It is Safe to Be Loved Without Expectations

Sunshine Zombiegirl
Hello, Love
Published in
2 min readDec 4, 2022

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Photo by Josue Escoto on Unsplash

Those who grew up with not-so-ideal family lives, trauma, or chaos never felt safe being themselves.

Even as adults, we’ve struggled to become the people we are. It’s all too easy to hide behind our rote behaviors. The ones we used to cope with as children but don’t help us fit in as adults anymore.

We feel desperate, alone, and unloved as our inner children struggle to push outside the bonds that childhood shoved us into. It’s an internal war, a bout of epic proportions. How to be an adult with healthy boundaries, empathy, and emotional intelligence when we see harm behind every corner. Disregulated nervous systems are ready to jump into anxiety and distress despite relative calm.

And how our inner subconscious joys in stirring up drama, the familiar tingle of conflict, both terrifies us and makes us feel utterly comfortable in our skins. Even as we feel in our bones, we can’t take one more minute of the bad. We know how unsustainable it is to live in spaces of fear, guilt, and shame.

We do it, regardless, because it’s what we know, right? It’s easy to slip into the skin of someone hurt. We victimize ourselves repeatedly as we flounder to deal with the relationship rules of people who have no idea what it is to have an unreliable primary caregiver. Or worse, we end up in a relationship with…

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