The intense love you feel with a narcissist or when you are in a trauma bond, isn’t actually love. It’s infatuation. It’s addiction. And it is because you are revisiting/reenacting something you went through in childhood from your primary care giver/s.
Subconsciously, we keep revisiting what we know, what is familiar. No matter how painful that may have been, it feels like “home”. It feels comfortable. I have worked with so many survivors who describe the relationship as initially feeling like it was ‘meant to be’; they’d found their ‘soulmate’; it felt like I had always known him/her; it was fate!
All those triggers that the narcissist/emotional abuser leads you to feel? Examine what your childhood felt like. Frustration, abandonment, occasional love, fear, feeling unworthy, stress, anxiety, unmet needs, hostility? When the narcissist causes these triggers, you feel them deeply because that is what you were taught love feels like.
Real genuine love does not feel like rejection, anxiety and anguish.
Real, genuine love feels calm, peaceful, nurturing and affectionate. But you weren’t taught that in your early years, so you respond to cruelty and misinterpret it as love. It stirs something deep in you. And anything less feels boring, if you are not yet healed. Peace feels like boredom.
Explore your past. Once you make the connection, you can start unraveling this mess.
When you begin to recognise what your childhood was like, you can start seeing your triggers for what they are. They are not love. Consider reading about reparenting. Attachment Styles. It is very likely that you have Anxious Attachment Style. Codependency.
Love is kind. Anything else is simply not love.
Andrea x