How difficult life experiences may have shaped your relationships
Wired for Survival
Years of living with childhood trauma rewired your nervous system to stay permanently switched on🎚️—a biological survival system that kept you alive when your world felt dangerous. You became incredibly attuned to reading people's energy, micro-expressions, and the subtle shifts that signal when someone might become unsafe. This hypervigilant awareness made you almost psychic 🔮 at detecting relationship red flags and protecting yourself from harm.
But this same survival wiring now makes intimate relationships feel exhausting and overwhelming. Your nervous system treats your partner's bad mood, delayed text response, or even their quiet moments as potential threats 📱⚠️. You swing between emotional extremes—either feeling completely numb and dissociated (when your system shuts down to protect you) or drowning in intense feelings (when the floodgates burst open) 🌊. Even when your partner is being loving and consistent, your body feels jumpy—it still carries those early trauma memories, bracing for the next emotional storm 🌪️ even in moments of genuine safety. You're so busy scanning for danger that you struggle to actually receive the love and affection that's right in front of you.