Have you ever met someone and immediately felt a pull, a sense of recognition, a feeling of that this time it will be different…
…but some time later, you have looked back and realised it was not different at all? It was exactly the same pattern you have been in before, time and again. If that has happened to you, I want you to know it doesn’t mean there’s something horribly wrong with you. You are not choosing badly on purpose. It’s that your nervous system is doing something entirely predictable and once you understand it, you have real power to change it.
I have been thinking about this a great deal recently, particularly in the context of what is happening in modern dating. Last month I made a series of videos for YouTube and wrote here about the Femosphere, the female counterpart to The Manosphere.
I wanted to bring to the fore the transactional, power-based philosophies spreading through dating culture online. A number of you wrote to me afterwards and asked the following question, “Why do some women find themselves drawn to exactly the kind of man and dynamic those philosophies create?” The answer is because it mirrors our early emotional blueprint.
When we are small, we develop a felt sense of what love is. This is not a conscious intellectual understanding but rather an immediate instinctive, bodily and emotional one. We learn what, for us, connection feels like. We learn what to expect from the people in whose care we were brought up. If that care was consistent, warm and present, we tend to develop a fairly secure internal template for relationship. We look for and can recognise what is wholesome, trustworthy and genuinely good.
However, if the care we received was inconsistent, emotionally withholding, critical or absent, even in subtle ways, we develop a very different template. When it’s like this, love has a quality of distance, unpredictability or a feeling of having to earn it. The emotional flavour of connection will contain some degree of anxiety, longing or working hard to secure someone’s attention. This template does not announce itself.
It operates in the shadow, in you body and thus beneath conscious thought. When we encounter someone who activates that familiar emotional flavour, even if it is not good for us, the nervous system recognises it. We get exercised, energised, excited. It feels like chemistry. It feels like home and we are urgently drawn towards it.
A woman with an anxiously attached nervous system, shaped by inconsistency or emotional unavailability in early life, can be particularly vulnerable to certain dynamics for example the intermittent reinforcement of a man who is attentive and then withdraws, the intensity of trying to win someone’s emotional availability, the feeling of chemistry that is, on closer inspection, the chemistry of an activated attachment system. It’s the urgency of anxiety, not the ease of genuine connection.
These patterns are intelligent adaptations. They were how you managed, how you survived, how you made sense of love when you were small and had no other frame of reference. They deserve compassion, not shame and they are also don’t have to be permanent.
When women do our inner work, something remarkable shifts. Our nervous system begins to recalibrate. We begin to identify and step away from what once felt like chemistry, the intensity, the urgency, the pull of someone hard to reach and begin to identify it as what it is is, anxiety. We then stop mistaking it for love. We step back from the fear and power games and become more autonomous and discerning.
At the same time, a connection which might once have felt too quiet, too easy, possibly even boring begins to feel more enticing. The man who calls when he says he will, who is genuinely interested in your inner world, who makes you feel safe rather than on edge, begins to feel so much more attractive, both intellectually and in your body. Your nervous system recognises a much more secure and loving kind of home.
That shift is one of the most profound I witness in the work I do. It is definitely not about lowering your standards, being less picky or settling. It is about evolving beyond the patterns that have kept you from what you actually want, a deep, trusting, respectful loving relationship with a man who has your back.
I am an accredited practitioner of the Calling in The One Programme and I stopped doing psychotherapy because this eclipsed that work. It didn’t go to these depths nor to the heights which can be reached in this work. It addresses the emotional blueprint, completing what was unfinished, releasing what is no longer yours to carry and giving you the clarity and power to choose well and healthily for yourself.
You will be choosing from your adult self, rather than from the frightened or longing part that learned its first lessons about love long before you had any conscious choice in the matter. You won’t be trying to earn love, to persuade someone you are lovable, good enough, worthy of love. You will already know that and embody it. You will not be looking for someone who needs looking after, mothering so you over-function by giving the love you hope to get. You will be looking for an equal in every respect. You will be looking to build your life together from strong foundations of maturity and integrity, honesty and true love.
If any of this has resonated, I would love for you to join my newsletter. I write every week about the inner work of love. Please sign up and receive my free Dating with Clarity guide at the link below.
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With love,
Heather
My name is Heather Garbutt and I send you my love and wish you every success in the search for your true love. If you would like guidance on attracting, true, committed and healthy romantic love, contact now me on Heather@heathergarbutt.com.