your type is not your type. it’s your childhood wound

Here's the uncomfortable truth. The person who's giving you butterflies might just be activating childhood wounds. Your system, nervous system, was trained in your childhood to recognize certain patterns. If your parent was emotionally unavailable, your brain learned that love is reaching for someone that is never fully there.

If your caregiver was unpredictable, then you learned that love feels like anxiety. And then you grow up, and you meet someone, and you really, really like them. They're really distant, or maybe they're hot and cold, and maybe they're playing with your emotions, but maybe they don't even know it. It's unconscious, and they're emotionally unavailable, and your brain goes, "Wow, I know this.

This is very familiar. This must be love." But it's not love, it's recognition, specifically pattern recognition. Your nervous system recognizing a pattern that it learned when you didn't really have the words to understand what it was.

And it feels intense because trauma always feels intense. Anxiety and excitement use almost the same combination of hormones. And we've been told that intensity means love. The person who feels calm, safe, predictable, we keep that person in friend zone.

Your brain will label them as boring, especially if your childhood was not boring, if it was more bumpy in many ways. Because you were never trained to live in a safe environment. You were trained to live in chaos, and chaos feels like home, even if home is not necessarily safe. And the most radical thing that you can do is choose a person that feels like peace instead of a tornado.

Because peace is not boring. Peace gives you the space and time to find more interesting things in your relationship and in your life, not necessarily fixing all problems. You just haven't felt peace yet. That's why you're not recognizing it.