When You Crave Intense Energy Due to Childhood Trauma
When you grow up in a dysfunctional home, there can be lots of chaotic and intense energy. This can lead you to become accustomed to this type of environment and people who create these feelings inside you.
Although uncomfortable and even painful, intensity and chaos are what you know. So, you may gravitate toward situations and people that re-create these in your adult life.
There is some research evidence that peace can feel intolerable to trauma survivors. That’s why you may notice that ruminating thoughts come in as soon as you stop to relax.
This is an example of your mind giving you the chaos you crave. Even though consciously you may desire peace instead.
Unfortunately, it’s our subconscious mind that runs the show. And it’s responsible for most of what we receive in life.
That’s one reason why positive mantras only have a positive effect if you believe deep down what you’re saying. If not, studies show these mantras will have a negative impact and make you feel worse than you did before.
That’s why dealing with your past is not the same as refusing to let go or holding onto resentments as some would suggest. It’s an intelligent way to reprogram and recondition yourself to have a better life.
Why You Crave Intense Energy
Since these things started in childhood, we do ourselves a disservice when we insist that time heals all wounds. Time heals nothing if we refuse to examine our past and how it has influenced us.
It doesn’t mean you have to camp out there. But understanding how a parent wound can lead you to struggle in your relationships will improve those relationships, both present and future.
Romance is one area where you seem to attract intense energy, even when you want something different. If you grew up witnessing chaos in relationships, you have no model for what a healthy one looks like.
You may feel bored when things are peaceful, like this is not really love. Because in toxic families “love” means screaming and fighting, or trying to get attention you never receive.
Your underlying belief that love equals chaos creates the intense energy that sabotages your relationship instead. You may unknowingly stir up trouble to avoid the peace that feels too boring to be love.
If you had an emotionally avoidant father like I did, you may attract someone similar. And then you do everything you can to get their attention, to no avail.
Risk-Taking & Self-Sabotage
The craving for intense energy can lead to dangerous risk taking. These can take the form of addictive behaviors such as gambling, drugs, and other physical or financial risks.
You may recreate the chaos and intense energy of your childhood home at work. Perhaps it’s impossible to stay at a steady job, or you gravitate to workplaces with toxic employees and bosses.
It’s easy to see how these patterns can lead to a lower quality of life in all the areas that matter most. To break these patterns, we need to first admit where they started: in our own chaotic childhoods.
We need to heal the inner child who never received the parenting it required to succeed as an adult. (Success includes emotional authenticity, not only financial abundance).
We need to understand that true love resembles peace more than chaos. Without experiencing the real thing, you may look to movies and books to know what love looks like.
But those are made to sell and real-life everyday love is a whole lot simpler than that. People from healthy homes know that because they’ve seen it.
Same goes for work and how we spend our down time. People from healthy homes tend to gravitate toward peaceful people and environments there, too.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking intense energy sometimes. But when it comes from an unconscious compulsion to recreate the chaos of childhood, that prevents you from creating the life you desire.
