Why You Keep Choosing Chaos (Even When You Say You Want Peace)
You are not attracted to chaos because you love to suffer; you are attracted to what your nervous system has learned is "normal." People often think they keep choosing the wrong relationships, jobs, or situations. The truth is often much deeper: your body is choosing what feels familiar before your mind even realizes it's happening. You may think, "I have bad judgment. I sabotage myself. I attract toxic relationships. But what is actually happening is that your nervous system will always prioritize predictability over happiness. To your nervous system, familiarity can feel safer than peace, so your body ends up mistaking intensity for aliveness and chaos for "home."
The Nervous System Programming
The nervous system is a survival system, not a happiness system, that has learned patterns through repetition. Your repeated experiences become "normal," and these experiences become what the body expects. Your nervous system will not move towards what your mind says is healthy for you; it will move towards what makes it comfortable. Every time. Without exception. Instead of your body asking, "Is this healthy for me?" it simply asks, "Have I survived this before?"
How Does Chaos Become Safety
If you grew up around people who had unpredictable emotions, where you had to walk on eggshells, or maybe love was inconsistent, and you only received love during a crisis. If you lived in a home where tension, conflict, emotional absence, or instability is the norm, you have to become hyper-aware of other people's moods. All of this programming sent the signal to your nervous system that instability was not only normal, but it was safe. That being said, when your childhood required you to be hypervigilant, calm can feel unfamiliar. When love comes with conditions and unpredictability, unconditional love and stability can initially feel boring. When chaos raises you, peace feels suspicious.
How This Programming Shows Up In Your Adult Life
- Choosing emotionally unavailable partners.
- Feeling uncomfortable when things are going well, or waiting for something bad to happen because things are going so well.
- Creating problems where none exist.
- Constant busyness or trying to prove your value through productivity.
- Needing a sense of urgency to feel productive.
- Feeling anxious in healthy relationships.
- Mistaking adrenaline for chemistry.
Who You Had to Become to Survive
Often, roles are created to help the nervous system feel the safety it needs and craves. For example, if you only felt loved and seen when you brought home good grades, you may find yourself as an overachiever. You may have had to become the fixer, the rescuer, the strong one or the peacekeeper just to survive. These roles will follow you into adulthood and unconsciously run you from within. I want to make a very clear distinction. You are not consciously choosing suffering. You have programmed survival patterns that are intelligent adaptations. Since these patterns protected you once, your nervous system will continue to use the patterns that worked even after the danger is gone.
How to Begin to Reprogram Your Nervous System Patterns
Changing the story - The first step is to stop blaming others. At some point, we have to stop blaming our parents, society, schooling, and even ourselves for what we went through and instead take responsibility and accountability for the necessary changes. You need to get to the point where you change the story from "this happened to me" to "this is what I am going to do about it."
Self-awareness and self-reflection - The next step is to become aware of your patterns without shaming or judging yourself. This is not always easy because we create an entire identity around our patterns and conditioning. The parts of you that you think, "that's just the way I am," are most likely patterns that were learned. So it is important to stop yourself or self-reflect and ask, "What am I recreating in this situation and what parts of it feel familiar?"
Shifting the patterns - The next part is to learn the difference between what is familiar and what is healthy. Your nervous system will always feel uncomfortable when you are changing the familiar to the healthy, so you must become comfortable with the discomfort. When you recognize what you are recreating from the previous step, you can then ask yourself if this is what you want. For example, if you realize that you are attracting unhealthy relationships because you settle for anyone who says they love you, I would hope that you would see the familiar part of this, but decide that it's not what you want. So, to change it, you have to recognize all the patterns that are attached to this action of settling.
The patterns I have seen from this type of programming are a lack of self-love, a lack of self-worth, a lack of boundaries, people-pleasing, just to name a few. When you know the patterns, you can begin to change them. I would recommend working through them individually and remembering that baby steps are still steps. You will fall back on old habits, that's to be expected, so continuing to self-reflect is important through the entire process. Stop putting others' happiness (or any emotions, for that matter) ahead of your own. You are not here to please others or be responsible for their emotions, and you don't have to be any more special than you already are to deserve love and worthiness. It's time you give yourself the love and respect that you are trying to get from others.
If at any point in this process you find yourself blaming others, I want you to bring your focus back to yourself. The truth is, it's not about anyone else, and everyone you meet is simply a mirror reflecting back to you where you are still attached and stuck in your programming. It's not about you and anyone else. It's about you and your soul reconnecting to become the person you came here to be, not who you had to be to survive.
By Dr Laurie Williams D.Ms
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