🔥 Loyal to Your Abusers: When defending your abuser feels like love

How it started

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 constant switching between abuse and care has now burned a neural pathway into your nervous system where you feel loyalty toward the very people who harm you. What you needed was unconditional love, but what you got was affection tangled with manipulation—teaching you that your value lay in how much emotional pain you could endure.

How it shows up in relationships

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. Partners unconsciously select you for this exact skill—your ability to stay loyal no matter how they treat you becomes what they need from you, not your authentic self.

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. You're drawn to partners you chose not to be like as a child—those who can put themselves first without guilt, slam doors when they are being barely mistreated, and demand respect without earning it. As long as they do it to others and not you, that's fine by you.

Sex & Intimacy

Your body learned that arousal and danger go hand in hand. Physical intimacy feels most electric when preceded by emotional chaos—the reconciliation sex after a fight, the desperate connection after threatened abandonment. Gentle, consistent touch from a kind partner fails to activate your sexual response because your nervous system associates real passion with intensity, not safety. You may find yourself creating conflict just to feel that familiar spike of adrenaline that makes sex feel "real" again.

Core Pattern

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 🃏. Part of you knows this isn't love, but you still end up attracting partners who need you for your high tolerance of emotional abuse you've developed as a child.