When Love Feels Unfamiliar After Survival
When healing changes your nervous system, healthy love can feel unfamiliar before it feels safe. Valentine’s Day can bring up things we rarely talk about. For some, it’s light and sweet, a day for affection, gifts, or celebration. For others, it quietly stirs longing, comparison, or memories of relationships that didn’t feel safe. And for those who have survived chaotic attachment or trauma, it can trigger a deeper, quieter question: why does healthy love sometimes feel uncomfortable? People rarely prepare you for that part of recovery, and that silence can make it feel even more isolating. Before healing, many of us learned connection through intensity. Emotional highs and lows, dramatic swings, and sudden closeness followed by distance became the rhythm of attachment. Your nervous system began to associate intensity with intimacy , and your body learned to interpret chaos as connection. So when someone arrives with consistency rather than volatility , it can feel unfamili...
