On being stuck in an unhealthy relationship — even when you know better |

I knew it. I had studied it. I had written about it even.
Somebody who’s afraid of being abandoned will invariably pick someone who’s unavailable. I put that in my book. In black and white. With a clear psychological explanation of why this happens, how it works, and what it costs.

And then, a year later, I walked straight into it. Eyes wide open. Or so I thought.

He had been in prison for twenty-two years when I chose him. Not despite that fact—and that’s the uncomfortable truth I have to sit with. The unavailability was part of the attraction. Not consciously. Not with bad intentions. But the pattern doesn’t ask for your permission. It doesn’t wait until you’ve finished reading the chapter about it. It simply runs, the way software runs: quietly, in the background, shaping every decision you think you’re making freely.

I told myself that love travels unpredictable paths, and fell in love. But two years later, while having steady proof already that our relationship was insanely unhealthy, I married him.
This is what I mean when I say that understanding isn’t the exit. The physical pull just was stronger. And as you may guess, that physical pull, in my case, wasn’t sex. It was the trauma bond. 100% present. 100% mine.
But I didn’t know just yet.

You can know everything about attachment theory, about abandonment fear, about the way chronic shame makes you reach for what feels familiar rather than what is healthy. You can have years of therapy, shelves full of read books, a practice of mindfulness and self-compassion. And still—still—find yourself in the kitchen of a relationship that looks nothing like what you said you wanted, wondering how you got there. And why you stay.

I’m not writing this to be hard on myself. I’m writing this because I think it matters to say out loud: insight is not immunity.

Knowing the name of the dragon doesn’t mean the dragon is gone. It means you can see it more clearly when it shows up. And sometimes—often—you still let it in. Because it feels like home. Because the nervous system doesn’t update itself the moment the mind does. Because old patterns run quiet, and new insight takes time, and a willingness to dig into yourself.

And let me say this: I believe that I could only come to my ultimate integration experience because this man clicked into my unconscious patterns like hormones click to their specific receptors only. He fitted in with five, six “song lines” from my youth, the energetic music that made up my personal love song. And as it happened, I fell in love with him the moment I danced on the very first song he shared with me as a gift. How symbolic! And how energetically aligned…

How symbolic! And how energetically aligned… 

Back to knowing. You develop what I can only describe as a growing tolerance for the discomfort of the relationship. The boiling frog syndrome, you’ll have heard about that. But even more so, the trauma bond makes you addicted. Physically. Those very same hormones that pulled you in the relationship in the beginning are pulling the strings inside your body and keep you where you are—craving the next high.

Leaving a draining love dynamic doesn’t happen because you read the right book. Even if you wrote it.
I walked into that relationship knowing what I knew. I stayed knowing what I knew. And I learned something I couldn’t have learned any other way: that the last layer of a pattern reveals itself only when you live it one more time with enough awareness and balls to stick with it to the end. Unfortunately that means, more often than not, that you’ll end up with exhaustion. With self-loathing. With fear and loneliness.
That’s not failure. That’s the curriculum.

Believe me, after you take up the path into integration, you will never be the same.
And neither will your relationship.

Heartgreet, Tex 🖤