NO PLAYBOOK FOR LOVE

Growing up, you never knew which version of your parent you'd get—their moods, rules, and availability changed without warning or explanation 🎭. Some days you were cherished and celebrated, others you were ignored or even punished for the exact same behavior. Love felt like a lottery where the rules kept changing, making it impossible to develop any reliable strategy for connection. This disrupted attunement with your caregivers created a painful contradiction: the very people you needed for safety and love were also sources of distress, confusion and fear.

This inconsistency taught your nervous system that relationships don't follow predictable patterns—there's no playbook that actually works 📖. You developed fragments of different strategies: sometimes nagging and asking for things worked, other times staying out of sight, invisible and self-reliant was safer, and occasionally dramatic tantrums got your caregivers' attention. But none of these approaches worked consistently, leaving you feeling like you're always improvising in relationships, never quite sure what approach might succeed.

In romantic relationships, this translates to swinging between different strategies when you start to feel disconnected 🔀. You might be accommodating and intensely affectionate during one crisis and withdrawn and sullen during the next, at times desperately seeking closeness while at other times pushing your partner away. The only partners who feel steady and familiar are the chaotic and unpredictable ones—because unpredictability became your normal when you were young. You attract them not because you enjoy chaos, but because people who are calm feel eerie and unfamiliar, like the other shoe is about to drop 👟.

Your adaptability and emotional range are remarkable strengths—you can read situations quickly and adjust your approach when needed ⚡. However, this same flexibility can be anxiety provoking because you never feel steady on your feet to know where you stand and what you want when relationship problems arise. The tragedy is having inherited no reliable map for love when you were young, you are now navigating relationships without a GPS📍, desperately wanting just to find someone where you can finally stop strategizing and start simply being.