Imagine meeting someone for the first time, someone intriguing. You find yourself interested in them, experiencing a sudden case of nerves that you write off as butterflies.
You can’t stop thinking about them.
You want to be around them all the time, and they leave just enough breadcrumbs to keep you coming back.
You convince yourself that this person is at least better for you than those in your past.
You continue to ignore the signs, embracing the breadcrumbs, finding comfort in the chaos, again telling yourself you’ve been through worse with people.
You ask yourself:
If it’s really that bad, why would I still want to be around them?
Why can’t I stay away or stop thinking about them?
Why do I still get butterflies?
Something I’ve learned and reflected on is that anyone who has ever excited my nervous system hasn’t been good for me. And my behavior ended up not being all that good either.
These relationships don’t bring out the best in me, and the people always end up not being the best people either.
Confusing excitemtent with warnings of our nervous system
There is a saying that people who grew up in chaos and traumatic environments are addicted to the familiar or choose the familiar due to habitual exposure over time.
We become desensitized because it’s our normal. Anything else feels weirdly out of place in our world.
We often think excitement of the nervous system means sparks and passion, and butterflies. We mistake the blaring red alarms for signs that it’s meant to be, instead of warnings.
We haven’t yet learned and trusted that our body holds score and can recognize things before our brain can comprehend what’s going on.
I’ve found a pattern in my own life where the boring relationships, friendships, and conversations with people that don’t excite my nervous system end up being the best ones, the healthier ones.
For example, there is no sudden rush of nerves; I am happy to have met them, but the excitement is subtle.
When I am around them, I don’t feel my nervous system going off, and there are no explosive fireworks or passion to the point that my nervous system is too excited to settle down.
It has taken me a while to process this, to unravel this, because I often thought it just meant that the other shoe was going to drop, that it might even be worse because this was a different environment I didn’t know when really it was the one I had been wanting.
The unknown can be scary for someone of us
The unknown is often a scary place for me because growing up my environment was often volatile and unpredictable, so when things are quiet and settled, I find my nervous system activated, waiting for the loud explosion that is someone’s temperament or violent behavior.
This is why often when we find ourselves in relationships where the other person seems “perfect” in our eyes, we find ourselves worrying, stressing, causing chaos because we are prepared for the loud explosion; we want to get it over with.
And if we have healed past that stage, we often struggle with not becoming bored because our bodies have become addicted to the adrenaline rush of chaos; because when there is none, we feel like we aren’t living our lives.
Breaking the addiction of chaos and embracing peace
I once told someone that I was worried about hurting someone; it’s why I have put off dating.
This person looked at me, with an expression of shock.
“You, you would never! Why do you think that?”
I told them because I worry about waking up after five years and realizing I don’t want to be in a relationship with that person, even though everything is fine, they haven’t done anything wrong.
They looked at me and said, “I listen to an artist, and he said that sometimes you are going to wake up and feel like that, that is where you need to find a way to fall back in love with that person again.” I thought that was a sage response, but I also sat and thought about it deeper.
It hit me that this was also a reaction from the nervous system in hindsight.
If I end up with someone and the relationship is fine, and we go on about our lives, building a life together, absent of chaos, that could be why I am worried I might fall out of the relationship because my nervous system has been addicted to the adrenaline of chaos.
And what I mean by addicted, the feelings that come with survival, stress, chaos, and most of all, trauma, have become normalized, a way to live, and so when things settle down, I feel like I’m not living life the right way…
Like if there isn’t a constant search for something…
If there isn’t constant movement…
Then something might be wrong.
So having that reflection has made me realize our nervous system holds onto familiar patterns in the areas we are unaware of because we never thought to question them.
Because survival mode has become so ingrained in our everyday life that we don’t always know what normal is or what healthy is for us.
This is why our nervous system is a step ahead.
What we aren’t aware of is that our nervous system is very sensitive like a car alarm so is easy to misinterpret the alarms.
With that said, learning how to listen to the different sensations can be the difference between entering another bad relationship, finding ourselves in a rut with someone, or entering a healthy relationship and aligning with what is actually right for us even when things settle into what we might interpret as boredom with others.
The Broke College Student 
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