LOYAL TO YOUR ABUSERS

Growing up, the people who were supposed to protect you were also the ones who hurt you most deeply. Your mother's loving embrace came with criticisms 💔. Your father's approval arrived wrapped in humiliation. You learned that love sometimes comes with pain—that the people closest to you have the authority to use your weaknesses against you. This Stockholm syndrome—where you feel loyalty toward the very people who harm you—was burned into your nervous system through alternation of abuse and care.

Your childhood experience made you incredibly skilled at getting along with unpredictable and sometimes dangerous people ⚠️. You became a master at finding the tiny sparks of tenderness hidden inside cruel people, developed an almost supernatural ability to stay hopeful during emotional storms, and learned to survive on the emotional scraps that would never sustain others. You can love someone through their absolute worst abusive behavior because you're used to love being complicated, not logical, and costly.

Now your heart recognizes abuse as intimacy 🔥. Safe, consistent partners seem flat and boring—where's the challenge, the need to prove yourself, the familiar storm of contradictory emotions to tell you this relationship is for real? You find yourself addicted to the cycle: the cutting remark followed by the passionate apology, the emotional chaos followed by desperate reconnection. When someone treats you consistently well, your nervous system doesn't respond to it. Love is supposed to hurt, right? Love is supposed to require you to earn it through surviving the worst personal moments. A partner who doesn't put you through emotional hell feels like they must not really care—because pain, for you, has always been love's calling card 🃏