what your nervous system mistakes for love

on dating, survival, and finally coming home to yourself

In bed – The Kiss | Henri Toulouse Lautrec 1892

i’ve been writing about the healing journey for a while now.

because i am still on it, and because, well, are we ever not?

but in all seriousness, as i continue to do so, i feel there’s something most of us are still living inside and learning how to name out loud.

and that is what it’s actually like to try to love someone else, and also, maybe most importantly, how to love yourself when you are a survivor of anything.

it’s been almost four years since finn died. and four years since i lost my anchor.

the one romantic relationship in my life where someone loved me truly and completely without an agenda.

if you follow my work you know that we met at the dog park one evening and i still believe it was a destiny encounter. his voice sounded like home.

and then, the world being the sick place it is, eight years later he got cancer and died. and i have spent the past four years figuring out how to be alive without him.

and as many of you know from reading my work, recently i began to feel ready to try again. i thought that maybe this time i was finally ready to dip my toes back in.

but here’s what i’ve come to understand about the nervous system of a survivor.

when you grow up in an environment where chaos was the norm, where being unseen, loved in unpredictable ways, emotionally abandoned, or outright harmed was just another day in the life, your internal compass doesn’t get calibrated toward safety.

instead it gets calibrated toward what’s familiar.

and familiar, for a lot of us, feels like danger and self abandonment.

i have come to think of it like this:

a compass is supposed to point north. it’s supposed to point toward your higher self, your true signal, your soul’s actual direction.

but if the compass was broken early, if the first people who were supposed to love you were also the ones who taught you what love feels like, and it’s full of pain, then that compass doesn’t point north. it gets bent out of shape.

and for survivors of early trauma, especially sexual abuse, this is even more literal.

sexuality gets activated young, in ways that weren’t chosen.

so later, when that same charge shows up in an adult relationship, it doesn’t feel like a red flag.

it feels like everything you have ever associated with being loved and nurtured.

because your survival brain got wired with both intertwined.

so the body recognizes it before the mind can catch up.

oh, i know this. this is how love and attention has always presented itself.

i know this script, your body says.

and then you wonder why you keep ending up in the same situations, with the same wound wearing a different face, again and again and again.

this is where ayahuasca comes in, because it changed something in me i couldn’t reach from therapy or going in through the mind alone.

if you’ve seen avatar, you know the mother tree. she is this vast, ancient intelligence that holds the memory of everything.

the mother tree holds every ancestor, every wound, every truth that was ever lived. that’s what ayahuasca is for me.

when you plug into her, you don’t just learn something new, you remember what was always already there.

and then you purge it.

because ayahuasca is first and foremost a purgative.

and that’s not a side effect, it’s the point.

there is something almost miraculous that happens when you are on all fours throwing up in the dark.

you are not just eliminating physically, you are regurgitating what was never yours to carry. the false beliefs, the inherited pain, the stories that got lodged in your body before you were old enough to question them.

sometimes the purge comes as yawns, sometimes as tears, sometimes it comes as something that moves through you so violently you wonder how you’re still existing.

but it always comes, for you cannot drink this medicine and stay the same.

she won’t let you.

and in a place like where i went, you don’t do it alone. you are supported by doctors and nurses and countless employees. the days are filled with workshops and speakers who help you follow the threads of what the medicine is showing you.

you learn to ask: where did this come from? when did i first start feeling this way? whose is this really? who have i become by carrying it?

and then the night comes and the medicine takes you deeper than any question you could have thought to ask yourself.

that’s what ayahuasca did for me. and this was my second time there.

the first time i was drawn there through what i can only describe as an inner nudge. i had become interested in sacred geometry and i was following a rabbit hole online, when i clicked a link, and suddenly i was reading about this place.

that’s how spirit tends to work. it is always dropping breadcrumbs, like hansel and gretel finding their way home.

what resurfaced, shortly after i came home the first time, was a memory i had buried so completely i didn’t know it was there. it is what the medical community calls dissociative amnesia. and what returned, in clear, somatic detail, was that i was also a child survivor of sexual abuse.

i have written much on this before now. about how i sat with it for a long time before i could tell my therapist, my closest people, and eventually begin to write about it here. how over time more things arose, and not only for me. how they shook our world like a 10 on the richter scale, breaking my family apart and in doing so, ultimately saved me and my children.

what i can say with certainty now, is that the medicine has given me the skill of asking within.

of getting quiet and saying: why are you showing this to me?

of learning to meet what was living underneath the activation instead of outrunning, dissociating, numbing, distracting, or burying it.

i do it now whenever i feel flooded, overwhelmed, or deregulated and it has been everything.

but back to dating as a survivor.

i have written about elements of this elsewhere, and still i am unpacking it.

the first handful of situations, all online, nothing in person, turned out to be exactly the same lifelong pattern repeating.

with my bent compass i kept finding people who were unavailable, chaotic, who swooped in fast, because dopamine and adrenaline don’t distinguish between pleasure and fear. they just flood the system all the same.

and when the two get tangled together early enough, that cocktail starts to feel exactly like desire, like chemistry, like the real thing.

there was a scary stalker situation, genuinely scary, and i almost filed a restraining order. it wouldn’t have been my first, as many of you know my first husband went to prison for attacking me.

and now i can see exactly how i always got there: love bombing in the beginning, words that matched the mirror i’d always been looking for, and my body screaming danger danger danger while my mind was busy believing the story i was being told.

because i was trained to trust the words over what my body knew.

to trust the mask over authenticity.

that’s how survival wiring works. you learn to read the room, not your own internal signal.

i put my intuition to sleep so i could survive my childhood and then i got addicted to the hormones that flooded in this constant state of arousal.

and then there was the 22-year-old i dated recently, and i’ve written about him as well.

he was genuinely sweet, but with an age gap of 48 and 22, and the push-pull of it, and him going m.i.a. for a day or more at a time, and the way my whole system would crash.

eventually i began to understand exactly what was happening.

when he would disappear into silence, my body went straight to finn.

to finn in his office during the year-long battle with cancer before he died.

the illness building a wall around him, his mind wanting to protect me from the weight of his own dying.

he didn’t do it to hurt me, but it hurt like abandonment every time.

it felt like being burned alive.

the pain of losing your true love and being able to do nothing about it. not even to comfort him.

because the trigger isn’t about the person in front of you. it’s about the one behind them.

then right after the 22-year-old, i went straight for another who was cut from the same trauma cloth.

because i kept thinking, maybe this one, this time, maybe he was the answer.

he was a fellow survivor, another writer here, another on the healing journey, someone who said all the right things about growth and love and doing the work.

note to reader and to self: we don’t do online dating in any form anymore.

especially not on substack, and not anywhere, really. it’s just too much. and i’m not here to date. i’m here to write and heal and be witnessed and to witness.

it’s just that until i had healed the wound, i couldn’t help myself.

and so the first night of ceremony in costa rica, the medicine showed me the difference between someone who has done the work and someone who has only learned the language of it.

in this case i was shown just how much he was performing. but the thing is, he wouldn’t even know he was doing it. and if i hadn’t unlocked my subconscious that could finally feel what was underneath all of it, i wouldn’t have known either.

so when i ended it in a text the next morning, his first response was to tell me he deserved a conversation.

and normally i would have been the first to say, yes, of course you do.

because conversations are the natural thing that two emotionally responsible humans do right?

but this time i listened inward. and my whole soul said,

no. the fuck. you don’t.

because a conversation requires two people who are actually there.

and the person i had spent eight months building what i thought was a friendship with, and then a month inside something that felt like love, turns out that person was following their own wounded script. and only throwing it all up all night long during ceremony showed me what was under the mask.

because underneath all the writing and speaking of healing and growth and doing the work, two broken nervous systems were feeding off each other.

and the currency was sexual energy.

but how do you tell someone who is too fragmented to hear it that they were performing?

that you were too, in your own way?

that neither of you was really there?

you don’t. you just go.

because here’s what nobody talks about.

so many of us are swimming in the soup of sexual energy, calling it connection, calling it chemistry, calling it finally feeling something.

and it moves through us like a virus.

it feels like aliveness. it feels like the real thing.

and for those of us whose nervous systems were hijacked early, whose sexuality was activated before we could consent to it, that soup is the most familiar water in the world.

we don’t even notice we’re drowning in it.

that’s how unconscious patterns operate. and that’s how i could move without even a pause straight onto a new connection, highly charged from the beginning, moving fast to whatsapp, to sexting, to phone sex, to all of it.

right to another person fluent in the language of recovery.

my life was a broken record and i couldn’t even hear it playing.

because when a nervous system hasn’t healed yet, it doesn’t rest. it seeks and it finds the next version of the same thing and calls it love.

until the medicine shows you the whole architecture in one night.

and you finally go deep enough, purge enough, heal enough to see it clearly for the first time.

and you go. no. the fuck. you don’t.

he was an admitted sex addict who said he had healed. and i truly believe that he believed that for himself. but what i felt, in the deep quiet of that first ceremony, was the same pattern i had known since childhood. unhealed sexual wounding masquerading as care.

those who had been tasked to protect me had warped and twisted the most sacred thing, saying one thing and doing another.

and so my compass had kept pulling me back to that same archetype, again and again and again.

finn was the only one who broke the pattern. he was whole and pure and good in a way i hadn’t known before and haven’t found since.

why do the good die young?

until recently i used to ask this like it was a real question.

but now i know it was never the right question.

finn didn’t choose cancer, but his death forced me inward.

and what surfaced during my recent pilgrimage into the mother and father wounds that formed me, is that finn died and in doing so he saved us.

a better question would actually be: what is living inside us that we must have tremendous courage to see once we have been broken open?

finn’s death cracked me open to the realization that my nervous system was still running the old codes.

still dressed in the old wounds, wearing them like a well worn and deeply familiar coat, still pulling in the same frequency because that was the only frequency it knew.

yet by gifting myself this retreat, i was finally ready to go to the root.

and during one of the ceremonies i chose to work on the fear that had been living inside me as long as i could remember.

not fear in the abstract. but the actual physical fear that had lived in my belly my whole life. the tangled knots of anxiety i had always carried, always managed, always learned to function around.

as i lay there feeling sick, i let it come to the surface. i stopped trying to think my way through it. and i let it rush through my whole body.

and then i threw it up. and i cried and i cried.

and in the calm that followed i had a vision.

my belly was the ocean. i dove down to the bottom of it, and at the bottom there was a giant oyster, sitting among everything else that had been littered there over the course of a lifetime.

inside that oyster was a pearl. so i dove down and i grabbed it, and swam back up to the surface.

that is what reclamation can look like.

i went into the fear instead of away from it, and on the other side was something that had always been mine.

that’s what i mean when i say the mother tree.

whether it’s plant medicine, or meditation, or deep somatic therapy, or even a deeply healing conversation with the right person at the right moment, when you go to the root, something in the nervous system finally lets go.

and when this happens, you don’t just think differently, you come back different.

the old wiring that kept recreating the same chaos, pulling in the same wound wearing a different face, it starts to unravel.

that’s not metaphor. that’s what happened to me.

and what i found on the other side wasn’t a new set of practices.

it wasn’t a morning routine or a framework or a list of green flags to look for in a partner.

it was a question i had never honestly asked myself.

what if the longing was never about another person at all?

i had spent most of my life feeling that same damn ache.

the same reaching.

that same sense that something essential was missing.

that if i could just find the right person, the safe one, the whole one, i would finally feel complete.

i called it loneliness. i called it the search for love.

i built entire chapters of my life around the hope that someone would arrive and make the missing thing stop missing.

what every tradition has always been trying to say, what rumi was writing toward in every single poem, what the medicine shows you when you finally stop running, is that the love you have been searching for outside yourself is a signal. it is your own soul, calling you home.

the soulmate was never out there.

i searched for him in every person who felt like home because home was the first place i learned to disappear. but he was never outside. he was the part of me that had been waiting to come home to herself all along.

and when finn came and showed me what unconditional love can feel like, and then died, it was in the dying and afterwards that he came through holding a mirror.

your next great love is yourself, he said.

i thought he was being poetic.

he was being literal.

and i am finally now, after all of this, beginning to understand what that actually means. not as a concept, not as something to put on a vision board, but as a lived, cellular, hard won truth. one i threw up countless times across four ceremonies at a licensed medical retreat center in costa rica to finally embody.

i am the one i have been waiting for.

and every person, every connection, every love that finds me from here, will be an addition to that. not a replacement for it. not a rescue from it.

just more love, flowing toward someone who finally knows she deserves it.

i love you guys so much. thank you for being in this with me.

---

i am a writer, speaker, and musician devoted to healing and embodiment. i share essays, poetry, and original music through venus consciousness. i’d love to walk this path with you. 💞