At a Glance:
The Mask – Why love that feels safe can trigger panic
The Cost – How trauma teaches us to reject the very thing we long for
The Threshold – What Attachment Science Says About Sabotage
The Mirror – How to stop sabotaging relationships that are actually safe/
Why Love That Feels Safe Can Trigger Panic
They say you push people away.
You disappear after closeness. You second-guess kindness. You sabotage the thing you say you want.
But beneath the behavior, something deeper is happening.
What looks like rejection is often protection. Not from the person — but from the panic that closeness stirs inside.
According to researchers on disorganized attachment, adults with childhood trauma often equate emotional intimacy with danger. Love, to them, feels both desirable and threatening — like walking into fire and craving the warmth at the same time.
This is why many people flee the moment a relationship starts to feel emotionally safe. Not because they don't care — but because care feels unsafe.
It's the heartbreak of nervous system memory.
“People don’t ghost because they don’t feel. They ghost because they feel too much — and don’t know what to do with it”.
How Trauma Teaches Us To Reject The Very Thing We Long For
Sabotaging love doesn’t start with a conscious choice. It starts with a body that learned: closeness equals pain.
Research from the Attachment Project reveals that those with disorganized or fearful-avoidant styles learned early that caregivers — those meant to soothe — were often the source of fear or inconsistency.
As a result, their internal wiring links intimacy to threat.
Even as adults, the cycle continues:
You fall for someone. They get close. You start to panic. You withdraw, lash out, or leave. Then blame yourself for ruining a good thing.
It’s not that you don’t want love. It’s that somewhere inside, you expect it to hurt.
That expectation turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. You sabotage the relationship to gain a sense of control over the ending — even if it never had to end at all
What Attachment Science Says About Sabotage
Psychologists call this pattern defensive deactivation — a nervous system response that shuts down intimacy before it can be taken away.
For those with disorganized or fearful-avoidant attachment styles, love is loaded with contradiction:
“I want to be close — but being close has never felt safe.”
Research from the Attachment Project and studies like Ghosting and Attachment Styles (Timmins et al., 2023) confirm:
People with avoidant tendencies ghost to maintain emotional distance.
People with anxious tendencies may self-sabotage to control the timing of abandonment.
People with disorganized attachment may do both — ping-ponging between clinginess and withdrawal.
This isn’t about being broken. It’s about protective strategies that were once necessary— but now get in the way.
And those strategies can look like:
Pushing away someone kind, then missing them the next day
Picking unavailable partners to avoid real vulnerability
Sabotaging love before it “inevitably” breaks
But none of this is random.
“People with unresolved attachment trauma often carry a blueprint where love equals harm, unpredictability, or loss.” — Dr. Lindsay Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Until that blueprint is updated, safety feels unsafe — and sabotage feels like control.
How To Stop Sabotaging Relationships That Are Actually Safe
Healing this pattern isn’t about learning how to love harder.
It’s about learning how to feel safe in the presence of love.
And that starts with slowing down the moment between fear and action.
Therapists like Sue Johnson (2019) call this a “corrective emotional experience.”
Each time you stay a little longer…
Each time you tolerate the discomfort of being seen…
You’re not just breaking a pattern. You’re building a new one.
Healing is possible—but not through shame.
The cycle breaks not by forcing yourself to stay, but by slowly teaching your nervous system that love can be safe.
Here’s what clinical research and therapy-backed tools suggest:
Build Awareness of Triggers: Noticing the moment you want to pull away is the first step. Journaling or therapy can help map the patterns and challenge automatic thoughts like “they’ll hurt me” or “I’m too much”.
Practice Micro-Risks in Intimacy: Start small. Share a personal truth. Ask for a need to be met. When the other person responds kindly, your brain learns: closeness isn’t always followed by collapse.
Rewire the Body’s Response: Somatic practices like breathwork, yoga, and grounding exercises reduce the “fight-or-flight” reaction to emotional intimacy. According to Dr. van der Kolk, healing trauma happens not just cognitively — but physically.
Engage in Therapy (Especially Attachment-Focused): Therapists trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) can model secure relationships, helping you internalize new ways of connecting.
Learn and Rehearse Secure Behaviors: Books like Attached and Hold Me Tight offer tangible scripts: how to express hurt, how to ask for closeness, how to name fear without fleeing.
Each time you practice — even imperfectly — you expand your capacity for intimacy.
Because the real shift happens not when fear disappears…But when safety becomes familiar enough to stay.
To run from love is not weakness. It’s a pattern. One that protected you before — but no longer needs to.
You don’t have to ghost the next good thing. You can stay. You can speak. You can grow into someone who lets love land.
Thanks for reading.
See you soon!
Team Rebuild
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