Love or Addiction?

When Chaos Feels Like Chemistry: Why We Get Pulled Into Inconsistent Love

There’s a moment I see again and again in the therapy room, that soft, conflicted breath before someone finally says, “I know this isn’t good for me… so why can’t I stop?” And here’s the part I rarely say out loud, but always feel in my bones: I lived this. I had to learn this the hard way. I didn’t discover this pattern through theory; I survived it. I felt the pull, the humiliation, the craving, the panic, the fantasy, the heartbreak, all of it long before I ever helped clients through it. I untangled it in my own nervous system first. So when I talk about the intoxication of inconsistent love, I’m speaking from both sides of the therapy chair. I know how magnetic it can feel. I know how rationality disappears. And I know how easily it can swallow you whole.

People often assume that being stuck in unpredictable, emotionally turbulent dynamics is a sign of weakness or lack of self-respect, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. These patterns grip because your nervous system is responding to a blueprint it learned long before you consciously understood what love was. You’re not craving the person, you’re responding to the emotional rhythm your body recognises from childhood. Not the love you consciously want now, but the love you were trained to expect decades ago.

And when you’re moving through midlife, if female there also may be perimenopause shifting your hormones, maybe ADHD or neurodivergence becoming louder. the pressure of burnout settling into your bones, those old patterns don’t just reappear, they tighten. They feel magnetic. Urgent. Comfortably familiar. It’s only when you start to take the mask off, the mask you didn’t even know you were wearing, that the pattern becomes visible. And you can only take that mask off once you realise it exists.

In Transactional Analysis, we talk a lot about scripts, unconscious relationship blueprints created in childhood that quietly shape everything: who you’re drawn to, what you tolerate, and what you mistake for “chemistry.” Eric Berne described a script as a life plan formed early, reinforced by caregivers, and replayed automatically unless you consciously interrupt it. So when you find yourself pulled towards someone who appears one moment and disappears the next, who is warm then cold, attentive then indifferent, that magnetism is rarely about the person. It’s about recognition. A younger part of you knows this rhythm. They learned to adapt to it. They survived on it. That’s why inconsistency doesn’t feel like danger, it feels like home. Not a healthy home, but a familiar one.

Unpredictable affection creates emotional activation, the quickening, the heightened attention, the longing, the sense of “aliveness.” People mistake this for desire because it feels intense, energising, consuming. For neurodivergent people, especially those with ADHD, that intensity can hit even harder. ADHD brains are wired to respond powerfully to novelty and emotional spikes, making inconsistent connection feel like fireworks in an otherwise flat emotional landscape. And if you’re experiencing perimenopause, everything is amplified: the highs, the irritability, the longing, the confusion, the sensitivity. The emotional landscape becomes more volatile, and the pull towards intensity can feel almost biological.

This is also why so many affairs begin from this place. Not because people are reckless, but because they are depleted. The craving for emotional aliveness becomes so strong that the push–pull dynamic feels like a lifeline. Inconsistency mimics passion. It imitates destiny. But more often than not, it is simply your nervous system mistaking activation for intimacy.

The reason people stay, long after they know the relationship is hurting them, is not because they’re addicted to the person. They’re attached to the unfinished story that person awakens inside them. In Transactional Analysis, we understand that the Child ego state holds the original longing: to be chosen, seen, valued, held with consistency. So when someone unpredictable offers a moment of closeness, that younger self whispers, “Maybe this time.” It’s that whisper, not the relationship, that keeps people stuck. Richard Erskine famously wrote, “We repeat the past not to suffer, but to seek resolution.” The body tries to repair an old wound through the wrong person, someone who cannot and will not provide the stability needed to heal.

If you grew up with emotional unpredictability or conditions placed on affection, your body learned early that love meant reaching, appeasing, performing, or chasing. Your nervous system remembers the pattern, not the intention. So in adulthood, when someone gives just enough to pull you in but not enough to hold you, your body reacts as though it has found something important, even sacred. That’s the cruelty of it. It’s not love. It’s recognition.

And here’s the part that surprises most people: stability can feel unfamiliar, even threatening. When you’ve lived in emotional turbulence, stability feels suspicious. Consistency feels foreign. Calmness feels like emptiness. Being fully seen feels overwhelming. Healthy love can feel so quiet that you misinterpret the absence of anxiety as the absence of connection. People reject emotionally available partners with lines like “there’s no spark” when in reality, their nervous system simply doesn’t know how to settle. That “spark” they miss is often the chaos they’ve been conditioned to call love.

I had to learn this slowly, painfully, repeatedly. Stability didn’t feel natural to me at first. It felt too quiet, too steady, too exposed. It took time, therapy, and a lot of unlearning to recognise safety for what it was. This is why I teach it, because I lived it. I felt the gravitational pull of the familiar chaos and had to choose differently over and over again.

You don’t break this pattern by forcing yourself to date the “nice person” or by pretending you’re above the attraction. You break it by becoming aware of the script running beneath the surface. You heal by noticing when your Child ego state is gripping onto hope. You heal by letting your Adult self step forward and say, “We don’t chase love anymore. We receive it.” You heal by recognising the mask that once kept you safe, the mask that says, “I’m fine,” “I can handle this,” “I don’t need more” and gently taking it off. Because the mask was a survival strategy, but it is not who you are.

You’re not addicted to them.

You’re attached to what they symbolise.

The longing. The validation. The fantasy. The repair. The emotional intensity. The unfinished story. You’re trying to complete an ending your childhood never gave you. But that ending will not come through someone inconsistent.

I learned this the long way round, through heartbreak, through self-abandonment, through therapy, through choosing myself when everything in my body wanted the familiar chaos. It’s why I recognise these patterns instantly in others. And it’s why I know, without question, that there is another way.

Therapy helps because it gives you something many people have never experienced: consistency. Attunement. Regulation. Steadiness. A relationship where you don’t swing between warmth and absence. A space where you don’t have to perform or earn your place. Through that experience, your script becomes visible. Your patterns soften. Your Adult self strengthens. And slowly, the familiar chaos loses its power.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “This is me,” then I want you to know: you’re not broken. You’re not dramatic. You’re not weak. You’re in a pattern, and patterns can be rewritten. You deserve a love that doesn’t cost you your peace. You deserve a nervous system that can finally rest but feel alive in a calmer way.

JH X