The Particular Pain of Calling Her Anyway
Why do you reach for a parent or family member who has repeatedly left you hurt? This essay names the powerful conditioning created by inconsistent love, the cultural pressure on women to keep family ties intact, and the slow work of noticing an old reaching impulse before it decides for you.
You called her on the drive home. Again. You’d sworn you wouldn’t, you’d said it to your therapist, to your best friend, to yourself in the bathroom mirror at 7 AM, and then the Tuesday from hell happened, and before you’d consciously decided to dial, her name was already on your screen.
Or maybe you didn’t call. Maybe you typed out the text to your mother on Sunday afternoon and deleted it twice and sent it anyway, and then you watched the three dots appear and disappear and appear again with your whole chest clenched. Maybe it wasn’t your mother at all, maybe it was your father, or your sister, or the aunt who practically raised you, the one who can make you feel seen in a way no one else quite manages and who, in the very next breath, can make you feel nine years old and foolish.
Or maybe it isn’t about calling at all. Maybe it’s the holiday you keep attending, the one where you build hope on the drive over and spend the drive home quietly dismantling it. Where you walk in hoping for the version of her who once drove four hours to sit with you after your surgery, and you get the other one instead. And you go to bed that night telling yourself: I won’t do this again.
And then you do.
This isn’t restlessness. This isn’t ingratitude. This isn’t evidence that you’re incapable of learning or growing or protecting yourself. This isn’t something your therapy has failed to fix in you. This is your brain, your brilliant, adaptive, exhausted brain, doing something exquisitely rational in response to one of the most tenacious relational patterns a nervous system can be shaped by: the one where love is real, and it arrives, and it disappears, and it arrives again, and you can never tell when.
“and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”
Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival,” in H. Moore (Ed.), Poems from the Women’s Movement, p. 107, Library of America
When Love Arrives Sometimes
She’d called her mother from the hospital parking garage, still in scrubs, still carrying the particular weight of a shift that had gone sideways in three directions at once. (Composite details used throughout for confidentiality.) Simone was thirty-eight, an emergency physician in San Diego, a decade in the ER, someone extraordinarily good at managing what cannot be managed, and she’d made a decision in the elevator not to call, and then she’d made the call.
“She was so good,” Simone said, leaning forward slightly in her chair. “I mean, she asked questions. Real ones. She stayed on for forty minutes, and I went home feeling like… like this thing in me I didn’t even know was missing had clicked back into place.”
She looked at me across the space between our chairs.
“And then I called her two weeks later after the worst shift of my month, and she told me I was always so dramatic about work. The same woman.” She shook her head. “Literally, the same woman.”
She’d grown up in a household where her mother, genuinely loving, genuinely capable of warmth, cycled between presence and disappearance in a pattern that had no reliable logic. Some weeks her mother was the center of everything: elaborate meals, long conversations at the kitchen table, the kind of attention that made Simone feel chosen, real. Other weeks she was gone into herself, the bedroom door closed, her affect flat and unreachable. And Simone had learned, from very young, to do the thing that children of inconsistent parents do: she read every room before she entered it. She became very good at being needed. She kept trying. She kept trying because it worked, sometimes. It worked just enough.
By thirty-eight she was still doing it. The bracing when her mother’s name appeared on her phone. The full-body tightening that was equal parts hope and dread. The way she still reached for her mother first when she was most depleted, not her husband, not a friend, her mother, as if some part of her nervous system had never received the updated information and was still sending signals written in the original language of her childhood.
I didn’t say anything right away. I sat with the quality of her voice, not defeated, not angry, but bewildered, the way you sound when you’ve been trying to solve an equation for thirty years that doesn’t have a clean answer. Then I told her what I want to tell you now.
“The children of unpredictable parents often clamored for attention and became intensely frustrated in the face of small challenges. Their persistent arousal made them chronically anxious.Constantly looking for reassurance got in the way of playing and exploration, and, as a result, they grew up chronically nervous and nonadventurous.”, van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, Chapter 10.
Why the Reaching Persists
A behavioral-learning pattern in which an unpredictable reward can create a particularly persistent urge to keep trying because the desired response occasionally arrives.
In plain terms: when warmth sometimes appears and sometimes disappears, the reaching part of you may keep hoping this will be the time it comes back.
Here is what behavioral science has understood for decades, and what no one tells us when we’re standing in a parking garage asking ourselves why we can’t just stop: the most powerful behavioral conditioning in the world is not consistent reward. It’s not consistent punishment. It’s the pattern where sometimes you get what you need and sometimes you don’t, and the “sometimes” arrives on a schedule that is random enough you can never predict when it’s coming. This is what drives slot machines. It’s what keeps people feeding quarters into a machine long after any rational calculation would have sent them home. And it is, in the most precise and unsentimental sense, what drives us back to the parent who sometimes hurts us.
We are not weak for this. We are wired for it.
I spent a long time with Donald Kalsched’s Trauma and the Soul trying to understand why the most intelligent women I worked with couldn’t simply decide their way out of this pattern. Kalsched writes about how, in the traumatized psyche, repeated experiences with an unpredictable caregiver don’t just create memories, they become embedded as traits. States of shame, of reaching, of bracing for impact get written into the nervous system not as events that happened but as the shape of the self. The child who grew up not knowing which version of her mother was behind the door doesn’t just remember the uncertainty. She becomes uncertain. She becomes someone who is always, slightly, waiting.
A relational pattern in which early experiences with an inconsistent caregiver shape expectations about closeness, reassurance, and whether support will be available.
In plain terms: your hand may reach for her before your thoughtful mind has caught up because the original need learned this route very early.
There’s a passage in Addiction to Perfection I kept coming back to when I was trying to understand why the most driven women in my practice couldn’t simply substitute: Marion Woodman describes the woman running as fast as she can toward independence, and running directly into what she calls the “starving self,” the part that keeps circling back to the original source of hunger. No amount of substitution quite reaches the right register, because the hunger was installed for that specific kind of love, in that specific early relationship. The nervous system learned a particular shape of want. It doesn’t easily learn a new one.
I found the phrase “soul nerve” in My Grandmother’s Hands, Resmaa Menakem’s name for the vagus nerve, the highway that runs between your brain and your belly, and I’ve returned to it more times than I can count when I’m trying to explain to a client why her hand dials before her mind has finished its sentence. That nerve already knows what happened. It knows where the old hungers live. The part of you that reaches for her is not the part of you that reads psychology books. It is older than that. It is faster than that. It is the part of you that learned, before you had language, that this was the only source available.
This is what Simone was doing in that parking garage. Not failing to learn. Not being naive. Responding, with everything her nervous system knew to do, to the most tenacious form of conditioning we carry.
“A giver is then obligated to offer love, sex, attention, affection, and admiration,as well as other forms of emotional, social, reproductive, and caregiving labor.”, Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press, p. 301.
The Gendered Work of Reaching
Here is the part we don’t say often enough: this is not a gender-neutral pattern.
The ongoing work of maintaining family relationships, the calling, the showing up, the trying again, the managing of difficult family dynamics, falls disproportionately on women. We are the ones who continue reaching toward inconsistent parents, who organize the holiday gatherings, who plan the reconciliations, who hold the phone through the hard calls. We are culturally rewarded for not giving up, for keeping the family connected, for finding a way to make it work. And we are quietly pathologized or punished when we eventually stop, called cold, unloving, selfish, unable to forgive.
Sarah Jaffe writes in Work Won’t Love You Back that skill in managing the emotional temperature of others is a skill learned from a life without power, and that it is rarely seen as skill at all by those who simply expect it. It is expected. It is gendered. It is framed as natural, just who women are, the relational ones, the ones who keep the family intact, and this framing makes invisible the fact that what we are doing is performing extraordinarily demanding emotional labor, often toward people who cannot or will not reciprocate, in a system that makes stopping very, very hard.
Her nervous system was shaped by her mother’s unpredictability. AND she was raised in a culture that tells women the right response to relational inconsistency is more patience, more effort, more grace. Neither is her fault. Both are real. And neither will shift by simply deciding to be different.
“Bodies speak to us. Your body might tell you it is not coping with what you are asking;and you need to listen. You need to listen to your body.If it screams, stop. If it moans, slow down.”, Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
Making Room for a Different Reaching
I’m not saying your parent didn’t love you. I’m not saying the love you received wasn’t real, or that it didn’t matter, or that the good times were a performance. I’m not saying you should stop the relationship or cut off your family or stop hoping for something to change. I’m not saying you were naive for calling. I’m not saying the answer to any of this arrived in this essay.
What I am saying is this:
The love was real. AND it was not reliably available. AND your nervous system, doing the only thing it knew to do, built an entire architecture of reaching around the sometimes, an architecture so old and so embedded it doesn’t feel like a strategy anymore. It feels like who you are.
We are not broken. We are conditioned. AND the conditioning is changeable. Not by deciding. Not by understanding it intellectually, which we have probably done seventeen times already. But through slow, careful, relational work, the kind that reaches below where the decisions live. Through the gradually accumulated experience of reaching for something and finding it there, consistently, without drama, without the bracing. Through learning, in the body rather than the mind, that consistent sources actually exist.
What becomes possible, not in a magic week, not after a single reckoning, but over time, in good work, with real support, is a different relationship to the reaching. Not the elimination of the hunger. The hunger was installed too early and too deep to simply dissolve. But the ability to notice the reaching before you’re already in the parking garage. To feel the tightening in your chest and recognize it as the old signal, the one that has your mother’s number memorized. To have, over time, more of a pause between the impulse and the dial. And, slowly, imperfectly, brutifully, to redirect that reaching toward sources that actually stock what you’re looking for.
Not the hardware store. Somewhere that has the milk.
The next time you feel it, that particular tightening in the center of your chest, the one that arrives when her name appears on your screen or when you’re in the car on the way to the dinner you said you wouldn’t attend again, place one hand there. Right at the sternum. Not to fix anything. Not to decide anything. Just to notice: this is an old feeling, in a body that has been carrying it for a very long time, and the fact that it’s still here is not evidence of your failure. It’s evidence of how much you once needed something. That’s enough to know for now.
Q: Why do I keep calling a parent who often hurts me?
A: The essay explains that inconsistent care can create a powerful learned pattern of reaching, especially when warmth and disappointment arrive unpredictably.
Q: Does reaching out mean I am weak or naive?
A: No. The essay frames the impulse as an adaptive nervous-system response, not a failure of intelligence, therapy, or self-protection.
Q: Is the love from an inconsistent parent real?
A: It can be real and still not reliably available. The essay holds both truths without requiring a simple answer about the relationship.
Q: Why can this pattern feel especially hard for women?
A: Women are often assigned the work of maintaining family relationships and may be rewarded for continued patience, effort, and connection.
Q: What can change over time?
A: The essay describes building a pause between the impulse and the call, then gradually redirecting the need for steadiness toward sources that can actually offer it.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
“Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.”
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist with 15,000+ clinical hours since 2013 and an EMDRIA Certified Therapist. She’s the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she successfully exited. She’s currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). Her expert commentary has appeared in Psychology Today, Forbes, Business Insider, NBC News, and The Information.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · Author, W.W. Norton 2027
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is an EMDR-certified licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist with over 15,000 clinical hours, and she's been in practice since 2013. She draws on psychodynamic and somatic approaches alongside EMDR, and she is licensed in 15 U.S. jurisdictions and registered to provide telehealth in Florida (California, Colorado (telehealth only), Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Washington). Annie works with driven and ambitious women from relational trauma backgrounds, and everything she writes about is field-tested across thousands of clinical sessions. She is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited, and is currently writing her first book, The Everything Years: Navigating the Pressure and Promise of Your Thirties, with W.W. Norton (2027). A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
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