Why you’re drawn to those who hurt you

The ultimate mirror for codependents

Why does love feel like a battle?

Why do you keep holding on to someone who wounds you over and over again?

In this blog, you’ll discover why your nervous system has come to accept unsafe love as normal, and how your healing begins by coming home to yourself.

Why codependents confuse love with survival

For many codependents, love feels like something you have to earn. Love means working hard, adapting, pleasing, stretching your boundaries and hoping the other person will finally see you. But where does that belief come from?

The root lies in childhood.

You learned that love wasn’t a given, but something you had to earn by:

• Setting your feelings aside for the emotions of your parents or caregivers

• Constantly scanning the atmosphere to prevent escalation

• Ignoring your own needs because they were “too much”

Those early experiences programmed your nervous system.

Love and safety became linked to hyper vigilance, adapting, and putting the other person first.

Why healthy love feels unfamiliar and even unsafe

If you grew up learning that love always came with tension, unpredictability, or conditions, then calmness in adult relationships can feel… boring. Even frightening.

Your nervous system doesn’t recognise it as love.

It only knows the familiar pattern:

• Push and pull

• Fear of rejection

• The constant search for reassurance

That pattern feels safe simply because it’s familiar.

Healthy, stable love feels strange, distant, or even scary. Not because it’s wrong, but because your system isn’t used to it.

As a child, your nervous system adapted quickly to insecurity.

It learned: “This is what love feels like.”

That imprint remains active into adulthood. That is why safety feels unfamiliar, your body doesn’t trust it.

The codependent and the narcissist, the ultimate mirror

Codependents and narcissists find each other effortlessly.

They are opposites that fit perfectly into each other’s wounds.

• The codependent gives, cares, and adapts in the hope of finally being seen

• The narcissist takes, controls, and manipulates from a fear of being hurt

The narcissist mirrors back the codependent’s deepest fear:

That your worth exists only in what you do, give, or achieve.

And the codependent mirrors back the emptiness the narcissist never dares to face:

That real love doesn’t need control.

Together, they create a destructive dance that feels familiar, but is anything but love.

Love does not require self-sacrifice.

Love asks that you choose yourself, even when no one else does.

The core of healing, return to the relationship with yourself

Codependency is not about the narcissist.

It’s about the part of you that once abandoned yourself in the hope of receiving love.

True healing doesn’t start with learning to set boundaries for others.

It starts with learning to feel boundaries within yourself.

• Feeling where you once abandoned yourself

• Feeling how safe it can be within yourself, without external validation

• Feeling that your worth does not depend on how much you give

Only when you restore that relationship with yourself does everything change.

The push–pull between giving and taking, hope and rejection, becomes an emotional addiction.

Not love, but a cycle of longing and survival.

Why standard self-love workshops don’t work

Self-love is not a checklist. Self-love is never abandoning yourself again.

Many codependents believe they’re working on self-love, but in reality they keep:

• Taking yet another course

• Finding yet another therapist

• Analysing and understanding even more

Why? Because slowing down feels like failure.

Because your nervous system is programmed to find safety in doing, not in being.

Real self-love begins with:

• Looking at yourself in the mirror without judgement

• Feeling your own sadness without running away

• Acknowledging your own needs without guilt or shame

That’s the foundation on which healthy relationships are built – relationships where you no longer have to lose yourself.

You are not broken – you are programmed (and you can rewrite it)

You are not broken, you were trained to confuse love with survival.

But you can let go of that conditioning. You no longer have to earn love. You can come back to yourself and choose connections that nourish, not burn.

True self-love does not require perfection.

It asks for presence, every time you’re about to disappear from yourself.

And that is the true mirror.

Love begins the moment you stop abandoning yourself.

If you’d like to learn how to restore the relationship with yourself and break your patterns, discover how my 16-week Codependency Recovery Programme can help you finally come home to yourself.