I work with young (or young at heart) professionals who feel confident at work but lost in love. They spend hours monitoring, pleasing, and performing for others, unable to stop even when it erodes their dignity and peace of mind.
Even after years of therapy, they feel stuck in the same painful cycles. Many still find themselves longing for an ex, devastated it did not work out, even when they know that person was no good for them. Some keep chasing affair partners despite knowing they will never leave their marriage. Others settle for exploitative collaborations at work just to keep a seat at a table of power.
I know outsourcing your safety, worth, and wellbeing to others is humiliating and exhausting. If this is you, I want to share that the real reason you are addicted to people is not because you are broken. It is because trauma energies are running your internal system.
What you may not realize yet is that the path to stable, secure love is not another round of therapy, coping skills, or relationship hacks. The real work is learning how to release trauma energies for yourself. Until those trauma energies are released, your childhood trauma will keep acting as the matchmaker instead of your True Self. Training, not therapy, is required.
This graphic below shows the difference between unresolved CPTSD and resolved CPTSD. When trauma energies dominate your system, they create possession and the belief that it is not safe to be human. When Self Energies take the lead, sovereignty becomes possible. You gain the lived experience of being able to hold yourself steady, no matter what, and to trust that your safety, worth, and love come from within. This is the end of your people addiction.
You are not crazy. The ONLY THING WRONG WITH YOU IS THAT You are running trauma energies
that need to be released.
If this resonates with you, I invite you to learn more about Happily Ever After, my six-month signature healing container.
When trauma energies are running your system, it can feel like something not-you is in charge. This is what I call possession, and it is the fertile ground where people addiction grows. Isolation, fear, and overwhelm collide in painful ways that create blame, shame, and despair. Each is devastating on its own, but when they converge, the story hardens into something even darker. This is the challenging terrain where your healing journey begins.
At the core of sovereignty is the truth that you can hold yourself. Protection, expression, and alignment work together to create new states of being. When protection and expression meet, you feel free to be fully yourself. When protection and alignment meet, your focus strengthens on what matters most. When expression and alignment meet, life feels effortless, like flow. At the center of it all is sovereignty, the embodied capacity to source safety, worth, and love from within yourself. This is the opposite of people addiction.
Up to now, you have seen what possession looks like when trauma energies run the system, and what sovereignty feels like when Self Energies lead. The natural question becomes: how do you actually move from one to the other? This is the map I use to guide students through CPTSD Resolution, a process of releasing trauma energies while increasing Self Energies until sovereignty becomes your lived reality.
At the core of possession is the distortion that being human is dangerous. It is not only that relationships feel unsafe but that existence itself feels unsafe. When you cannot hold your own humanity, you hand your power to others. This can look like clinging to rescuers in relationships, submitting to systems that promise certainty, or disconnecting from your TrueSelf.
If possession shows us the cost of trauma energies running the system, sovereignty reveals what becomes possible when Self Energies lead. This is the lived experience of holding yourself steady and knowing your safety, worth, and wellbeing come from within.
Students often tell me they want to “finally get love right.” They long for a relationship that feels safe and lasting, instead of heartbreak after heartbreak. Quietly, many fear the opposite: that they will never figure it out and end up alone, or that they will compromise and stay in a relationship that drains them.
What I know, and what they rarely imagine, is so much bigger. You come to healing for love, but after resolution you realize love is no longer the center of your life. The very thing you once obsessed over loses its power. Love becomes a natural fact of life, not the prize you are desperate to win.
Your life itself feels rewarding, joyful, and whole. You wake up satisfied simply to be yourself, aligned with your medicine and your magic. From that rootedness, love may flourish, but it is no longer the goal. You become sovereign, grounded, free.
The truth is, your struggles in intimacy are not proof that you are broken. They are the natural outcome of unresolved trauma responses, patterns that coping skills and talk therapy can soothe but never resolve. What you really need is a path that unburdens trauma energies and amplifies Self Energy, so you can stop living as a trauma-shaped version of yourself and start living as your True Self.
And when you do, you discover the surprising outcome most people never imagine: you no longer chase love. Love becomes a natural fact of life, not the center of it. You become satisfied, sovereign, and whole, and from that wholeness the relationships you once longed for are finally possible.
