The Art of Staying Series: Post 1 - Coming Home to Safety

Why Intensity Feels Like Connection When The Nervous System Doesn’t Yet Trust Calm

For nearly half my life, I lived dissociated— mostly unaware that I was doing so. And when that fog began to lift, and I became aware of this pattern, it didn't arrive with drama or revelation. It arrived as a quiet noticing.

I began to see a repeated pull toward intensity. Toward people, experiences, or emotions that lit me up - not because they always naturally appealed to me, or were true desires, but because the stimulation itself felt familiar in some way. What I was often responding to wasn’t attraction so much as a nervous system reaching for activation, shaped by unmet needs and uneven regulation. Learning to recognize that distinction — and to find pleasure inside steadiness rather than escape from it — has been one of the most subtle and transformative shifts of my life.

Many of us, with untended childhood wounding patterns can identify with this. That is why I am sharing it. Because until we do, we often mistake intensity for connection— and confuse nervous-system activation with intimacy.

And it’s important to be precise here.

When I use the word intensity, we’re not talking about passion, desire, erotic charge, excitement, creativity, or adventure.

Those are healthy.

Those are life-giving.

Those belong in a fully lived body.

The intensity I’m speaking about here is something quieter — and far more common.

It’s the kind of intensity that shows up when you feel more engaged waiting for a response than resting once it arrives— when a little uncertainty keeps you leaning forward, alert, and emotionally tuned in.

It looks like:

    •    feeling closest during conflict, crisis, or emotional processing

    •    bonding through late-night confessions or shared dysregulation

    •    feeling chemistry when something is unresolved or at risk

    •    tracking moods, waiting for responses, reading between the lines

    •    mistaking emotional charge (anxiety + hope) for intimacy

    •    feeling flat or disconnected when things are steady and predictable

This kind of intensity isn’t fantasy.

It’s activation.

And for a nervous system shaped by unpredictability, activation once meant:

I’m inside the connection.

I’m relevant.

I’m desired.

I’m needed.

I’m not being forgotten.

I have value.

For a long time, stimulation was how closeness registered in my body.

It was how I felt valuable.

How I felt chosen.

How I knew I mattered in real time.

So when calm appeared— steady, warm, uneventful— my body didn’t recognize it as safety.

It recognized it as absence.

As lacking.

Not because calm was wrong, but because my nervous system learned intimacy through alertness, not regulation. Calm didn’t feel reassuring because it wasn’t resonant with the baseline I developed when I was young. It felt dull. Empty. Disconnected. Like something essential had gone missing.

This is also where the roots of trauma bonding live— not in a love of pain, but in a nervous system that learned to associate connection with activation, rupture, and relief. When closeness repeatedly arrives after distress, the body begins to read intensity as intimacy, and calm as disconnection or boredom — even when nothing is actually wrong.

And this is where many people get confused.

Because when the nervous system begins to settle— when volatility fades and urgency softens— it can feel like something essential is lost or missing. Calm may arrive as restlessness, numbness, grief, or a craving for stimulation— not because safety is empty, but because it can feel dull or disconnected before the body learns how to live inside it. And until that shifts and regulation begins to feel safe, you will find yourself looping this pattern over and over again subconsciously. Each time robbing you of the very presence, peace, and real safety that you crave.

Because beneath that flatness — that feeling that something is missing— there’s often a quieter fear: that if nothing is happening— if no one is pulling, responding, or reacting— that the connection might fade and will not hold.

That you won’t hold.

If you learned early on to anticipate, attune, or manage emotional environments, your body adapted intelligently to help you survive.

It learned to stay alert.

To read subtle cues.

To associate depth with charge.

To feel most alive when something mattered in the moment and you were seen and your worth activated.

In that context, intensity wasn’t chaos.

It was purpose. It was action. It was meaning.

Calm, by contrast, offered no feedback loop.

No adrenaline.

No immediate confirmation of value or closeness.

Often, it was when you stood in the shadows, neglected or unseen.

Because in childhood dysfunction patterns, connection rarely comes in a healthy way, through moments of regulation, closeness, predictability, and safety.

So the body learned a quiet rule:

If it isn’t activated, it might not be real.

And real safety and regulation can feel foreign and amiss.

This isn’t about rejecting passion, excitement, or vitality for life.

We are not replaceing desire with neutrality.

We are not flattening aliveness.

We are not choosing calm instead of depth.

Healthy stimulation— attraction, adventure, creativity, eroticism— all belong in a regulated nervous system. I wouldn’t want a life without them.

But when intensity becomes the proof that we matter, it comes at a cost.

Because then closeness requires tension.

Desire requires urgency.

And calm feels like emptiness or disappearance.

And our nervous system continues its unhealed loops of dysregulation - leading to a whole host of adverse events we wish to avoid.

Staying doesn’t mean giving up intensity.

It means understanding why intensity once became the proof.

For many of us, intensity wasn’t indulgence — it was orientation.

It told us we mattered and held value.

That we were wanted.

That we were inside the connection instead of standing just outside it.

So staying asks something radical.

It asks you to stop outsourcing your worth to stimulation.

To remain present when no one is pulling on you.

When nothing is escalating.

When you are not being mirrored back in real time.

That moment — the one that feels boring, empty, or disconnected —

is not a lack of meaning.

It is the first moment your body is no longer being asked to perform for connection.

And yes, often, there is grief there.

Grief for the version of you who learned to stay visible by staying activated.

Grief for the charge that once made you feel chosen, alive, undeniable.

Grief for the intensity that stood in for value when nothing else did.

But, there is power there too.

Because when you stay — when you don’t rush to be wanted, desired, or intensified — something reorganizes at a deeper level.

Value stops coming from response.

Closeness stops requiring tension.

Desire stops needing urgency to exist.

Not all at once.

Not dramatically.

But irrevocably.

Calm becomes the ground.

Passion becomes the current.

And connection stops costing you yourself.

This is where regulation stops feeling like restraint

and starts feeling like self-possession.

Where presence replaces performance.

Where desire becomes choice instead of compulsion.

Where safety is no longer something you wait for — but something you embody.

This isn’t resignation.

It isn’t settling.

And it isn’t the loss of intensity.

It’s true, embodied sovereignty.

Reflections (to sit with, not solve):

    •    When I reach for intensity, what am I hoping it will confirm about me?

    •    Where did stimulation first become tied to feeling valuable, loved, or chosen?

    •    What happens in my body when nothing is escalating — and can I stay there without abandoning myself?

    •    How does pleasure show up for me in calm? How can I invite more of this into my life?

    •    What might passion feel like if safety were already here?

You don’t need answers.

You need honesty.

Because the deepest shift doesn’t come from calming the nervous system.

It comes from no longer needing activation to prove that you matter.

And that kind of embodiment — that kind of wholeness —

is a different order of power entirely.

One that doesn’t burn out.

One that doesn’t chase.

One that has the capacity to hold your deepest desires -

and support your greatest growth and abundance-

without losing yourself in the process.

Next in The Art of Staying series we’ll explore regulation vs. dissociation and escapism. Why “feeling calm” isn’t always a sign of healing.

Until then —With Much Love, Always.

Seraph