February is my favorite month to talk about love. Not because it’s simple—God, it’s not simple—but because this is when the question gets unavoidable. The heart-shaped boxes show up. The couples flood your Instagram. And somewhere between the Whole Foods flower display and another friend’s engagement announcement, you find yourself wondering: Why is this so hard for me?
Maybe you already know your version of this story. Maybe you keep choosing partners who need managing, saving, or impressing—the same person with different faces, over and over. But I want to talk to you if your story looks different. If you’ve poured yourself so completely into your work, your causes, the people and systems that desperately need you, that your own romantic desires went underground somewhere along the way. If the question “What do you want in a partner?” makes your mind go blank.
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Because here’s what I’ve learned from fifteen thousand hours of clinical work: Both versions are often the same story. Both can grow from the same root. For some women, that root is a childhood home. For others, it’s a romantic relationship where caretaking slowly replaced mutuality. And for many, it’s both.
You may have learned to taste love wrong. And it likely happened early—sometimes before your first relationship, and sometimes inside a relationship that reshaped your nervous system over time.
This month, I’m going deep on that. Today’s essay is about the what and the why—what happened to your nervous system, why love feels so confusing. Next week, for paid subscribers, I’ll give you a workbook with actual exercises to start untangling it. And on Friday, February 27th, I’m teaching a 90-minute live workshop called Loving When You Were Raised by or Partnered With a Narcissist, where we’ll go deeper into the specific pattern frameworks I use with clients to understand your particular wiring—and how to change it, regardless of when or where that wiring formed.
But first, we need to name what might actually be happening.
When Caring for Others Becomes the Only Way to Exist
Rupi Kaur wrote:
“if i knew what safety looked like / i would have spent less time falling / into arms that were not.”
But what if you stopped falling altogether?
Let me describe someone. See if you recognize her.
She can hold space for anyone. Her friends call her when they’re falling apart. Her team knows she’ll absorb whatever chaos lands on her desk. She’s built a life of meaning—maybe she runs a nonprofit, or she’s the one who organizes, advocates, shows up. She matters to a lot of people.
And she is profoundly lonely.
Not because she doesn’t have people around her. But because somewhere along the way, she became the one who gives. Rarely the one who receives. The idea of someone taking care of her—really seeing her, really holding her—makes her chest tight. It feels dangerous in a way she can’t quite name.
When someone gets close, something happens. Her whole system goes… quiet. Blank. Still. Not rejection exactly—more like disappearing. The wanting that might have been there just… stops.
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges calls this the freeze response. In his polyvagal theory, when your nervous system perceives overwhelming threat—and yes, intimacy can register as threat—it doesn’t always fight or flee. Sometimes it shuts down entirely. The dorsal vagal system takes over, and you go still. Immobilized. The body’s oldest defense.
For some women, that freeze can become a way of life in the entire terrain of romantic intimacy—whether it began in childhood or emerged inside a relationship where closeness felt unsafe.
You can mobilize communities. You can hold everyone else’s feelings. But when someone asks what you want? When someone tries to care for you instead of being cared for by you?
Blank. Still. Gone.
This wiring often has roots. Deep ones. Let me trace some of the most common paths it takes.
Maybe your household was volatile. A parent whose mood could shift without warning—loving one moment, rageful or withdrawn the next. You learned to read the weather before you could read books. You learned that your job was to manage the emotional climate, to become the steady one, to have no needs that might add to the chaos.
Maybe you were the caretaker for a parent who couldn’t hold themselves together. You learned that love meant being needed. That your value came from being useful, indispensable, the one who held it all together while asking for nothing.
Or maybe you didn’t grow up that way—but later found yourself in a romantic relationship where volatility, emotional unpredictability, or chronic self-abandonment became normal.
Toni Morrison, in a conversation with Oprah, named something essential about what this can do to a child:
“When my children used to walk in the room when they were little, I looked at them to see if they’d buckled their trousers, or if their hair was combed, or if their socks were up. You think your affection and your deep love is on display, because you’re caring for them. It’s not. When they see you, they see the critical face. What’s wrong now?”
What’s wrong now?
If you grew up seeing that face—the one scanning for what you got wrong, or scanning for what you needed to fix in them—then your understanding of love may have gotten built on a fractured foundation.
A 2014 Princeton study analyzing data from over 14,000 U.S. children found that approximately forty percent lack secure attachment bonds with their caregivers—and those children are significantly more likely to struggle with relationships throughout their lives. That’s not a small minority. That’s nearly half of us, walking around with attachment systems that may have gotten wired for survival instead of connection.
Your nervous system may have learned something specific: Other people’s internal states are your responsibility. Their needs come first. Their moods matter most. Your survival depends on reading them accurately.
That wasn’t a choice. That was adaptation. And adaptation doesn’t only happen in childhood. Nervous systems adapt wherever survival is required.
Salt for Sugar: When Love Trains You Not to Want
The poet Amanda Lovelace wrote something that has never left me. From The Princess Saves Herself in This One:
*my mother
smiled
as she offered
a cube of
sugar in her
upturned palm.
greedily,
i accepted.
i reached inside
my mouth,
delicately placing one
(just one)
on the center of my tongue,
& i clamped down.
salt.that is what abuse is:
knowing you are
going to get salt
but still hoping for sugar
for nineteen years.*
Here’s what can happen when you learn—early or later—to accept salt disguised as sugar: You can lose the ability to taste the difference.
For some women, this means volatility feels like passion. Unavailability feels like mystery. They keep choosing partners who need managing—because that’s what love tasted like in their house.
But for others—maybe for you—the confusion runs even deeper. Maybe you stopped trusting the whole category. Stopped reaching for sugar at all. Because every time you reached, you got salt. So you decided, somewhere deep in your nervous system, to stop being hungry.
You became the one who feeds others. Rarely the one who eats.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes about the soul-starved woman in Women Who Run With the Wolves—describing how a woman who is “starved for her real soul-life” may look put together on the outside but is “filled with dozens of pleading hands and empty mouths” within. That soul starvation can drive you to grab at anything that looks like love, or convince yourself you don’t need sustenance at all. Both can be responses to the same original wound.
And here’s what I want to name, because it doesn’t get talked about enough:
For women who learned to survive by caretaking, receiving care can feel more threatening than never getting it at all.
Think about it. If your entire sense of self got built around being the one who gives—the competent one, the steady one, the one who needs nothing—then what happens when someone tries to give to you?
It’s not just uncomfortable. It can be destabilizing. If you’re not the caretaker, who are you? If you have needs, are you still safe? If you let someone see your hunger, will they use it against you?
One of my clients described it this way: “I feel like I have a big hole in my psyche, or maybe it’s a wound that never quite heals. God, I’m lonely by myself.”
That’s the terrible paradox: desperately wanting connection while being unable to receive it. Aching for intimacy while your whole system freezes the moment someone gets close.
Your brain may have done something brilliant when you were young. It learned that wanting things was dangerous—because your needs got ignored, or mocked, or used against you. So it made the wanting stop. Or at least, it buried the wanting so deep you stopped being able to hear it.
That was adaptive. That kept you safe.
But it may not be serving you anymore.
The Mirroring That Never Happened (And Your Miscalibrated GPS)
Marion Woodman, the Jungian analyst, wrote extensively about what happens when the natural order of mirroring gets reversed—when the child is expected to mirror the parent, instead of the parent mirroring the child, stifling the young potential before it ever has a chance to bloom.
You were supposed to be seen. Delighted in. Reflected back to yourself so you could understand who you were, what you felt, what you wanted. That’s what healthy early attachment does—it teaches you about yourself through the loving gaze of someone who finds you fascinating.
Instead? You may have become the mirror. Your job was reading their states. Managing their moods. Keeping the peace. Disappearing when necessary.
And that same wiring—the wiring that makes you exceptional at reading others, at sensing what a room needs, at anticipating problems before they happen—may now be shaping your romantic life. Or your absence of one.
Because here’s the thing: Your relational GPS—the internal guidance system that points you toward love—likely got programmed early—or recalibrated inside a relationship that demanded survival instead of reciprocity.
If that early programming was shaped by chaos, volatility, emotional unavailability, or the demand that you have no needs, then your GPS may have learned something specific. For some women, it points toward what feels familiar—partners who need managing. For others, it says: Don’t want anything. Wanting is the problem. The safest direction is nowhere.
That’s why “chemistry” can lie. And that’s why safe, available people can feel boring—or terrifying.
Recognition isn’t the same as right. And protection isn’t the same as thriving.
What Becomes Possible Now
This can change.
Not overnight. Not through willpower or shame. But through understanding why your palate got trained the way it did—and slowly, carefully, teaching it something new.
Neuroplasticity is real. Your brain forms new neural pathways throughout life. And the research on “earned secure attachment” offers genuine hope: a growing body of studies shows that individuals who experienced insecure attachment in childhood can develop secure relationship patterns as adults through consistent, safe relationships and intentional therapeutic work. Your early wiring is not your destiny.
But you can’t change a pattern you can’t see. And you don’t need a childhood explanation for a pattern to be real. If your body learned it, it counts.
Today’s essay was about naming it—the freeze, the caretaking that became identity, the terror of receiving what you’ve spent your whole life giving, the relational GPS that may have gotten programmed for survival instead of connection.
Next week, I’m giving paid subscribers the how: a workbook with concrete exercises to start identifying your patterns and practicing something different. The essay teaches. The workbook works.
And on Friday, February 27th, I’m teaching a 90-minute live workshop called Loving When You Were Raised by or Partnered With a Narcissist.
We’ll go deeper into the specific pattern frameworks I use with clients—why “chemistry” so often points you back to familiar pain, why safe can feel boring or even threatening, and how to begin recalibrating your system so it can recognize real safety as something you’re allowed to have.
You’ll leave with language for your pattern, three practices you can start using right away, and a 75-page workbook to keep working with long after we’re done. There’s lifetime access to the replay if you can’t be there live.
$47. Camera optional. This is the workshop I wish I’d had in my thirties.
This is for you if you recognized yourself anywhere in these paragraphs—whether your patterns formed in childhood, in a narcissistic romantic relationship, or across both.
You’re not broken. You may have learned to taste love wrong because that’s what you were given. You may have learned to stop wanting because wanting was dangerous.
Those were brilliant adaptations. They got you here.
But you may not need them anymore.
Adrienne Rich wrote about the promise we made ourselves as children, in her poem cycle Sources:
the child backed silent against the wall
trying to keep her eyes dry; haughty; in panic
I will never let you know
I will never
let you know
That promise kept you safe when you were small.
You may not need it anymore.
You can let someone know.
Loving When You Were Raised by or Partnered With a Narcissist
Friday, February 27 • 12:00–1:30pm ET • Live on Zoom
A 90-minute workshop for driven women whose romantic patterns don’t match their professional success.
