I used to check my partner’s phone location seventeen times before lunch. Not because I was controlling—I just needed to know if today would be a good day or if I should brace myself. My friends called it toxic. I called it Tuesday.
When you’ve spent years in relationships that swing between euphoric highs and devastating lows, your nervous system rewires itself. Drama becomes your baseline. The absence of chaos doesn’t feel like peace; it feels like the eerie quiet before a storm. I know because I lived there for a decade, convinced that real love meant fighting hard and loving harder.
The quiet feels wrong at first
My last relationship was like being plugged into an electrical socket—every text could flip my world upside down. So when I met someone who responded to texts consistently, who meant what they said, who didn’t vanish for days, the steadiness felt suspicious.
Healthy love is like wearing comfortable shoes after years of beautiful heels that destroyed your feet. Everything’s easier, but you keep bracing for pain. When we disagreed about dinner and they simply said, “Thai sounds great instead,” I spent three hours decoding hidden meanings that didn’t exist.
Research confirms our brains literally get addicted to toxic relationship patterns. We mistake chemical chaos for passion. Without it, healthy love feels flat—like switching to herbal tea when you’re used to triple espressos.
Your body stays ready for a fight that never comes
For months, my body remained prepared for battles that existed only in muscle memory. Shoulders tensed. Jaw clenched. I’d jolt awake at 3 AM, heart racing, ready to defend myself against accusations that nobody was making.
This is hypervigilance—your nervous system scanning for threats in complete safety. My partner would reach for my hand and I’d flinch. They’d text “can we talk tonight?” about weekend plans and I’d spiral into panic mode.
Their consistency felt like a long con. Nobody just loves steadily, without tests or games or emotional obstacle courses. Right?
Real intimacy lives in the ordinary
In toxic relationships, closeness came through trauma bonding—surviving each other’s storms, those intense reconciliations. I thought that was intimacy. It was just mutual survival.
Healthy love feels quieter. It’s someone remembering you hate cilantro without being reminded. It’s pausing Netflix automatically because they know you missed something. It’s talking about books, weird dreams, that TikTok that made you snort-laugh—without subtext, without scorekeeping, without armor.
The depth caught me off guard. Without spending all my energy on relationship triage, I could actually know this person. And they could know me—not the carefully edited version, but the real one who eats cereal for dinner and tears up at those military dad surprise videos.
The urge to sabotage becomes overwhelming
Three months in, I nearly torched everything. I picked fights about nothing. Pushed boundaries to find their breaking point. Created drama because peace felt like wearing a costume that didn’t fit.
“You’re too perfect,” I accused them, convinced they were hiding something sinister. They looked genuinely confused: “I’m just trying to love you well. Is that okay?”
Their simplicity undid me. Reading Rudá Iandê’s Laughing in the Face of Chaos helped me understand why. He writes: “We are not just the light or the shadow—you are the entire, vibrant dance.” I was desperately trying to recreate familiar shadows because I’d never learned to exist in steady light. His book showed me that peaceful love wasn’t shallow—it was finally having space to go deep.
Boredom is just safety in disguise
What I labeled boring was my nervous system short-circuiting in the absence of danger. Without constant emotional calculations and damage control, I had all this mental bandwidth. It felt vacant, unsettling.
Then that space began filling with life. Creative projects. Deeper friendships. Actually tasting my morning coffee instead of gulping it while strategizing relationship survival tactics. The “boredom” revealed itself as presence.
Secure attachment looks boring from the outside because the drama happens internally—in the safety to be authentic, the freedom to grow, the relief of being seen without performing.
You mourn who you used to be
Healthy love becomes a mirror reflecting your past choices. I grieved the woman who interpreted jealousy as passion, control as protection, volatility as investment. The one who accepted crumbs and called them a feast.
We often can’t recognize toxicity from inside it. Only from somewhere safer can you look back and wonder how you survived.
But shaming your past self is another trap. That woman was navigating with a broken compass, doing her best with limited tools. She wasn’t weak—she was learning.
Final thoughts
Healthy love feels like a Sunday morning that nobody’s documenting. It’s having a bad day without relationship apocalypse. It’s disagreeing without mental scorecards. It’s being truly seen without the exhausting performance.
Sometimes I still catch myself manufacturing problems, chasing that familiar chaos high. But mostly, I’m learning to sink into this new sensation: being loved without auditioning for it, without earning it through suffering, without the constant threat of losing it.
If you’re reading this from inside your own storm, convinced that healthy love would bore you to tears—I was you. Peace feels terrifying when chaos is home. But boring isn’t the absence of passion. It’s finally having enough safety to discover everything else that was always there, waiting quietly beneath the noise.
Just launched: Laughing in the Face of Chaos by Rudá Iandê
Feel like you’ve done the inner work—but still feel off?
Maybe you’ve explored your personality type, rewritten your habits, even dipped your toes into mindfulness or therapy. But underneath it all, something’s still… stuck. Like you’re living by scripts you didn’t write. Like your “growth” has quietly become another performance.
This book is for that part of you.
In Laughing in the Face of Chaos, Brazilian shaman Rudá Iandê dismantles the myths we unknowingly inherit—from our families, cultures, religions, and the self-help industry itself. With irreverent wisdom and piercing honesty, he’ll help you see the invisible programs running your life… and guide you into reclaiming what’s real, raw, and yours.
No polished “5-step” formula. No chasing perfection. Just the unfiltered, untamed path to becoming who you actually are—underneath the stories.
