How Love Deprivation, Not Addiction, Took My Life Apart

Prologue

In 2023, I reached rock bottom through unhealed relational wounds. The way I felt about myself shaped my thoughts, and those thoughts carried me toward self-destructive, life-collapsing choices. I didn’t lose everything all at once. The unraveling was slow — made of small compromises, ignored intuition, and a hidden adversary who mirrored every part of me that remained unhealed.

From the outside, the collapse looked sudden. One year I had a steady job and a downtown Orlando apartment, pursuing my creative career part-time. The next, I was living out of storage units and shelters, without a job, a driver’s license, or a bank account.

But this isn’t a story about homelessness.

It’s about what happened when old emotional wounds began steering my life without my awareness. A chaotic, destabilizing relationship became the catalyst for my understanding of how unaddressed low self-worth and love deprivation can quietly dismantle a person. I’m sharing this in the hope that it brings you clarity or helps you recognize a familiar pattern before it costs you as much as it cost me.

Be Careful with the Company You Keep

Hurricane Ian. September 2022.

It looked like God was scrubbing the world clean, our sins rinsed down the gutter while Noah’s spaceship — sponsored by Tesla — was being built right around the corner. Trees bent sideways. Street signs snapped like matchsticks. Cars skated down the street in surrender.

It looked like a movie scene, so I had to see it up close.

I ran into the street while my girlfriend recorded me. I remember thinking: if I was going to die that night, at least I’d die courageously in Mother Nature’s arms — making up for the fact that my own mother never really held me. Making up for the fact that my girlfriend hadn’t touched me in weeks.

I knew she was sleeping with someone else. We didn’t talk about it. We just smoked weed together every night in silence. That day, it was shrooms and laughter.

This was my first Florida storm. Barefoot in the rain, high on mushrooms, I was laughing and crying and spinning all at once — losing my mind, though I didn’t know it yet. Before I took my dose, I told her I wanted to see the truth. She said shrooms were the best way to see clearly. I was curious. I was courageous. But I wasn’t ready. Because the truth doesn’t whisper — it floods.

How ironic that the truth flooded in on the same day the hurricane flooded Lake Eola and I splashed around in it like I was in a kiddie pool.

I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t yet understand that the truth I wanted wasn’t child’s play, that the shock of it could unravel me, that my very adult life was already crumbling. Somewhere deep down, I knew I was trapped in a co-created prison — one I walked into willingly, and one where she held the key.

But it was hard to accept that I was allowing my own undoing. So I dissociated. I danced in the rain. I pretended everything was okay. Mid-pirouette, while she kept recording, a metal sign whipped past my head close enough to slice my ear. I ducked. The shrooms gave me reflexes I didn’t know I had.

Looking back, that was God telling me to listen. To pay attention.

I didn’t hear Him. I was too preoccupied looking for her, searching for reassurance, for concern about my wellbeing after almost being mauled by a sign. I scanned the street through sheets of rain. I found her behind me, framed in the doorway of my first-floor apartment, still recording. There she stood: my girlfriend, my wound, my mirror. Or maybe just a woman I was addicted to.

I blinked and swore I saw horns curling from her head, her face twisted with disdain and disgust. Maybe it was the drugs. Or maybe that was the truth finally flooding in, flashing across her face. She didn’t like me.

In that moment, I understood something too late: this wasn’t just a storm. This was the beginning of a collapse that started with who I let stand closest to me.

Two months later, I’d be admitted to Central Florida Behavioral Hospital. Six months after the storm, I’d lose my apartment. A year after meeting her, I’d be sleeping in a storage unit down the street from the place I once called home — crying to God, How did I get here?

Later, I would learn that while I was losing housing, stability, and my sense of reality, she had the clarity and the audience to recast me as the danger. That reversal did more damage than I knew how to name at the time.

It’s Not Love Addiction. It’s Love Deprivation.

People understand when you say you lost everything because of drugs. They can trace the logic: the money goes to the high, you’re too high to work, the job goes next, and the apartment follows. There’s a script for that kind of collapse.

But say you lost everything because of a relationship, and people blink. They can’t process how another human can become the needle, the pipe, the drug. There’s no detox for someone else’s manipulation. No twelve-step program for rebuilding your sense of reality after gaslighting. No clear language for when your mind breaks before your body ever does.

I wasn’t addicted to love. I was addicted to the high of pseudo-being seen — really, the attention and intensity. I was addicted to the low of being discarded. Every apology hit like dopamine; every silent treatment felt like withdrawal. My body didn’t know the difference between passion and panic. It just called both connection.

That addiction didn’t come from nowhere. I entered the relationship with a history of rejection, neglect, and love deprivation. When you’re betrayed early, you learn the mechanics. You learn how to abandon yourself with precision.

As Lauren Eden writes, “When you’re not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives.” She’s describing love deprivation — the chronic absence of care that trains the body to accept pain as proof of connection. Those knives didn’t just cut me. They dismantled my sense of worth, my boundaries, and my ability to tell the difference between nourishment and harm.

She filled gaps I didn’t even know were open — made me feel things I didn’t know I was starving for. Her attention made me feel like I mattered. I didn’t realize how insignificant I felt until I met her. She would drop off bottles of water and collect quarters for my laundry. Acts of service — something I had always yearned for as a hyper-independent Black woman.

For the first time, I wasn’t alone. I had someone who had my back — until I didn’t.

She wanted to spend hours with me — running errands, sometimes driving me to work — only to later call me a burden and a leech. That whiplash became cognitive disorientation. My internal compass started shaking, so I began looking to her for clarity. That’s when she gained control.

She once said, “It’s me and you. I’m never leaving your side.”
Little Charm — who spent years forgotten in child protective services — lit up when she heard that. To be chosen, to be remembered, to be accepted was all I ever wanted from my family. So adult me believed her.

Especially the day of the storm, when she said she didn’t want me to weather it alone. It sounded like care. It felt like care.

But zoom out, and she just wanted someone with money to get high with. She was miserable, and I was her company.

She tricked me into feeling special while she got me high — then complained to her friends about how annoying I was when I was high. We were two people shooting each other up with delusions and calling it safety. I almost got hit by a damn sign that night and she didn’t flinch.

That was the truth trying to warn me.

She didn’t love me or care about my wellbeing. She loved the reflection of herself she saw in my devotion. And that devotion — shaped by love deprivation — was how one romantic relationship nearly destroyed me.

My Conditioning Tolerated Abuse and Chaos

I was an adult by the age of nine, raised to meet other people’s needs before my own. I learned early that love had to be earned, and that emotions made me “too much.” Rejection and abandonment weren’t new — they were familiar. That’s what made the abuse feel like home.

She felt like home.

And that’s how I became her puppet — not because I was weak, but because I was conditioned to confuse cruelty for love, caretaking for connection, and control for safety. The way I was taught to secure love and connection was by becoming a doormat — and she walked all over me.

I felt seen by her — and I was. She saw me, studied me, and recognized my unhealed parts before I did. I had been trained to be prey to predators, manipulators, and chaos-makers. That’s what she saw in me, and that’s why she abused me.

I smelled like prey. I smelled like chances. I smelled like opportunity. I smelled like food. And I fed her.

I fed her external regulation of self-worth. I fed her when my mood tracked her behavior. I fed her through my big reactions to her belittling. I fed her when I tried endlessly to understand her, even as she kept moving the goalposts. I fed her by holding space without reciprocity.

No amount of devotion satisfied her. I was never enough, and she always wanted more — while I became more depleted, more destabilized, more wounded, sacrificing parts of myself just to not be alone.

The wound had been festering for years, infecting my beliefs, my emotions, and my choices. Everything that came next — the hospital stay, losing my apartment, the nights in the storage unit, the nearly three years in survival mode battling housing instability — was the infection leaving my body.

It wasn’t healing yet. It was the purge before recovery and reclamation.
It was the purge before I stepped into my power and made an oath to never take anyone’s shit again. It was the purge before my villain era.

The Truth About Growing Up Emotionally Lonely

I grew up inside a funhouse of distorted mirrors — warped reflections of self, of love, of mother, of father. There were moments of care, laughter, even joy in family and community. But everything was cracked. The image never lined up with the truth.

At the core, my mom didn’t want children. She had me for her own reasons, reasons tied to her survival. That unspoken truth shaped everything. I was both needed and unwanted — her firstborn daughter in America, her translator, her bridge. Her survival depended on my seven-year-old grasp of the English language. But she had few words of love or validation for me in any language.

I was a vulnerable child carrying adult responsibilities I never agreed to, while my own needs went unseen — or worse, seen and ignored.

That’s the wound of emotional neglect. You’re not starved of presence, but of attunement. Your parents are there, yet never with you. So you mold yourself to fit their reflection, contorting into whatever shape you think might earn love that never really arrives.

I kept chasing that same warped love. Fighting for belonging with people who mirrored the rejection I grew up with. That meant a lifetime of complicated, confusing, chaotic relationships that fed me dopamine and left me with cortisol gut.

For years, I mistook attention for love. Survival for belonging. Validation for safety. The distorted mirrors of my childhood followed me into adulthood, pushing me into delusional relationships where I was deceived, used, and emotionally controlled.

I cringe at the fake friendships and shallow connections I called home. I was liked, but not protected. Liked, but not valued. Liked, but never wanted. Childhood conditioning becomes its own curse — a recurring nightmare where the demons change masks, but the script stays the same. I kept choosing people who, like my mother, were self-involved and incapable of meeting me with real presence.

It’s a painful cycle: searching for intimacy while recreating the same disconnection.

And yet, I don’t carry only grief. Because there were real moments of warmth — of family, of community — but they fell short of true nourishment. Like eating air when my body needed food.

My parents didn’t just lack capacity; they often made choices that served their own survival more than my wellbeing. So I learned to normalize neglect. To tolerate pain. To make myself useful to others — often at the expense of myself.

Healing now means unlearning usefulness. It means recognizing that reflections aren’t always accurate, but they hold clues of truth. I’m learning to step out of the maze — to see myself directly, without distortion. To honor the child I was and become the adult I needed.

I’m learning not to stay stuck in what happened, but to tell the truth which helps me reclaim my reflection, and choose differently.

For example: the warped reflection of usefulness shows me the truth of my supportive nature. I don’t need to secure love through what I do or how helpful I am. Once secure in safe, nurturing connection, that same supportive nature becomes how I naturally express love. See the difference? Free therapy gems. My Cash App is $charmbaxter — thank you, kindly.

Parents’ inability to show up fully is usually shaped by forces beyond their control. Recognizing that doesn’t erase the pain, but it opens the door to compassion — the kind that actually heals. Because healing doesn’t come from blaming. It comes from recognizing the limits that shaped them, and the choices we make now to break the pattern.

Prayer of the Day:

Dear Source of Strength and Compassion,
I see the truth of my past without shame.
I honor the child I once was, and the adult I am becoming.
Guide me to step gently through the maze of my memories,
to recognize the lessons, release what no longer serves me,
and tend the garden of my life with care, courage, and love.
Let the light of awareness show me the path to wholeness.
Amen.

Affirmation of the Day

I am allowed to see the truth of my past.
I honor my journey without blame.
I release patterns that no longer serve me and choose new ways to thrive.
I am the gardener of my own life, and I am learning to cultivate love, safety, and joy for myself.

A meditation on what it means to grow beyond the care we were or were not given.

This is the first of a three-part series exploring how the care or lack thereof we receive from our parents shapes the adult lives we lead, the relationships we form, and the way we heal.

It’s time to tell the truth. Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my traumatic past through an adult lens, finding fragile peace in uncomfortable truths that once shackled me to a prison of unhealthy connections and incompatible communities. My series of heartbreaks has led me to see how the relationship with my parents lives in the shadows of my adult connections. I’ve noticed patterns: my attraction to people who couldn’t hold me or didn’t value me, my tendency to push for connection and understanding beyond what others were capable of, and my hyper-independence, which sometimes makes it difficult for others to step in even when they want to. I now see how deeply these patterns trace back to the care I received or didn’t receive when I was young.

I’ve noticed a painful pattern in my relationships both with friends and lovers. I don’t fully get to enjoy people, and they don’t get to fully enjoy me. For lack of a better word, my relationships haven’t been “normal.” Fun times have often slipped into unsavory moments. I’ve made people uncomfortable and sometimes pushed them away with my questionable socializing skills. Also, many of the people I called friends were using me or tolerating me and I didn’t notice. I was wired, trained even, to be the perfect prey: the perfect victim or scapegoat for those who thrive on exploiting and using others.

During the search for connection and companionship in my teenage years and adulthood, little me was unknowingly trying to find love, acceptance, and belonging and I found people whose souls mirrored my first neglectors and abusers: my parents. My relationships became a cycle of what Freud might call repetition compulsion: unconsciously recreating the dynamics of my childhood in the hope that maybe, just maybe, this time it would be different.

The truth is, part of me tolerated and was even attracted to people who could not match my energy, who could not engage with me at the depth I crave, or who were incapable of meeting my needs. At the same time, my own hyper-independence creates another barrier. I’ve had to be my own everything for so long that I function at such a high level of self-sufficiency it can feel impossible for someone else to step in. And when I do try to let them in, I often reach for emotional intimacy and conversation that some people simply cannot hold.

That’s where the heartbreak keeps repeating. Underneath it all, I received an early message that I was “difficult to love,” “too much,” or simply not wanted. That message came from my first relationships with my parents. They were unable, and perhaps unwilling, to nurture me, protect me, and love me the way I needed. And so, unconsciously, I kept recreating the same story: drawing people who cannot meet me, pushing people where they cannot go, hoping that maybe, just maybe, this time it would be different.

Here’s the painful truth I see now: my parents didn’t just lack the capacity they chose themselves over me. I was not wanted as a child. And that’s okay. Stick with me. Walk with me. As you continue to read, you may understand what I mean by “it’s okay.” I was the by-product of their sexual intimacy and the religious and social conditioning that made abortion “not an option.” They played the role of parents as best they could, but actions do not lie. Our behaviors reveal the truth our words try to hide. And everything in their behavior told me the truth: I was not wanted.

From my mother not taking me to the hospital after I tried to unalive myself, to my father disappearing after I helped him secure citizenship, I have a long list of experiences that illustrate this reality: my parents not only didn’t want me, they were burdened by my presence. They expected me to be useful to them rather than nurtured by them. Sometimes parental units are little more than surrogates or sperm donors and that is not shade, nor character assassination it is the truth. That’s why they say it takes a village to raise a child. Parents may plant the seed, they may give birth, but they are not always equipped, prepared, or even willing to nurture the life they’ve brought into the world.

I have been most exposed to my mother, and everything in her actions shows she never wanted the responsibility of parenting only the benefits of having a child love her. No wonder, when she physically disciplined me, I felt contempt in her slaps. She hated my existence and was too ashamed to admit it. My theory is that she hoped something would come with my birth and when she couldn’t get whatever it was she wanted, she was left with me.

I was conceived in Lima, Peru, and my mother boarded a plane around six or seven months into her pregnancy so I would intentionally be born in the United States. This was a decision she and my father made together. It was a decision of survival in pursuit of the American dream, so I get it. But let’s really look at that: they strategized my birth in hopes that it would one day serve them in citizenship. This choice illustrates, clearly, how my parents planned to use me. People’s actions reveal their true feelings, and sometimes even their intentions.

Additionally, my mother opted for a C-section two weeks before my due date because she wanted her baby born on Valentine’s Day. Again, do you see what I see? This decision was designed to serve her, not me. When I lay this truth out for the elders in my family, it is too uncomfortable for them to bear. My gift of seeing the unseen and articulating it makes me the black sheep — and I am totally okay with that.

As an autistic child, I saw the pattern behind the so-called love story they told me. Really, a re-branded story covering up unfinished business, infidelity, and bad decisions. Trust me, I’m not being critical, I’m just being autistically honest. Both were married to other people, had children, and then 11 years later, somehow reunited and had me, despite not being married to each other. Once I was born, my father’s family denied that I was his child, in his honor. I remember hearing the romanticized retelling of this story from my mother. As I was intently listening and connecting the dots, I said to my mother in a tone of eureka, “So I was a mistake.” Then she reassured me, “No, no, no, me and your dad always said we wanted a baby girl.” I see now that was my mother covering up shame, disguising her low self-worth — but little me got the picture anyway.

So this is the soil where my relational wounds were planted. And this is where the story begins. I see now the roots of my grief and the shadow of their absence, and I begin to wonder what blooms might be possible when I tend to this garden myself. Yes, the past lingers, shaping my steps, yet the soil is mine to cultivate and I am learning to ask, with care, what might finally grow here now that awareness is my best friend and I am choosing to see my parents as imperfect humans through a lens of compassion.

Even in the shadow of absence, I see the possibility of growth. Understanding the roots of our pain the patterns inherited and repeated is the first step toward reclaiming the garden of our lives. Recognizing how the choices, limitations, and sometimes absence of those who came before us echo in our adult relationships allows us to step back, breathe, and choose differently. And sometimes, that understanding alone is enough to begin tending it differently.

This is where we revisit why it’s okay that my parents didn’t want me. Parents can fail to meet our needs, and it can hurt deeply, but it doesn’t always make them harmful or cruel it does make them incapable. Their inability to show up fully is often shaped by forces beyond our control. Recognizing that doesn’t erase the pain, but it allows for a kind of compassion that is healing. We deserve to live lives beyond our parents’ poor decisions. I’ve learned that healing doesn’t come from blaming; it comes from recognizing the limitations that existed, the constraints that shaped behavior, and the choices we make now to break patterns. I got the parents I had, and yes, they traumatized me, but my experiences with them also created an opportunity for alchemy.

A good alchemist is curious, observant, patient, and disciplined. A good alchemist studies the material they are working with. And when we speak of material in this context, we are talking about trauma. So as I look at this soil, I realize that what has grown both the pain and the patterns is the work of trauma as much as of absence. Understanding that will be the next step in this journey.

Next in this series: How trauma informs behaviors and shackles us to patterns of dysfunction. Read Part 2 on Substack.

Part confessional, part stream of consciousness — messy, honest, and deeply relatable.

I used to think I was confused about love. But the truth is, I wasn’t. I understood love — I just kept colliding with people who didn’t.

What I was really doing was reenacting the dysfunction I grew up with. The gaslighting. The jealousy. The disrespect. The way I was belittled, ignored, or made to feel small. I wasn’t drawn to pain — I was drawn to what was familiar. I over-accommodated. I tolerated too much. I lost myself trying to keep the peace. Not because I didn’t know better, but because I was conditioned to believe that’s just what intimacy looked like.

And even when I knew something was wrong, I stayed. I stayed because I thought if I loved hard enough, it would turn into something safe. Something real. Something whole. But all it did was echo the love I didn’t get at home. Although, I wouldn’t have said that out loud during the time that I realized all this. I was in deep denial for some time.

But the way I loved — and who I kept loving — told the truth I hadn’t yet faced: I was addicted to unhealthy, demeaning relationships. Not because I wanted to be hurt, but because that’s all I knew. That was my normal.

Something I think about a lot when it comes to love and the people we love is how we get through conflict. Where I come from, conflict isn’t a bump in the road — it’s a dead end. Silence was the answer. Disappearing was the pattern. When people fought, they left. No apologies. No coming back. So I learned early on: love is conditional. Disagreement is dangerous. And being “too much” will get you pushed out.

So when I’d hear people say, “Yeah, we argued, but we’re good now,” I’d be confused. Like… how? In my world, arguments were final. Separation was survival. I didn’t understand that love could stretch. That it could stay. That people could fight and still choose each other.

Deep down, I wanted to believe it was possible. I had an instinct to love people through conflict — to work through it, not run from it. But I’d never seen it modeled. My inner knowing had no proof. No validation. And without that, the kind of love I believed in started to feel like a fantasy — something I made up, not something that could actually exist.

I didn’t grow up seeing conflict as a bridge — it was always a cliff. I didn’t see people fight fair, take accountability, and come back stronger. I didn’t grow up with love that knew how to hold me when I was hurting. I didn’t grow up with love that felt safe.

So I gave mine away too fast, too deep, too hard. I was starving, so I poured out everything I had to anyone who’d take it. Friends, lovers, strangers. I showed up for people like they were family, because I didn’t have a family that showed up for me. I gave the kind of love I always needed — without asking if they could hold it. And I paid the price for that. Over and over again.

Some people used me. Others just got overwhelmed. Some ghosted. Some stuck around just long enough to drain me. And I couldn’t figure out why it kept happening. Why did every deep connection feel like a setup? Why did I always end up betrayed, confused, ashamed?

The truth? I was confusing intensity with intimacy. I was confusing chaos with care. I was offering sacred parts of myself to people who hadn’t earned access. Because no one ever taught me to discern between yearning and love. So I kept loving people who couldn’t love me back. And I kept thinking it was my fault when they didn’t.

Eventually, it all caught up to me. The heartbreaks. The betrayals. The loneliness that followed loving people who left. The way I twisted myself to be “enough” for people who were never meant to stay. My body started keeping score. That’s how trauma works — it doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it just weighs you down.

I got diagnosed with Complex PTSD. Not because of one big, dramatic event — but because of the slow erosion. Years of overgiving, under-receiving, never feeling safe, never being chosen back. It changed the way I thought. The way I loved. The way I moved through the world.

For a while, I thought I had BPD. Or ADHD. Or Autism. Turns out, what I had was survival mode. A nervous system that had never been loved long enough to relax. A heart that never had a soft place to land. A mind that never got to trust that someone would stay or be able to trust the words that someone would say.

I wasn’t “too much.” I was just full of love with nowhere safe to put it.

But here’s the good news: the body can heal. The heart can learn again. Safety is something we can build. Even if we never had it growing up.

I’m learning now — on purpose, gently, slowly — that love doesn’t have to hurt. That not every conflict means abandonment. That the right people will stay and repair. That real love is calm. It’s honest. It’s safe.

I’ve started protecting my love. Moving slower. Paying attention to who deserves access. I no longer offer family-level love to people who treat me like I’m disposable. I don’t confuse scarcity with connection. And if I slip up — if I give too much to someone who can’t hold it — I return that love to myself before they have the chance to drop it.

This isn’t about pity. It’s about truth. And truth is what set me free.

So here’s the truth I live by now:

• My love is sacred.
• I give it slowly, wisely, and only where it can grow.
• I no longer abandon myself to keep people close.
• I no longer chase chaos just because it feels familiar.
• I no longer treat survival like it’s love.

If you’ve been where I’ve been — loving hard and getting hurt even harder — I want you to know: you’re not broken. You’re just wired for love in a world that hasn’t always known what to do with it. But healing is possible. Peace is possible. Real, safe, steady love is possible.

Just don’t give up before you find it.

And while you’re still searching, be the first safe place you land.

Prayer of the Day:

God, help me unlearn the lies I was taught about love. Teach me to recognize safety. Heal the parts of me that confuse pain with connection.
Remind me I am built from love, for love — and I never have to lose myself to feel worthy.

Affirmation of the Day:
My love is sacred. I give it slowly, wisely, and only where it can grow.

This isn’t just a blog post — it’s a mirror. A lifeline. A new beginning.