Many of us grow up believing that once we find a healthy relationship, things will finally settle and our worries and anxieties will lessen. Our hypervigilance will ease as we allow ourselves to soften into love. Sometimes this does happen. But just as often, love does something else entirely. It can stir and unsettle us. It can bring us face-to-face with reactions we thought we’d outgrown.
You might find yourself feeling unexpectedly anxious when your partner pulls away for an evening. Or overwhelmed by conflict that seems minor on the surface. Or flooded with emotion when intimacy deepens rather than relieved by it. These moments can lead to shame or confusion. If this relationship is safe, why does my body feel like it’s under threat?
What’s important to understand is that healthy relationships don’t bypass our past. They bring us into closer contact with it.
Attachment Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
Attachment theory offers a powerful explanation for why love can sometimes feel so difficult and emotionally overwhelming. From the earliest moments of life, our nervous system learned what closeness meant through our interactions and experiences with caregivers. It learned whether connection was reliable, inconsistent, overwhelming, or absent. These early experiences shaped not just our beliefs about relationships, but the way our bodies respond to them.
John Bowlby described attachment as a survival system. We are wired to seek closeness because, at one time, closeness kept us alive. When that closeness felt safe enough, the nervous system learned to relax. When it didn’t, the system adapted by becoming hypervigilant, fiercely independent, or emotionally guarded.
These adaptations don’t disappear simply because we grow up or become self-aware. They live on as unconscious patterns of emotions, reactions and impulses. So when a partner matters to us and when we allow ourselves to care deeply, the attachment system is triggered. It scans, anticipates and reacts, not because something is wrong, but because something has importance.
Trauma and the Echoes of the Past
Trauma adds another layer to this experience. Trauma is often misunderstood as something that only happens during extreme events. But trauma also forms when a child’s emotional world is repeatedly unmet or misunderstood. It can happen when feelings are too big to be held alone, or when safety depends on staying quiet, pleasing others, or staying alert.
As Bessel van der Kolk writes, trauma is not just what happened to us but is what happens inside us when there is no one to help us process what’s happening. These experiences shape the nervous system. They teach the body how to prepare for threat, even in the absence of any “real” danger.
This is why relationship triggers can feel so disproportionate to reality.
The Nervous System Is Always Listening
Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory helps us understand why these reactions happen so quickly and so automatically. Our nervous system is constantly assessing the world for cues of safety or danger. This process happens below conscious awareness. Before we have time to think, the body has already decided whether to open or protect.
In relationships, where vulnerability and dependence are present, this system is particularly sensitive. A slight shift in tone, a delayed response, or a look of frustration can register as a threat if the nervous system has learned that closeness is risky. The resulting reaction might look like anxiety, anger, shutdown, or the urge to pull away.
These responses are not signs of failure. They are signs of a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.
Why Healthy Relationships Can Feel the Hardest
There is a particular irony in healing through relationships. The safer and more consistent a relationship becomes, the more room there is for unhealed material to surface. When the nervous system senses the possibility of a safe, stable and real connection, it also senses the risk of real loss.
Healthy relationships often slow us down enough to feel what we couldn’t feel before. They offer enough safety for old grief, fear, and longing to emerge. This can make it seem as though the relationship itself is the problem, when in fact it may be the context in which healing becomes possible.
Regulation as a Pathway to Choice
Healing begins not with fixing our reactions, but with learning how to be with them. Nervous system regulation is about creating enough internal safety to stay present with what arises. When we can notice the tightening in the chest or the rush of heat without immediately acting on it, we interrupt the old, unhelpful survival pattern.
This doesn’t require perfection or constant calm. It requires curiosity. A willingness to pause. A recognition that the body is communicating something meaningful. Over time, practices that support regulation help the nervous system learn that intensity can pass without crisis unfolding.
Importantly, regulation is not meant to happen in isolation. Humans are relational beings. We regulate through connection as much as we do through individual practices. Being met with empathy, steadiness, and responsiveness helps the nervous system recalibrate its expectations of closeness.
Boundaries as Acts of Care
In this context, boundaries become essential. Not as rigid defences, but as ways of creating clarity and safety. Boundaries help us stay connected without becoming overwhelmed. They allow us to honour our nervous system’s limits while remaining in relationship to those we love and care about.
When boundaries are named with honesty and care, they reduce reactivity rather than increase it. They make room for repair instead of rupture. Relational therapist Terrence Real speaks about the importance of taking responsibility for our internal experience without blaming our partner for it. Boundaries help us do exactly that.
Love as a Context for Repair
Attachment is not completely fixed. Research shows that repeated experiences of safety, repair, and responsiveness can shift even long-standing patterns. Secure attachment is not the absence of conflict or triggers, but the growing trust that moments of disconnection can be repaired.
Each time a relationship survives a misunderstanding, each time a need is expressed and met with care, the nervous system updates its story. Slowly, it learns that closeness does not inevitably lead to harm. That emotions can move through without destroying connection.
This is not quick work. It unfolds over time, through repetition rather than insight alone. And often, it is supported by therapy or guided relational spaces where these patterns can be explored with compassion.
Letting Love Be What Heals
Being triggered by love does not mean that love is unsafe. It often means that love is reaching something tender that has been waiting for a long time to be seen and understood. Healthy relationships don’t erase our wounds, but they can offer the conditions in which those wounds can learn to heal.
When we approach our reactions with curiosity instead of shame, when we learn to regulate rather than suppress, and when we set boundaries that support connection rather than distance, love becomes more than a source of comfort. It becomes a space for integration. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s real.
References
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and Loss: Volume 1: Attachment. Basic Books.https://ia800205.us.archive.org/5/items/attachmentlossvo00john/attachmentlossvo00john.pdf
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment. Lawrence Erlbaum. https://mindsplain.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Ainsworth-Patterns-of-Attachment.pdf
van der Kolk, B. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. https://ia601604.us.archive.org/35/items/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-PDF.pdf
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3490536/
Real, T. (2002). How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women. Scribner. https://cdn.bookey.app/files/pdf/book/en/how-can-i-get-through-to-you-.pdf
