The Uncover YOU podcast

Ep 190: Should Love Feel Safe? (And Is Attraction Bad..?)

• Eva Beronius • Season 3 • Episode 190

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There’s a lot of dating advice out there saying the “right” love should feel calm, steady, and like home. No butterflies. No activation. No intensity. Just safety.

But love is not meant to keep you comfortable. Love is disruptive. It opens the rooms inside of you that haven’t been met yet. It asks you to expand, to feel more, to grow. Nervous system regulation isn’t the end goal. It’s the ground you stand on, so you have the capacity to actually live, feel, and love fully.

In this episode, we look at attraction as a guide rather than a problem. We debunk the idea that if you feel activated, you must be trauma-bonding or doing something wrong. There is wisdom in what draws you toward someone. The invitation is to learn how to work with it.

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Eva:

Welcome back to the Uncover You podcast today from what I now call the Pussy Throne studio. If you follow me on Instagram or if you've been on my webinars or if you're in my programs, of course, you see me like teaching or sharing from this beautiful wooden chair that is cushioned with this like pink velvet fabric. And I've just realized that if I turn around and kind of like face the back of that big, it's a huge chairs, chair, and it's kind of like rounded the whole seat and it goes up over my head. And if I turn around and I face inward and I bring my microphone with me in there, it has a really nice like isolation for the sound. So the Uncover You podcast is coming to you from the Pussy Throne studio today. And it really is comfortable in here. So today I have a very exciting topic because I I love this topic. I'm very passionate about it, and I love bringing clarity and some nuance to this. Because a lot of the conversation out there on social media and around relationship and dating and choosing your partner has recently been gravitating a lot towards safety. And that the person that you choose, that it should feel like home, that it should feel like, ah, just like no butterflies really. It shouldn't make your nervous system activated. It just should feel safe and like home. And you should be seen and valued and like all these things. So I want to raise the question today. Should love feel like home? Should love feel safe? And no matter what it is for you, or maybe what you decide is a good compass for you right now after this episode, it's all good. But I want to bring in some nuance to this conversation because it tends to get very polarized. It's one or the other, right? And I understand where these advice are coming from. If we tend to what's popularly called trauma bond with people, and like our wounds are finding each other, but we don't have the tools, the capacity, or the willingness to meet with that and to heal from there, yes, we will get pulled into this very activating and very unsafe spiral again and again. And if we're just digging a deeper hole where we keep believing the story around that wound, where we keep reinforcing it, yeah, then is not doing any good. But if we have the capacity and the skills to use that as our dojo and move through that situation, it doesn't mean that we end up choosing that person to be with, but it might be a lesson in there for us, or there's always a lesson and an opportunity for growth. Sometimes that is walking away, and sometimes that is like moving through all the uncomfortable emotions that are coming up around it. And I want to start with saying it's completely up to you, and there's nothing wrong with either of those choices. Am I staying, am I leaving, am I staying a little longer but not committing? Am I talking about it? Am I being open with what I'm feeling? Am I keeping it to myself? Like, remember, there's no right or wrong. There are no rules. You get to move through your life and your relationships the way that you want to. And it doesn't matter if that is something that's confronting for someone else or something that feels scary or not loving for them. Like as long as it's coming from love from you and for you, it will include them and others as well. So we can always walk away with kindness, right? Or we can stand up for what we want with kindness. That doesn't need to be harsh, that doesn't need to be hard and rejecting of someone else or what they want. What we all want gets to be acknowledged and included, and we still need to move in a direction that honors our wantings and our desires and what we need right now. So that's just a little suggestion or preface for now of what if you threw out all the rules that you're hearing and that you've that you have like condition programmed into you about how you should be showing up and just start navigating relationships and dating from a way that makes you feel proud of how you're showing up. So this topic should love feel safe? Should love feel like home? Let's break this down. So in this new trend or direction where a lot of us are talking about nervous system regulation and feeling safe and yeah, feeling moving from unsafety to safety, I see a lot of misconceptions, and it makes sense, right? Because this is how human, the evolution of human consciousness goes. We've been doing one thing, and then our awareness opens up to this other room inside of us, and we're like, huh. I've been in an activated nervous system, I've been feeling unsafe. And I'm like, even these words addicted to safety or unsafety and drama. I wouldn't use those words, but let's save that for a little later. But then we start to realize I can make myself safe. I can start to regulate my nervous system, and that's how it should feel like. That should be my baseline. And then the pendulum kind of swings, and we say, that's the right thing to be, that's the right thing to experience. But I want to say that we don't do nervous system regulation to always feel safe. We do nervous system regulation so that we can live, so that we can be fully alive. Meaning that we have greater capacity to cope with whatever's being thrown at us or what's showing up in our life, or when there's opportunity for growth and evolution inside of us and for our soul to take a journey that our mind didn't expect, that we have the capacity to do that. Because if we're constantly in a survival response, we don't have a lot of agency, we don't have a lot of free will, we don't have a lot of choice. Instead, we're again and again being pulled into an automated reaction. However, like doing nervous system regulation is just the first step of now creating movement between the different states of your nervous system. And I want you to be able to play all the notes on your instrument. And the way you gain that freedom is to be able to go into activated state and also regulate out of it or come out of it and shift out of it. And what does that take? It's not just nervous system regulation, right? It's it's to get to the bottom of your wounds, to get to the core of them and start looking at what made the situation feel so unsafe and to reclaim it. It's not about saying, hey, now everyone else needs to show up in a way that feels safe to me. This is what I call the island of safety. The island of safety is an actual physical platform in the middle of the plaza of hell in Teotihuacan, where I take people on power journeys to. That island of safety is the symbol for everything that the systems and the protection mechanisms and the structures and our little comfort zone that we start building around our wound. Like I don't want that wound to be touched, so therefore, people need to show up this way. You can say that to me. I don't want to go into these situations. That's too scary. Island of safety. That doesn't mean that we might be ready to just jump off that platform and do everything that's been so scary for us. It might mean that in some areas we need to move slow. We need to come up against that edge and feel into it. So it doesn't just escalate into a 10 in nervous system activation. But that we get to hang out in the uncomfortableness of getting to that edge and just like, ooh. So that I can still be in a bit of agency. I can still be in my body. I don't have to go into an amygdala hijack and get the hell out of there or freeze. But I bring my awareness into that moment and I can feel into it. But what I'm seeing happening right now is that we use nervous system regulation and feeling safe as our new island of safety. And that everyone around us and our teachers or coaches or whatever it is, and like this trauma-informed perspective, where it gets to the point where like everyone show should show up creating safe spaces for each other. And I call bullshit because life isn't safe. Life never was safe. The moment you're born. This is a temporary experience that we're having and is going to end. And this whole creation is filled of suffering, of violence, of heartbreak, of disappointments, of rejection. It's like it's part of it. It doesn't mean that you've done something wrong because you're experiencing that. It just means it's part of this experience. However, we can choose to create hell on earth or heaven on earth from how we relate to the creation of this reality. Heaven or hell is a place inside of you. It's a place on earth. And it comes from how you relate to everything. If you're in rejection to everything that's happening and going on, yeah, now you're creating, you're adding to the suffering. You're making it mean something that you're not yet having the relationship that you want, that you're not attracting the people into your life that you want to have that makes you feel safe. And now you're making yourself wrong about that. I haven't done enough work, I haven't done enough healing. I bet I'm still believing something unconsciously, and that's why these people keep showing up. I have to learn to set boundaries, I have to learn to choose differently. You're making what's showing up mean something about you that is based in not enough. Yes, you can use the reflection in this hall of mirrors that us humans are to each other to see things inside of you. But it doesn't mean that you should be somewhere else. It doesn't mean that you're getting it wrong, that you haven't succeeded yet. It just means you're on your journey. So when safety and nervous system regulation is being used to the point of oh, everything just should just feel so safe and at home for you, we're missing the point. Feeling safe and like that safety is often a longing from a child within us. It's a childhood need. And if that need was unmet, I didn't feel safe, and I longed to feel that safe and held and just carried by my parents because that is what will teach me my own nervous system regulation and my own ability to emotionally be with life, with the world. And if there's a sense of like that was lacking, that was missing, then a part of you will be longing so much for that safety. Just like scoop me up and hold me, make me feel chosen, make me feel seen, like all of these things. An adult, in the sense that I define that word. An adult is far from a boring thing of having to go do the same soul-crushing work every day or be a slave to a system somehow. No, an adult, a grown-up for me is an artist of their life. It's someone who creates their life and their relationships the way that they feel good about as a piece of art. And to me, like an adult, a grown-up wants growth and expansion, not safety only. Safety is one room to inhabit, safety is a kind of baseline that we find in the unsafety of existence, where we start to like be okay with that, it's ultimately unsafe to be alive. And then how people are showing up doesn't need to be so safe anymore. Now we're creating more freedom. So I want to like flip this around, and I talk about it in my programs and in with my members and clients, that you're doing nervous system regulation so that you can meet with everything that's here, so that you can transmute it, so that you can move through it, so that you can grow from it. Because if you're in a survival state, yeah, there's not a lot of room for growth. But it doesn't mean that getting to that safety in your nervous system is the end point. We're doing that. So, one, you can have a childhood need met. Okay, that that wound inside of you, that need is getting met, but it's gonna hit a lot deeper when you find that safety no matter what people are doing around you, because you're feeling it inside of you. You're feeling an immense sense of love, and that you're always love no matter what happens. That's a whole different sense of safety that now allows you to be able to move through growth and expansion and take leaps and have seasons of deep rest and going inward and like whatever it is that feels juicy right now, that is calling you, so that you can play all the notes, so that you can paint with all the colors when you're creating your work of art, which is your life, like the journey that your soul is here to take. So, in that case, what is love? If I'm saying, if I'm starting to answer the question here, should love feel like home, should it feel safe? For me, love is disruptive, highly disruptive to that island of safety that we've built, which is a lie anyway. Love has made me discover more of myself. It's made me meet with the deepest pain inside of me, so that love could inhabit also that room in my house inside. Love has made me travel the world and do like seemingly crazy things. It's it making me take leaps of faith. Love is disruptive, love is a force, love is courageous. So when you start feeling love for someone else, which might start as attraction, because there are so many expressions of love. When love as a force hits the prism of the human heart, it will turn into all of these different colors, right? So it might start out as attraction, and it might be like an underlying love for all of humanity all the time, but that doesn't mean that we want to go have lunch or dinner with all of humanity or every single person. So if we start talking about this thing about attraction and start taking apart this notion of like trauma bonding or it shouldn't feel like butterflies, it should feel so safe and like at home, then we have to look at what is attraction. And if you look at attraction as um in physics, it's the pull between magnets, right? It's the pull between two different poles. So it's the pull between opposites. And yes, if you're being unconsciously pulled without any awareness or agency into what is commonly called a trauma bond, which is an opportunity for healing, right? But we might not have the tools yet or the awareness yet, and then we forgive ourselves for messing it up. That's okay. But it is an opportunity for that. So, trauma bonding or not, it's an attraction to your own wound. So, what do we tend to get attracted to? And I would say that this also happens in stages, depending on where we are on our healing journey, on our alchemical journey. So at a point where we have a lot of unhealed wounds, meaning a lot of places in ourselves where we ourselves haven't yet directed loving attention. Parts of ourselves that we haven't integrated, because they're pushed down into our shadow, into our unconscious, this beautiful, genius creation of hull of mirrors around you will show up and show you that, right, somehow. So because you're not facing it in yourself, it will show up in people around you. And we can call that being wrong or that I'm not healed enough, or we can call that the genius of your unconscious to lovingly show you what needs to be integrated in you. Meaning the next step on your soul journey. Like you can't get that wrong. There's nothing wrong with that showing up around you. It just means that life, the universe, love, whatever it is, got your back. It's showing you, hey, oh, you want more of this? You want more relationships that are this connected and loving and deep. Oh, then you need to see this inside of you. Great. So when we have a lot of unhealed, unintegrated parts of ourselves, we tend to get attracted to our unfinished business. We tend to get attracted to people who are similar to that unmet need we have from our caretakers, from our parents somehow. Because if they're just showing up and just giving it all to us, it doesn't feel like we're healing the wound. It doesn't feel to our system like we're solving the problem that we originally have because we wanted that love from that parent. We wanted that need met from them. So our system, our unconscious is trying to solve that problem. So just having some other nice lady or man showing up and giving that to us, some fairy godmother or some really nice human just giving it to us, it doesn't land because the problem hasn't been solved. We wanted it solved from this person. We wanted to know that we're loved by them. So if you're on that stage, you decide how you want to move through that dojo. But again, I want to make it more about you than about them, meaning do that work for you. Have the experiences in your relationships and explore it because you're growing your own self-love and self-esteem, and because you're meeting with these parts inside of you, and not so much about like making this relationship work. So let them be the mirror then, so that you can meet with these parts inside of you. And that can, of course, be done with love and compassion for the other. It doesn't mean treating them like garbage, right? I promise you, you can do both. So once you're out of this kind of grip of core wounds that are constantly pulling you to people that are showing you that wound and kind of reinforcing that wound and poking that wound, then even if that side of you is kind of healed, you will keep being attracted to your shadow. And this isn't, according to me, a problem. Because even if it's not a core wound anymore, or something that's like so painful, it might be aspects of you that your soul wants to explore. Aspects of you that weren't allowed to be developed growing up. Aspects of you that's been like hidden or forgotten or pushed down a bit. Oh, your 10 or 20 years of doing all that Buddhist meditation and um Joe Dispenser work and just light work and racing your frequency, what about the darkness? What about facing the suffering of humanity? What about kind of getting turned on by all the ways that you're let down and rejected? This is also part of the creation. And when we turn away from one part of the creation because we don't want to see it or face it, and we say this is better then, then we stay unintegrated. And I really believe that this is what our soul is here to do, to integrate all the aspects of being human. And that might look different. Like your path and someone else's path of integration will not look the same, and that's okay. So when we find ourselves being deeply attracted to someone and like, oh my God, I just need to have them. I want them inside of me, or I want to be inside of them, and oh, I want them close. For me, and sometimes then the mind can't make sense of it. And we're like, what is it about this person? And and the mind goes, This isn't a good choice for a partner or a long-term relationship. Like, what are you up to? And then we get into this inner conflict where we feel our hearts, maybe our sex and our mind is in conflict and has different opinions about having like entering a connection with someone. But ultimately, you're on the journey. So anytime you're making yourself wrong for being on the journey, like why would you? It just comes from old conditioning and old ideas of what life should be. That's often coming from a sense of, oh, I need to prove myself, I need to be successful at life, and having this job and this relationship and whatever else it is, this number of kids and pets and cars, that means I've made it. This means I made it in life. But it's all tracking back to this lie and sense of unworthiness, that we're not already whole and forgiven, and that we get to be here and mess it up and experience all of this, and love permeates all of that experience. And I know some of your minds will go, but but but what about this friend and and that example over there? They have a very fulfilling, safe relationship where they're all so crazy about each other and committed to each other, and it all seems like just hunky-dory. So, how does that fit in this description? Well, it fits in that way that we're all gonna have a spectrum of experiences. For some of us, that relationship might be the safe space. For some of us, our career or our professional life, our skill might be that safe place where where we're growing is relationship. And for someone else, it's the opposite or something else. Like we're all having different paths and journeys that our soul is following. And it doesn't mean that yours is less than someone else's, or it doesn't mean that what seems perfect when you look at it from the outside for someone else might explode or fall into pieces tomorrow because disease, because an accident, because someone's soul wanted to untether and go in a different direction. All of that might and will fall apart. So it's more about the quality of the journey that you're taking. How do you want to feel? How do you want to relate to everything that's showing up on this journey that you're on? So we can say that you're attracted to to your own trauma, we can say that you're um attracted to your shadow, or or we can say that you're attracted to growth. Because I think our souls are attracted to growth. And is that a bad So for me, I want to be attracted. When I feel attracted, that's a sign, that's a green flag for me, which means it might feel scary, which means I'll face things in this person. That is actually about facing things in myself. But the more capacity and tools and skills I have to move through that, meanings nervous system regulation and things where I can like find freedom and safety in moving through all the unsafety, then I have a greater capacity for growth and I have a greater capacity for love to let love into all of these places that are hurting, that feels unsafe, that feels scary, that feels edgy. So I want to not be able to keep my hands off them. I want to feel that attracted to them. That's not the only thing. Of course, if you step into a relationship or connection, you also want it to be like a mutual sense of like, yes, we're both here for the growth, or we're both here for the experience. We're both mutually attracted and committed to each other. And if you're not, you might still decide to be in that dojo for what it's bringing up to you. But a part of you knows, like, this is probably not my for life decision. But I'm here for the journey right now because it's bringing up things inside of me that needs to be seen, that needs to be loved on. I would not go on dates and like choose the person that feels safe because it's like a flat. There's no polarity there, there's no growth. It's your brother or your sister. And if you want to experience love and relationship like that, beautiful. Do that if your soul is longing for that, but make sure that you're honest about what your soul really wants. Yeah. We were exploring in in the Embodied Relationship Academy inside of ERA the other week with a member there. She was sharing, like, yeah, I like there's this trauma bond with this person, there's this shadow, and I've always seen them as kind of dark. And I asked her to start listing, like, tell me right now, like, what is it about this person who's different from you? Where is he the opposite? Well, okay, he's someone who very easily like takes or step into a room and feel like he and people owe him things, or he's like able to do that. And there's almost like an aggression to him. It's not that he's aggressive, but huh, it's there. And I said, Well, what about you? Have these aspects or expressions been available to you throughout your life? And she's like, No, I've been so known to be the giver and the people pleaser, and you know, the bathwater in the bathtub, where instead of you being a second person in the bathtub with someone else, you're just trying to envelop them and make them feel good. And you're not of your own flesh and bones. You're trying to be the bathwater. I think that's a really good image and analogy. Um, so it's like that's what I've kind of been conditioned to do. And some of it is probably a little bit in my temperament. Like I can feel that being true to me, but some of it is also just survival mechanism. That's how I learned to stay safe. Like, uh, so would you say that these aspects of you, some aggression, some black and white, some like judgment, some um taking, like, yeah, I want this, that that has been shadowed and not allowed inside of you because it wasn't safe to be that. She's like, yeah. So it's like, are you really attracted in a, in a, in a sense, to him, or are you actually attracted to your own shadow? Meaning it's calling for you to be integrated. And before your any of your minds step in and say, but but I don't want to be any of those, those are not good traits. Well, not until you have those are all available to you, can you choose what you want to be? Otherwise, it's just one automated pattern and something else is shadowed. Once you know aggression and can feel it, integrate it inside of yourself, you're really truly safe. Because now it's not gonna come out sideways as resentment, as something else. Passive aggressiveness. Now it's something that you've integrated and it's there, and you can feel this in people. The people that are the most safe to me are the ones that have faced kind of even violence or aggression, and they've learned to ride that wild horse. They're not gonna be pulled under by that impulse. They can like hold that inside of them. So it's not about, oh, you should become that. No, you should integrate that if you want to. If you want to have more freedom in your relationship with who you choose to be with. Otherwise, like your unconscious will always win. Your conscious mind will never outplay over when you're unconscious. So this is the game. Yes, be attracted to people, knowing that you're probably attracted because there's they're somewhat the your opposite. But then we go into complaining about them. Oh my God, they can't open up emotionally. Well, that wasn't what your soul was looking for in the moment. Oh my God, I don't feel seen and met well. Wasn't it like the reason you were attracted to them was because they were advocating for their agency and and all individuals' agency and their individuation. And now you're missing out on them being more caring or caring for the connection. It's like that's that was your poll, and you were attracted to the other poll. When you know you have a partner, is when you're both aware of this and you're willing to learn from each other. And that doesn't have to come in uh sophisticated language around this, it can be just an inn, in like innate knowing inside of someone. They don't have to have fancy language for this, they don't have to call it the shadow or individuation or integrating. Like, no. It's just a willingness in them to like I'm like this, you're like this. All of us humans are different. Thank God, that's a good thing, and let's learn from each other. This also means that you need to be courageous enough to stand for your half. Instead of A, making yourself wrong and like trying to adapt to their way of doing things. Oh, I should be like them to have them like me. Like, no. You should be more of you. You should bring forth your skills of connection, of emotional availability and depth because they need that. They want that. The relationship needs that. Don't dampen or hold back on your skills just because they are bringing theirs. But also don't complain and make their side of it wrong. See what is being created together in this third entity, which is their connection, which is the relationship. And this is of course gonna be a journey where you're discovering what is okay with you or not, what is um like fundaments that you really want in a relationship, non-negotiables, and you probably won't know stepping into your first or even your third relationship because you learn along the way, and that's okay. Remember, you get to mess it up. That's what you're here for. Go mess things up and learn some things from it. Don't put so much pressure on you for like making the right decision and choosing the right person. Like, no, learn to drop into your body and follow these signals in them. If there's a yes from your heart, from your sex, even if your mind is saying, like, this is a bad idea, then there's something here to explore, and you get to know, you get to decide how long. If that's for two weeks or two months, two years, 20 years. You get to decide, and it can all be done with and from love. And if you want fierce support and reminders of this again and again and again, and the tools to take this kind of journey instead of the island of safety journey through life, like a courageous, open-hearted, embodied, unapologetically you kind of journey. And you realize that, okay, I'm gonna get there faster with support, then come join us in our programs. Alchemy for when you want to learn how to alchemize the core wounds that's been sitting there. And then ERA, the Embodied Relationship Academy, where you want to grow into that artist of your life and relationship, where you want to create and have the skills to do that beyond the old conditioning, beyond the old layers of protection mechanisms, so that you get to move from your own compass into life, into relationship, into a much greater capacity to lead from love instead of fear and protection. Then join us in ERA. Applications are open, get it in there, and um your future self will thank you. I hope this has been helpful and let me know how this is landing. Send me a DM on Instagram, put a comment in the Embodied Self Mastery community. I would love to hear how this has been landing, what shifted, if anything.