When Love feels Safer to Lose than Keep

Sometimes the people most afraid of abandonment become the ones who sabotage love first.

I was born in the Philippines and came to the United States when I was about two years old to be adopted. Growing up in suburban Wisconsin, I wasn’t particularly close to the few Asian peers I knew. I quickly adopted the norms of middle-class Midwestern life: “Midwest nice,” nuclear family values, and the protective narrative surrounding adoption.

Around first grade, the “what ifs” began.

What if my mother looked like this?

What if I had been stolen instead of relinquished?

What if I was unlovable, and that’s why my parents couldn’t keep me?

During my early childhood, I was sheltered beneath what many adoptees call the “adoption umbrella.” I was accepted in my community. Everyone in town knew the three adopted kids. Adoption was viewed as something beautiful, something that had given me a better life. On the surface, there wasn’t much room to question that narrative.

But adoption didn’t just affect my childhood. It shaped the way I understood safety, conflict, attachment, self-worth, and eventually, intimacy.

When your first attachment rupture happens before you can even speak, your nervous system learns lessons that your adult mind may not fully understand for decades.

One of the greatest dialectics in adoption is nature versus nurture. While my home life looked typical from the outside, I witnessed firsthand how grief and trauma can reshape an entire family. Shortly after I arrived in the United States, my uncle died by suicide following a terminal illness diagnosis. My father often shared that my mother was never the same afterward.

The loss of her brother became a wound she carried for the rest of her life.

At a very young age, I learned how to be emotionally safe for others before I learned how to be emotionally safe for myself. I became independent out of fear of creating additional hardship for my family. Over time, I learned how to tolerate unhealthy dynamics. I became afraid of vulnerability. I perfected people-pleasing. I constantly felt like a burden. I lived with the belief that I was either “too much” or “not enough.”

By middle school, I had become increasingly curious about the unanswered questions surrounding my adoption. Around the same time, my parents told my brothers and me that they were getting divorced.

This was also when I began emerging from what many adoptees call “the fog.”

For adoptees, coming out of the fog means becoming conscious of the deeper losses and traumatic implications of adoption. Some describe it through the acronym FOG: Fear, Obligation, and Guilt. I started asking difficult questions.

If adoption is so beautiful and life-saving, why do I carry so much fear and anxiety?

My parents ultimately divorced, and I wholeheartedly believe it was the right decision for both our family and their relationship. Yet the years that followed were complicated, particularly my relationship with my mother. Unfortunately, she passed away last February.

The years surrounding the pandemic brought some of the most difficult seasons of my life. Through all of it, my husband stood beside me.

He supported me through my lowest lows. I was irritable, detached, reactive, grieving, and emotionally raw. Yet he never wavered. Together, we navigated not only my mother’s death but also the loss of his father four years earlier.

Then came another challenge.

Complications from my autoimmune disease landed me in the hospital for over a month.

Through every crisis, my husband showed me what unconditional love actually looked like. He cared for me, continued providing for our family, and remained a devoted father to our children.

His love reminded me of something my father once told me. He said that his divorce had been a blessing in disguise. Had my mother never filed for divorce, he likely would have stayed despite years of struggle. He would never have found the happiness he has today.

Ironically, that realization triggered something in me.

I began to wonder if my husband would be happier without me.

Like my adoption story, I convinced myself that loving someone meant letting them go.

So I began sabotaging the relationship.

It wasn’t a test to see whether he would stay. I already knew he would. Seventeen years together had proven that.

Instead, there was a part of me that genuinely believed that sparing him from me was an act of love.

I’m not trying to romanticize that belief.

It was an attempt to unburden him. In my mind, it was the ultimate demonstration of how deeply I loved him.

Many adoptees, myself included, internalize sacrifice, loss, and separation as forms of love. We confuse self-abandonment with protection. We mistake distancing ourselves for caring for others.

The trauma responses rooted in our adoption stories don’t just affect us. They affect the people we love most.

True intimacy—especially emotional intimacy—requires unlearning survival strategies. It requires self-awareness, acknowledgment, accountability, and the willingness to remain present when every instinct tells you to run.

Adoption is often discussed as a childhood event. It isn’t.

It is a lifelong relational wound. An interpersonal experience that continues shaping how we connect with ourselves and others.

What I eventually had to accept was that explaining behavior is not the same as excusing it.

Healing required recognizing that my nervous system was trying to protect me with strategies that no longer protected anyone.

Many adoptees who have come out of the fog are relearning worthiness. We are learning that conflict is not abandonment. We are learning that disappointment is not rejection. We are learning that love does not have to be earned through suffering.

Today, I am choosing honesty over self-protection.

I am learning to listen to my hurt parts instead of letting them drive the car.

The goal is no longer to survive relationships.

The goal is to fully participate in them.

To stay.

To trust.

To believe that I am worthy of being loved—not despite my wounds, but alongside them.

Because healing isn’t proving that you’re lovable.

Adoptee’s need to stop believing you are fundamentally “too broken” to fully love safely.