If someone treats you well and your first thought is “What do they want from me?” or “This won’t last,” but when someone treats you badly, you think “Well, at least this is honest”—your heart has learned the wrong lessons about love. And that’s not your fault.
Let me explain what’s really happening here.
Your Brain Learned Love in the Wrong Language
Think about your brain like a computer. When you were young, your brain was learning what love looks like. It was taking notes. It was building a template—like a recipe for what love is supposed to feel like.
But here’s the problem. If the people who were supposed to love you also hurt you, your brain got confused. It started writing down the wrong recipe. It mixed up “love” with “pain.” It connected “caring” with “chaos.”
So now, when someone is genuinely kind to you, your brain doesn’t recognize it. It’s like your brain is looking at the recipe and saying, “Wait, this doesn’t match. Something’s wrong here. This must be fake.”
But when someone is mean to you or treats you badly, your brain says, “Ah yes, there it is. NOW it feels like love. This matches the recipe.”
Why Cruelty Feels More Real Than Kindness
Here’s the heartbreaking truth: You’re not broken. You’re just trained wrong.
When you grew up with love that hurt, your nervous system—that’s the part of your body that decides what feels safe and what feels dangerous—it got its wires crossed.
Imagine you grew up in a house where every time someone said “I love you,” they also yelled at you or ignored you or made you feel small. Your body started connecting those two things together. Love equals pain. Pain equals love.
So now, as an adult, when someone is cruel to you, it feels familiar. And familiar feels like home. Even if home wasn’t safe, it’s what you know. Your body relaxes into it because it recognizes the pattern.
But when someone is gentle with you? When they’re consistent and kind and they don’t play games? Your body freaks out. It doesn’t recognize this. It feels foreign and strange and your brain starts screaming, “This is a trap! People who are this nice always turn mean later! Run!”
The Terrible Cost of a Broken Love Template
Let me tell you what happens when you live with this broken template:
You push away the good people. The ones who would actually love you right. Because when they’re kind to you, you don’t trust it. You wait for the other shoe to drop. You test them. You look for proof that they’re going to hurt you. And sometimes, you push so hard that they finally leave—and then you say, “See? I knew it. I knew they’d leave.”
But here’s what you don’t see: You only felt comfortable when they started pulling away. That’s when it finally felt “real” to you.
Meanwhile, the people who treat you badly? You hold on tight. Because THAT feels like love to you. The chaos, the drama, the pain—that’s your recipe. When they’re mean and then suddenly nice, your heart says, “This is it! This is love!” You feel more alive in those moments than you ever felt with someone who was consistently kind.
And the worst part? You think this means something is wrong with YOU. You think, “Why can’t I just appreciate someone who treats me well? What’s wrong with me?”
Nothing is wrong with you. Your template is just broken. And the beautiful thing about templates? They can be rewritten.
How to Fix Your Broken Love Template
Okay, here’s the part where we fix this. And I’m going to be honest with you—this isn’t quick. This isn’t easy. But it’s possible, and you deserve it.
Step 1: See the template for what it is.
Right now, I need you to say this out loud: “My brain learned that love hurts. But that was wrong information.”
You have to start separating what you learned from what is true. Just because your brain believes cruelty is honest doesn’t make it true. Your brain is working with old, bad data.
Step 2: Notice when you’re running the old program.
Pay attention to your feelings. When someone is kind to you and you feel suspicious or uncomfortable—stop. Take a breath. Say to yourself, “This is my broken template talking. This person isn’t being fake. My brain just doesn’t recognize real kindness.”
When someone treats you badly and you feel that familiar pull, that feeling of “at least this is real”—stop again. Say to yourself, “This is my old template. Pain is not love. Chaos is not passion. This is just what I’m used to.”
Step 3: Stay anyway.
This is the hardest part. When someone treats you with consistent kindness, you’re going to want to run. You’re going to feel like it’s fake or boring or “too good to be true.”
Stay anyway.
Let yourself be uncomfortable. Let yourself feel weird. Tell the kind person, “Hey, I’m not used to being treated well, and it makes me nervous. But I’m trying to learn.” A good person will understand.
Step 4: Let your body learn a new pattern.
Your nervous system needs new evidence. It needs to experience kindness over and over and over until it starts to feel normal. This takes time—sometimes months or even years.
But slowly, your body will start to relax into kindness. You’ll start to feel safe with someone who’s gentle. The anxiety will get quieter. And one day, you’ll realize that peace doesn’t feel boring anymore—it feels like relief.
Step 5: Grieve the old template.
Here’s something nobody talks about: You’re going to feel sad as you let go of the old pattern. Even though it hurt you, it’s familiar. It’s been with you your whole life.
Let yourself grieve. Cry if you need to. Be gentle with yourself. You’re not just changing how you see love—you’re saying goodbye to a part of yourself that tried really hard to survive.
The Truth About Real Love
Real love is boring. I know that sounds terrible, but hear me out.
Real love doesn’t make your heart race because you’re terrified. It makes your heart calm because you feel safe.
Real love doesn’t keep you up at night wondering if they still care. It lets you sleep peacefully because you already know.
Real love doesn’t feel like a rollercoaster. It feels like coming home after a long day.
Your broken template made you think that if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not real. But the truth is the opposite: If it hurts, it’s not love.
You Can Learn to Trust Kindness Again
I know this is hard to believe right now, but kindness is not a trick. Gentleness is not weakness. Consistency is not boring—it’s actually the most precious thing in the world.
Your brain just needs time to learn this. Be patient with yourself. You spent years building that broken template. It’s going to take time to build a new one.
But every time you choose to stay with someone who treats you well, even when it feels uncomfortable, you’re rewriting the code. You’re teaching your brain a new language. The language of real love.
And one day—I promise you this—kindness will feel like home. Peace will feel like safety. And you’ll look back at all the chaos you used to crave and wonder how you ever thought that was love.
You deserve kindness. You deserve gentleness. You deserve someone who makes love feel easy instead of hard.
And the most important thing? You’re strong enough to learn this.
You survived the broken template this long. Imagine what you can do when you finally have the right one.
