Salt for Sugar: How You Learned to Taste Love Wrong

Family Dynamics & Boundaries • February 1, 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

The freeze response is an automatic survival reaction where your nervous system, overwhelmed by perceived threat, shuts down emotionally and physically instead of fighting or fleeing. This is not the same as laziness, avoidance, or a lack of caring—freeze is a deeply rooted biological shutdown, not a conscious choice or weakness. For you, especially if you have a history of relational trauma, freeze can show up as blankness, numbness, or feeling ‘gone’ when you most want to be seen and held. It’s why being vulnerable or close doesn’t simply feel hard—it can feel unsafe, even if no one is physically threatening you. Recognizing freeze as a survival strategy, not a character flaw, is the first step toward reclaiming your capacity for connection and authentic presence.

• You may find yourself freezing, shutting down, or becoming numb during moments of intimacy because your nervous system has learned that closeness feels unsafe, triggering the dorsal vagal freeze response instead of connection.
• Polyvagal theory reveals how your nervous system cycles through states of safety, fight/flight, or shutdown, explaining why your body might interpret emotional vulnerability as a threat—even when there is no physical danger.
• Understanding that your freeze response is an automatic survival mechanism rather than a failure or choice can help you begin to recognize and hold the complexity of your experiences with intimacy without blaming yourself.

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?

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. If you recognize this pattern in yourself, early relational trauma damages the foundation of our house in ways that show up decades later in our most intimate relationships.

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.

1. Salt for Sugar: When Love Trains You Not to Want
2. The Mirroring That Never Happened (And Your Miscalibrated GPS)
3. What Becomes Possible Now

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:

That is what abuse is: knowing you are going to get salt but still hoping for sugar for nineteen years.

— Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One

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. This is one of the defining struggles for ambitious, driven women from relational trauma backgrounds—the very skills that fuel professional success become the walls that keep real intimacy out.

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 invisible patterns you can’t outwork…

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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.

Understanding how attachment trauma shapes adult connections is often the first real crack of light for women who have spent decades wondering why the same patterns keep repeating—why the right person never feels right, and the wrong one always feels like home.

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 “learned 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.

This is part of our comprehensive guide on this topic. For the full picture, read: Self-Sabotage: A Therapist’s Guide.

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

How Distorted Love Templates Show Up for Driven Women

In my work with clients, I’ve found that driven, ambitious women often carry love blueprints that are particularly hard to recognize — because the distortions are often wrapped in achievement. If love in your family was conditional on performance, then succeeding becomes a way of trying to earn what should have been freely given. If love was chaotic and unpredictable, then the high-stakes urgency of a demanding career can feel, on some level, like home.

Elena is a 37-year-old surgeon who came to therapy because she kept ending up in relationships that “started perfect and then fell apart.” She was drawn, reliably, to brilliant, emotionally unavailable men who admired her competence but kept her at arm’s length. When I asked her what love had felt like growing up, she described a father who was warm when she achieved and distant when she didn’t. “I was always performing for him,” she said. “I think I’m still performing for him. I just keep finding different versions of him to perform for.”

Elena’s story is more common than most people realize. The love blueprint formed in childhood doesn’t announce itself as a pattern — it just feels like preference, like attraction, like the way relationships naturally go. The work of therapy is to bring that blueprint into conscious view, to understand its origins without judgment, and to begin — slowly, with enormous patience — to develop the capacity to taste love differently. To recognize nourishment when it’s offered. To not mistake safety for boredom.

If you’ve found yourself in a cycle of relationships that feel familiar in all the wrong ways, it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to repeat it. It means you’re carrying a blueprint that was written in circumstances you didn’t choose. Trauma-informed therapy is one of the most effective ways to begin rewriting it.

When Salt Tastes Like Sugar: The Role of Familiarity in Attraction

One of the most disorienting aspects of the distorted love template is that it operates through the mechanism of familiarity — and familiarity feels, in the body, like rightness. When something activates the neural patterns associated with early love — the chaos, the inconsistency, the emotional labor of trying to earn connection — it registers as recognition. It feels like home, even if home was a painful place.

This is why people sometimes feel “more chemistry” with partners who are ultimately harmful than with partners who are kind and steady. The chemistry, in part, is the nervous system recognizing a familiar pattern. It’s not love — it’s familiarity. And the two can be very difficult to distinguish when you haven’t yet developed an alternative template to compare it to.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of Trauma and Recovery, writes about how trauma creates a kind of repetition compulsion — an unconscious drive to re-encounter the original painful situation in the hopes of resolving it differently this time. Applied to love, this means that people raised in painful relational environments may unconsciously seek out similar dynamics in adulthood — not because they want to be hurt, but because some part of them believes that this time, they can get it right. This time, the love will become what it should have been.

Healing the love blueprint means interrupting this pattern — not through willpower alone, but through the slower process of expanding your nervous system’s repertoire. Of learning, through experience and support, what it feels like when something genuinely nourishes you — and building the capacity to choose it. Fixing the Foundations is a resource specifically designed for this work.

Both/And: A Relationship Can Be Good and Still Need Work

One of the more nuanced truths about relational healing is that good relationships still require work — and driven women sometimes struggle with this because they’ve been conditioned to interpret difficulty as failure. If it’s hard, something must be wrong. If I’m struggling in my relationship, I must have chosen the wrong person. In my clinical experience, this all-or-nothing framing is almost always imported from an early environment where things were either perfect or catastrophic, with nothing in between.

Kira is a biotech executive who came to couples therapy convinced her marriage was broken. She and her partner argued about logistics — who handles school drop-off, how weekends are structured, why she always feels like the household project manager. These aren’t exotic problems. They’re the ordinary friction of two driven people building a life. But Kira’s nervous system didn’t register them as ordinary. Each disagreement activated an old alarm: this isn’t working, leave before it gets worse.

Both/And means Kira can have a good marriage and still feel frustrated within it. She can love her partner and be angry at him. She can need repair and that need can be normal, not a sign that everything is falling apart. For women who grew up in environments where conflict meant danger, learning that a relationship can survive disagreement — that rupture and repair are the mechanism of intimacy, not a threat to it — is genuinely revolutionary.

The Systemic Lens: Relationships Don’t Happen in a Vacuum

Driven women are socialized into a double bind that directly affects their relationships: be independent enough to succeed in a competitive world, but relational enough to maintain partnerships and care for others. Be ambitious, but not so ambitious that you intimidate. Be strong, but not so strong that you don’t need anyone. Navigate these contradictions perfectly, and never acknowledge the impossibility of the task.

This double bind is not an accident of personal circumstance. It’s a systemic condition. Women entering professional fields over the past several decades did so without a corresponding restructuring of domestic and relational expectations. The result is that many driven women are effectively working two full-time jobs — their career and their relationship’s emotional infrastructure — while their partners, regardless of good intentions, benefit from a system that never asked them to do both.

In my practice, I help couples see these patterns not as personal failures but as cultural inheritances. When a driven woman feels like she’s “doing everything” in her relationship, she’s often not exaggerating — she’s accurately describing a structural imbalance that neither partner created but both perpetuate. Making it visible is the first step toward changing it.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

How to Heal: Relearning What Love Actually Tastes Like

In my work with clients who grew up in households where love came with conditions, criticism, or unpredictability, one of the most disorienting parts of healing is this: when you finally encounter something genuinely nourishing — a partner who’s consistent, a friendship that’s warm without an agenda, a dynamic that doesn’t require you to earn — it doesn’t feel like love. It feels flat. Strange. Like salt when you were expecting sugar. That’s not a failure of perception. That’s the imprint of early love doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Relearning what love tastes like isn’t a cognitive project. You can’t simply decide to stop being attracted to what’s familiar. The patterns live in the body — in what feels like “chemistry,” in what registers as safe or exciting or real. That’s why the most effective healing for this kind of relational imprinting works at the level where the patterns actually live: the nervous system, the attachment system, the implicit memory.

Attachment-focused therapy is the cornerstone of this work. A skilled attachment therapist isn’t just helping you understand your patterns intellectually — they’re offering you a relational experience that’s different from what you grew up with: consistent, attuned, non-retaliatory, genuinely curious about you. Over time, that repeated experience starts to recalibrate what “safe relationship” feels like in your body. It’s slow. It’s also the most direct route to the change you’re looking for.

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is often useful for processing the specific memories that installed the original template — the parent whose love was conditional, the childhood moment where you learned what you had to do to be acceptable. EMDR helps reprocess those memories so they stop functioning as the default blueprint for what love looks like. Clients frequently describe a shift in what they find attractive after this work — not because they decided to choose differently, but because the underlying template has changed.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is another modality I find essential here, particularly for the part that keeps seeking salt: the part that mistakes intensity for love, unavailability for depth, and chaos for passion. In IFS, we build a relationship with that part, understand what it’s trying to protect, and help it update its understanding of what nourishment can actually look like. That update isn’t instantaneous, but it’s real.

A concrete practice I often give clients early in this work: when you’re in a relationship or interaction and something feels “wrong” in the direction of too boring, too easy, or too available, sit with that feeling for a minute before acting on it. Notice where you feel it in your body. Ask yourself: is this boredom, or is this the unfamiliarity of something genuinely safe? Those two things can feel remarkably similar when you’ve been malnourished long enough.

You deserve to know what real nourishment feels like — not as an abstraction, but as a daily lived experience. That’s possible. Many of my clients have found their way there, and I’ve had the privilege of watching them stop choosing salt. If you’re ready to do this work, I’d invite you to explore therapy with Annie or take a few minutes with Fixing the Foundations. You’ve been hungry long enough. Something sweeter is available.

Medical Disclaimer