Rewiring My Beliefs about Love

Love bombing used to be my kryptonite.

The over-the-top attention, constant texting, feeling like the most beautiful, desired person in the room, songs of praise, being stuck in each other 24/7… it was intoxicating. It felt like finally being chosen after a lifetime of being overlooked. It felt like love.

But I had to learn the hard way that love bombing isn’t love. It’s a performance, a lure, a hidden hook that reels you in before the net closes around you.

As an incest survivor, that hook landed in an old wound. It kept me trapped in the same cycle. Again, and again, and again.

Why Love Bombing Felt Like “The Real Thing”

When I was groomed as a child, the abuse didn’t start with violence. It started with what I thought was love. Being noticed, being told I was special, being given little moments of affection that felt like a secret treasure.

After a childhood filled with abuse at the hands of my stepfather, I longed for my real father to save me, protect me, and love me. Instead, he groomed me. He used me. And in doing so, he rewired my brain and the way I perceived love.

So when someone came along in adulthood showering me with that same “specialness,” my whole body lit up.

I didn’t just want it, I craved it. I longed for the deepest kind of love, and love bombing always felt like that. It felt like the answer to my prayers, the exact kind of connection I’d been praying for. It felt like home.

I told myself,

“This is the kind of love that will heal me.”

But it wasn’t the kind of love that heals. It was reenactment.

How Incest Hijacked My Identity

When incest happens in childhood, and for most of us, that’s when it happens, it steals something we don’t even know we’re losing: our identity.

Childhood is supposed to be where you discover who you are, what you like, and what you need to feel safe. But instead of forming a healthy sense of self, I got wrapped up in my abuser’s moods, desires, and needs. I became an expert in reading him, in predicting danger, in morphing myself into whatever version of me would keep me “loved.”

My budding sense of self was replaced with a survival strategy:

Be what they want you to be, or pay the price.

That training ran deep. Any attempt to speak up, express my needs, or end the abuse resulted in violence.

By the time I was grown, self-abandonment became the way I understood love. I was ready to do, give, and become anything if it meant staying wanted. I did it instinctually, without a second thought.

So when a narcissist came along, I never resisted. I welcomed it in. I surrendered.

Then, I turned myself inside out to keep their love. It wasn’t weakness, it was wiring. I used to feel like it was one of my most endearing qualities. It was evidence that I didn’t let my abuser destroy me or change me into a heartless monster.

Now, I see that my self abandonment wasn’t an indication that I was worthy. It was a huge sign to anyone looking for a doormat to come and wipe their boots on me.

Finally Waking Up

The thing about love bombing is that it always ends.

One day, the same person who couldn’t get enough of me started going cold. The texts slowed. The compliments disappeared. The distance grew.

I blamed myself. I believed that I must have done something to push them away. I found myself bending over backward, shrinking myself, working overtime to earn back what I had at the beginning.

That’s how my whole healing journey began. As a desperate search to discover, and correct everything wrong with me so I could finally be worthy of love. So I could win back the love bomber, and all the affection, attention, and adoration he once showed me.

My attempts were never successful, because love bombing is not love. It’s manipulation all wrapped up in pretty paper with a cute little bow on top.

But unlike my previous relationships, where I was content living in denial and lacking any depth of self awareness, I was awake this time. I’ve been healing. I’ve been reading. I’ve been exploring every nook and cranny of myself and questioning everything. Every belief, every emotion, every behavior, every desire, every thought. Everything.

That’s when it hit me:

I had been here before.

This wasn’t just heartbreak. This was a reenactment.

I was right back in that childlike position, obedient, hypervigilant, and desperate to keep the connection alive, no matter the cost to me.

Why I Kept Reenacting

It took me over 2 decades to figure it all out. For the first 20 years, I lived in denial. My abuse and everything attached to it was locked behind a door. The affect it had on me was outside my awareness. It was the only thing that kept me relatively sane. Denial kept me alive.

It wasn’t until the painful consequences of living in denial became greater that facing all the buried pain that I began to wake up to all the devastation it wrecked upon me.

Now, I see that I wasn’t choosing pain for the sake of pain. I was merely operating from a set of beliefs that came from what I had experienced. I didn’t know any better because I never wanted to acknowledge any part of it or what it did to me.

But my subconscious knew. Deep down I knew I was worthy of love. Real love. Reenacting is the subconscious minds way of getting you to wake up. I was chasing a different ending to my original story.

Deep down, I was still that little girl who wanted the fairytale ending:

The version where the love bombing never ends.

The version where my self-abandonment is rewarded.

The version where the object I become is cherished and adored, not used and discarded.

I thought if I could just do it right this time, if I could be “good enough,” I’d finally earn the love I had always needed.

But instead, I just kept wounding myself over and over. Because there is no happy ending with a narcissistic abuser, and as long as I stayed in denial I was doomed to falling for their love bombing and getting sucked into another reenactment of my abuse.

The happy ending only happens by learning what real love is. The happy ending comes from acknowledging how my abuse twisted my perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors so that I could do the work of untwisting then. The happy ending comes from one crucial realization:

Nothing will change until I change.

What Real Love Actually Looks Like

Healing has forced me to confront a truth that at first felt unbearable: I can’t keep longing to be an object of obsession and call that love.

Real love is not obsession.
Real love is not all-consuming intensity.
Real love does not require me to erase myself to stay desirable.

It’s insanely difficult to let this idea go. I’m fighting decades worth of longing and craving. I prayed to be loved in this way. I fantasized about it. I cried rivers of tears from never receiving it.

Letting go is not easy, but it is necessary if I’m ever to experience what I’m truly wanting… Real love.

Here’s what I know now about healthy love:

It’s steady, not explosive. Healthy love feels like a safe fire — warm, sustaining, not a wildfire that burns everything down.

Healthy love is present. It sits in the pain with you. It welcomes true self expression. It’s willing to communicate, clarify, and negotiate.

Healthy love is curious. It wants to know you, all of you. Because it can’t fully love someone it doesn’t fully know.

It respects my “no.” I don’t have to earn my partner’s affection with compliance.

Healthy love is vulnerable. It lets you in. It wants intimacy and connection. It doesn’t avoid, abandon, or ignore.

It makes space. Needs, feelings, and boundaries are not treated like inconveniences.

It allows me to be myself. I don’t have to shrink or twist into something I’m not to stay connected. I don’t have to perform to avoid being discarded.

Healthy love communicates. It speaks all things pleasure and pain. It seeks understanding and compromise. I don’t have to bury myself in silence in order to keep the peace.

It’s committed. It chooses you and makes you a priority. It shows that you’re important. You matter. It lets you know “we’re in this together” and “I want you close to me and in my life.”

And here’s the hardest part for me to admit: sometimes real love feels… boring. It’s not a roller coaster of extreme highs and lows. It’s doesn’t swing wildly between hot and cold or chase and withdrawal. It’s consistent.

Because my nervous system was trained to equate chaos with connection, peace can feel foreign, even uncomfortable. I have to fight my training every single day, that deep longing to submit completely, to hand over my power, to be consumed by someone else’s desire and have them find value in it.

I have to resist the urge to earn love by disappearing.

I have to remind myself that I don’t want to be loved for how small I can make myself, I want to be loved for how fully I can show up.

What Changed Everything

Breaking this cycle didn’t start with someone finally loving me right. It started with me loving myself enough to stop betraying myself.

I began naming my patterns. I stopped pretending I didn’t know when love bombing was turning into control. I grieved the death of a fantasy that I had been chasing my whole life.

And slowly, I began building a stronger sense of self, one that could hold my needs without shame, one that could say no without fearing abandonment, one that could recognize when attention came with strings and choose not to pick them up.

What I Now Know

Real love does not punish me for being human.

Real love doesn’t require me to trade my voice for safety.

Real love is steady. It’s patient. It allows me to exist without performance.

And now, when I feel that familiar rush, I pause. I breathe. I ask myself:

Is this love, or is this another reenactment?

Because I am done living the same story over and over.

I deserve more than reenactments.

I deserve real love. I deserve a love where I’m safe to be me.

I deserve the kind of love where I’m adored simply for who I am.