There's a specific kind of self-sabotage that doesn't look like sabotage at all in the moment. Someone shows you real, consistent love, and instead of leaning in, you find reasons to pull away, pick fights, or convince yourself it's 'too easy' to be real. Then six months later you're wondering what happened to the one person who actually showed up.
This isn't really about the other person. It's an attachment wiring issue. If love felt unpredictable or conditional growing up — earned through performance, or withdrawn when you made mistakes — your nervous system quietly learns that steady, unconditional love is suspicious. Not bad exactly, just unfamiliar enough to trigger a threat response. So when it shows up, some part of you starts looking for the catch, or manufactures one, because chaos feels more 'normal' than peace.
I know a lot about pushing people away. Back when I was deep in the grip of opiate addiction, I made an art form out of it. If someone came to me with genuine, open-hearted love, my first instinct wasn't to thank them; it was to find the angle. What did they want? When were they going to use this against me? My brain was so wired for survival and the next fix that anything resembling peace felt like a trap. I would pick a fight over nothing, act completely reckless, or just vanish for days. I convinced myself that I was doing them a favor by leaving first, before they could see how broken I really was and walk out on me.
Then, years later, after I survived the addiction and thought I was on stable ground, I had my stroke at 43. Suddenly, I’m partially paralyzed, having to relearn how to talk, how to walk, how to feed myself. Talk about feeling like damaged goods. When my family and friends tried to show up for me, that old self-sabotaging monster woke right back up. I felt like a burden, and instead of accepting their love, I projected all my self-hatred onto them. I'd snap at them, tell them to leave me alone, tell myself they only cared out of pity. I almost ruined the best relationships I had left because I couldn't handle the vulnerability of being loved when I had nothing 'useful' to offer in return.
The regret comes later because in the moment, pushing away feels like self-protection. It's only with distance that you can see it was actually self-abandonment — protecting the wound instead of protecting the relationship. The people who break this pattern aren't the ones who found 'the right person who was patient enough.' They're the ones who did the internal work to recognize the pattern in real time and choose differently, even while every old instinct screamed to run.
If you recognize yourself in this, the move isn't guilt over what you did to past relationships. It's awareness now — noticing the urge to create distance from something good, naming it out loud, and staying five more minutes than your instinct tells you to. That's how the pattern actually breaks.
You have to learn to tolerate the discomfort of being safe. It sounds crazy, but safety is terrifying when you've been running on high-alert for half your life. You have to train your nervous system to understand that you are allowed to have good things. You don't have to earn it, and you don't have to be perfect to deserve it. If you have pushed people away in the past, don't waste your energy on shame. Shame is just another way of staying stuck in your own head. Use that pain as a compass. Next time love shows up, don't run. Stay five more minutes. Let them see you. It might just save your life, like it did mine.
Go love somebody that you don't like. I love y'all. 🙏
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