotional unavailability, or silent treatments that lasted for weeks. Your feelings were consistently dismissed, minimized, ignored, or turned against you, creating an emotional rollercoaster that you learned to see as "love."

🔧 Drawn to Things Broken

You compulsively care for others, fearing rejection if you stop performing. A child part of you still believes love means swallowing your pain to tend to theirs. You go on being friends with and continue helping people who've been destructive to you because fixing others feels more familiar than receiving care.

💃 Same Dance, Different Partners

In relationships, you tend to attract partners who eventually turn out to be controlling, manipulative, distant, or needy. You repeatedly trust people who have proven unreliable, unconsciously recreating the emotional unavailability you experienced as a child.

🎭 Suspicious of Genuine Care

Around others, you minimize your emotions, having learned early that your feelings will be either ignored or seen as problematic. When someone shows genuine interest in your feelings, you feel both drawn to and suspicious of their attention—it's so unfamiliar it feels dangerous.