⭐Hey You Chase Love (And They Pull Away)

“You don’t chase them because you love them.
You chase them because your childhood taught you that love runs away.”

“You’re not pursuing a partner — you’re pursuing the parent who couldn’t choose you.”

THE MOMENT YOU START CHASING

Let’s start with the exact moment it happens.

Someone pulls away —
maybe a text slows down,
their tone shifts,
the energy changes,
they turn distant,
or they say “I just need space.”

Instantly your body:

• goes into panic
• your chest tightens
• your stomach drops
• your mind races
• you replay every interaction
• you start fixing, soothing, chasing
• you send the long text
• you over-explain
• you apologize even when you did nothing wrong
• you start “performing”
• you try to become the version of you they’ll choose

But what you call chasing…

…is actually your fear hijacking your nervous system.

This is NOT about them.
This is not even about adult you.

This is your unseen childhood wound screaming:

“DON’T LEAVE ME.”

THE REAL EMOTIONAL BLUEPRINT BEHIND CHASING

Chasing doesn’t begin in adulthood.

Chasing begins the exact moment you learned:

• love was inconsistent
• love was unpredictable
• love was conditional
• love disappeared
• love had to be earned
• love pulled away the moment you needed it
• love chose work, addiction, siblings, religion, stress, or silence over you

Chasing love is not a behavior.
It is a childhood role.

Here are the five childhood conditions that create adult “chasers”:

1. YOU GREW UP WITH AN EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE CAREGIVER

You learned connection comes through pursuit.

2. YOU LEARNED TO EARN LOVE THROUGH PERFORMANCE

Achievement = attention.
Obedience = connection.

It was all about what you did, how well you did it, and NOT about who you are.

Your Achievement and Obedience are what got you attention and connection.

3. YOU WERE THE EMOTIONAL CARETAKER

Your worth and value came from emotionally fixing, soothing, & stabilizing them

4. YOU LIVED IN CONFUSION

Your worth and value came from emotionally fixing, soothing, & stabilizing them

5. YOU NEVER FELT CHOSEN

So you lived in the background, like the family pet at the dinner table, yearning for head scratches and any leftover scraps of love.

So, your adult chasing is simply: Your childhood trying to finish a story it never got to complete.

THE TRAUMA CHEMISTRY LOOP

This part is critical.

Your brain is formed by your emotional experiences as a child, and those experiences create an emotional blueprint we take into adulthood. Id you are a chaser, your brain became addicted to the emotional chemicals produced by:

• distance
• unpredictability
• inconsistency
• hope + fear cycles
• intermittent reinforcement
• longing
• unreliability

This emotional cycle of ups and downs is identical to what casinos use.

Your brain gets dopamine not from love…

…but from the chase. As a child, you pulled the metaphorical emotional safety and love slot machine handle every day, anxious to see what you were going to get from your caregivers.

Like the gambler, you were desperate to win. And you are still desperate to win. That is why you keep picking people who mirror the emotional environment of your childhood.

Now you know why:

• The avoidant feels magnetic
• The unavailable feels intoxicating
• The distant feels “deep”
• The stable feels boring
• The present feels unsafe
• The consistent feels foreign

Your nervous system isn’t seeking love.

Your nervous system is seeking what it survived.

That is because our brains are designed to repeat what they already know emotionally. It follows the emotional blueprint of what we experienced as children. This is what I call The Worst Day Cycle.

THE WORST DAY CYCLE BEHIND CHASING

Let’s break it down:

TRAUMA

The moment a caregiver didn’t choose you.
Your blueprint has been formed, which sends you into stage two.

FEAR

Your brain and body become chemically addicted to the emotional state of chasing. And the chasing sends you into stage three. SHAME

You internalize:

• “If I were enough, they would stay.”
• “I’m the reason they pull away.”
• “I need to fix myself.”
• “I’m unlovable unless I earn it.”

SHAME

Your emotional blueprint becomes internalized with mantras like:

• “If I were enough, they would stay.”
• “I’m the reason they pull away.”
• “I need to fix myself.”
• “I’m unlovable unless I earn it.”
• So you only have one option. To get any emotional scraps from the dinner table of love,
  you have to cast off your authentic self, redefine what is hurtful, and call it love.
• Now, the only way you can achieve that and protect yourself from the overwhelming
  emotional pain you are experiencing is to move to stage four.

DENIAL

This is where the child you came up with a brilliant life-saving strategy. To protect your authentic self from the pain and loss of care, you create a protective persona of:

• the fixer, and the giver
• the perfect partner
• the calm one
• the stable one
• the one who always forgives
• And the emotionally responsible one

You chase because your childhood emotional blueprint persona learned that the only way to survive was to chase.

It’s not who you are —
it’s who you became to survive.

WHY YOU CAN’T STOP CHASING EVEN WHEN YOU KNOW BETTER

You can’t stop because your nervous system was programmed to interpret distance as danger.
Withholding = abandonment
Silence = rejection
Space = disconnection

So when someone pulls away, your body doesn’t think:

“Maybe they’re busy.”

Your body thinks:

I’m losing love.
I’m losing worth.
I’m losing safety.

Fear takes over,

Shame floods your system,
your adult self disappears,
and your childhood wound starts frantically pulling on the slot machine handle, desperate to win love, finally

So, you see, you’re not chasing THEM.

You’re chasing the FEELING of being chosen.

THE CHILD YOU LEFT BEHIND

Now here is the tough truth that most people won’t tell you.

The adult who’s chasing isn’t really you. It is the hurt, unhealed parts of you.
Depending on your specific childhood environment, it might be

• the 5-year-old who felt invisible
• the 7-year-old who never felt picked
• the 9-year-old who earned approval through perfection as a student or athlete
• the 12-year-old who emotionally soothed your parent after the divorce
• the child who learned their needs were inconvenient
• the child who believed:
  “If I can just be good enough, they will finally choose me.”

So every time your partner withdraws…

…your inner child jumps forward and says:

“I can fix this.
I can be better.
I can make them stay.”

That child STILL doesn’t know you survived.
Still doesn’t know you’re an adult now.
Still doesn’t know love can be safe.

What that means is that chasing is your child trying to rewrite history and find someone to be the caregiver and caretaker of your abandoned heart.

So, how do you stop the chasing pattern? You can’t do it with superficial strategies that treat the symptoms, like Emotional Intelligence but only with TRUE emotional reprogramming that heals the core.

The process you are looking for is the Authentic Self Cycle, which is built on developing Emotional Authenticity. That is because Emotional Intelligence has you focus on your emotions today, not the root, the place where all emotions and feelings are learned, childhood, only Emotional Authenticity does that.

So let’s begin with the Authentic Self Cycle and step one…

HOW TO STOP CHASING

Here is how you stop the chasing pattern — not the superficial version, but the TRUE emotional reprogramming: The Authentic Self Cycle

1. TRUTH

Identify the original moment you felt:

“I’m not chosen.”

This is the root wound behind every chase. This is a critical step because it breaks the wall of denial and exposes the false persona your emotional blueprint had to choose to survive.

2. RESPONSIBILITY

Not blame. Not shame. You did the best you could with what you knew at the time.
So responsibility looks like….

“This survival pattern kept me safe.
And now it’s time to let it go.” And I will do that by committing to a process and plan of healing.

3. HEALING — This is where the Emotional Authenticity Method comes in

It shows you how to rewire the chasing response by:

• Showing you how to reparent your inner child and become the parent who chooses you.
  And when you do that, you can…
• break the shame story
• heal the fear-based chemical addiction
• Confront the emotional memory your body is still carrying
• Create emotional safety inside your own nervous system
• Teach your body that stability = safety
• Build tolerance for consistent love

When you become the parent you needed for yourself, safety becomes familiar, and chasing becomes unnecessary. And the combination of the first three steps leads you into

4. FORGIVENESS

Forgiveness is not about focusing on the partner you chased.

Forgiveness is about the child who had to chase love to survive.

Forgiveness is the moment you can be the parent to your wounded child and say:

“I appreciate you for coming up with such a brilliant strategy. You are so smart and so capable, to have figured out how to survive.

But I want you to know I am here now. It is my job and my promise to you is that I will work every day to become the parent you needed so you can feel safe and not feel like you have to take over anymore. You no longer need to earn love; I will give you all of mine.”

YOUR JOURNEY TO BEING YOURSELF

Let’s wrap this up.

I hope you can now see that when you use the 4 Pillars of the Authentic Self Cycle, through the emotional authenticity method, what you discover that…

“You do not chase because you’re needy.
You chase because your childhood taught you that love disappears.”

But…. More importantly. You deserve to be chosen not by others, but by yourself.”