Survival Love & The Courage to Come Home to the Heart

There comes a moment in many healing journeys when a quiet but life-altering recognition begins to surface:

Some of what we have called love… was survival trying to protect us.

This realization can feel tender. Disorienting. Sometimes even heartbreaking. Because it asks us to gently examine bonds, patterns, and reactions that were never born from manipulation or weakness — but from brilliance. From the body’s fierce and intelligent commitment to keep the heart alive when love once felt uncertain, inconsistent, or painfully fragile.

When we begin to recognize survival love for what it is. We stop outsourcing our soul. We begin honoring love in its truest, most restorative form.

The Hidden Ways We Learn to Protect the Heart

Most people do not consciously decide to hide from love.

They adapt to protect it. Sometimes we hide our hearts in obvious ways — withdrawing, guarding, or avoiding intimacy altogether. But more often, we hide behind love itself.

We become the caretaker. The stabilizer. The one who loves deeply, gives endlessly, supports faithfully. From the outside, it looks like devotion. Inside, it can sometimes be protection. Protection from loss. Protection from abandonment. Protection from the unbearable vulnerability of fully inhabiting ourselves inside love. And sometimes, without realizing it, we tuck the most sensitive chambers of our hearts into quiet corners within us. Not forever. Just somewhere safe. Somewhere they will not be bruised again.

When Love and Survival Become Intertwined

The nervous system does not separate emotional pain from physical threat. To the body, the loss of connection, safety, or belonging can register as a life-threatening event.

When love has once included unpredictability, exclusion, betrayal, or emotional loss, the nervous system begins creating protective maps — survival pathways designed to ensure that level of pain is never experienced again.

Sometimes this wiring sounds like:

• If I share love, I might lose love.

• If I am not everything to someone, I might not matter.

• If their attention moves, I might be abandoned.

• If I trust fully, I might be hurt beyond repair.

They are protective responses built by younger parts of us that once carried more than they had the capacity to hold. The nervous system and heart remember painful relational pathways with extraordinary speed. They can activate stress responses in milliseconds — long before the thinking mind has time to evaluate whether we are actually safe. This is why a person can genuinely know they are loved… and still not feel safe in love.

The Physiology of a Contracted Heart

I have a saying that 'there is no birth without contractions'. Tolerating a contraction is a natural part of growth and expansion and even more so when it comes to matters of the heart. But when a heart contracts in gripping fear for extended periods, it slows the birthing process of growth, connection, and trust. While honoring the need to do this. The mind can narrow around a prewritten story and the body can begin to mobilize into urgent protective responses. The world can even feel catastrophic, overwhelming, or emotionally unsafe.

During these times and In these moments, the nervous system often chooses what feels like the safest option:

Mobilize away from perceived threat.

Control the environment.

Seek certainty.

Grip tightly to prevent loss.

These responses can appear as jealousy, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, emotional shutdown, or fear of sharing love. Yet underneath these reactions is rarely control or possessiveness.

More often, it is the echo of a younger heart saying:

"I cannot survive that level of pain again." and perhaps because it all feels far too vulnerable and vulnerability feels way to scary.

Why We Outsource the Soul

When the nervous system does not yet trust internal safety, it searches for it externally.

We begin to outsource:

Our worth. Our belonging. Our sense of stability. Our emotional regulation. Our identity inside relationships.

We begin measuring our safety by how securely love stays directed toward us.

But external love, no matter how beautiful or genuine, cannot sustainably carry the weight of internal safety. It was never meant to.

And when love becomes responsible for regulating survival stress, it can begin to feel fragile, pressured, and easily threatened. This is often where survival love begins to replace pure love. Not because love disappeared. But because survival stepped in to guard it fiercely.

The Moment Everything Changes

Healing does not begin when fear disappears. Healing begins when we recognize fear as a messenger instead of a decider or dictator. There is often a sacred turning point when someone pauses and asks:

Is this love… or is this survival trying to look like love?

That question is not meant to dismantle relationships. It is meant to liberate the heart.

Because when survival love is recognized, it no longer has to operate silently in the background, shaping reactions and fears without awareness. It can finally be met with empathy and empathy changes physiology.

Nervous System Restoration: Rebuilding the Inner Home

In Core NeuroCare and RISE to WISE work, healing is never about eliminating protective responses. It is about helping the nervous system update its understanding of safety. When survival stress is gently unwound, the heart no longer needs to contract as tightly to protect itself. The system begins learning:

I can feel deeply and remain safe. I can experience uncertainty and remain whole. I can share love without losing myself.

This process when it is repetitive, consistent and built on extraordinary self-compassion becomes a scaffolding. An internal structure while it is being rebuilt, nervous system restoration creates internal supports that allow regulation, trust, and emotional flexibility to strengthen over time. Eventually, the body begins trusting that it has choices in how it responds — rather than defaulting to the fastest survival pathway recognized through patterns and repeating cycles.

The Role of Resonance in Healing Love

True love is not simply emotional closeness. It carries with it a resonance that is the deeply felt and often unseen. It runs deeper than words and thoughts and promises it holds experiences of being emotionally and physiologically attuned to and 'feeling' met — by either ourselves and by others. It is the sense that our inner world can exist in relationship without needing to be edited, silenced, or protected through survival strategies. When resonance is possible, we do not lose ourselves in love. We tend to expand in many ways within it. Like feeling held while you experience a contraction. Both resonance and attunement require capacity to feel and decipher information from multiple layers of our being. If an emotion feels too intense or overwhelming, the nervous system will naturally shift out of resonance to prevent flooding. This is not rejection. It is protection. Learning to expand nervous system awareness and motional capacity allows resonance to grow. Between presence and resonance is where sustainable love lives.

When Healing Touches Relationships

As individuals rebuild internal safety, relationships often change in subtle but profound ways.

Couples sometimes learn to recognize dysregulation together — not as conflict, but as information. Some even create simple signals or code words like:

"I’m feeling dysregulated." , "I'm not making sense right now, let's come back in 5".

This creates space for each person to self-regulate rather than escalate survival responses together. If survival love meets survival love, both are stuck and outcomes will look and sound very different from a survival baseline versus a more coherent center.

Because when the nervous system is in survival mode, it will reinforce limiting beliefs and scan for evidence that confirms them. This is not intentional sabotage — it is protection attempting to stay consistent with past experiences. As stored survival stress releases, those beliefs lose their fuel source or one can at least have some hope of changing those fuel lines from adrenaline and cortisol to acetylcholine and clarity. New relational pathways begin to feel safer, steadier, and more trustworthy.

This is how love begins to evolve.

The Painful Truths That Lead Back to Hope

Healing sometimes requires acknowledging truths that can feel uncomfortable: Love has hurt many of us. Trust has been broken. Hearts have been asked to carry more than they were prepared or resourced to hold. But another truth lives alongside these experiences:

The heart just like the breath never stops waiting for reunion.

Even when protected. Even when quiet. Even when guarded by survival responses that appear rigid or intense. The heart is remarkably patient but it needs to feel held too.

The Love That Never Leaves

I have never given up on love.

Not the idealized version that promises perfection or certainty. But the deeply human, resilient, transparent quality of love that has the power to heal hearts and regulate nervous systems.

I have witnessed true love repair and rebuild so many hearts and lives. I have watched individuals rediscover themselves after believing they were too broken, too guarded, or too overwhelmed to feel safe to breathe again no less feel safely again. I have seen relationships reborn when survival stopped carrying responsibilities that love was meant to hold.

Pure love is not fragile.

It is strengthened when we stop outsourcing our safety and begin inhabiting ourselves and compassionate boundaries more fully.

Coming Home to Yourself

When we recognize survival love, something sacred becomes possible. We slowly stop abandoning ourselves to maintain connection. We slowly stop measuring our worth through another person’s attention. We slowly stop believing love must come at the cost of our own internal stability. Slowly, gently, we begin returning home to the heart. With appropriate boundaries to protect and with the survival version well known and understood. The living, breathing, feeling heart that feels how we hold it, so it to can guide us when it is supported by a regulated, resourced and nourished body and mind, spirit and soul .

The Quiet Invitation

I recently shared this with my subscribers that if there is a question worth carrying forward, it might be this:

If your heart could speak freely… what would it ask you now?

Perhaps it would ask for patience. Perhaps it would ask for gentleness. Perhaps it would simply ask you to stay — to remain present long enough for it to trust that it no longer has to guard itself alone.

Love is real.

Not because it never wounds.

But because it continues calling us back to ourselves, again and again, until we remember that the safest place love can live is within a heart that feels safe to exist inside its own body.

And when that happens, love stops feeling like something we must hold onto.

It becomes something we can finally stand within and trust more than anything else in the world.

FINAL NOTE

Coming Home to the Heart

Your heart matters.

Not just emotionally. Physiologically. Relationally. Spiritually.

When survival stress is integrated:

Love feels safer, self-trust strengthens and connection becomes sustainable

If you are ready to stop outsourcing your safety and begin inhabiting yourself more fully…

🌿 CoreNeuroCare & RISE to WISE work supports nervous system restoration, emotional integration, and heart-centered coherence.

You deserve to feel safe inside your own heart.