When Calm Feels Uncomfortable: On Chaos Addiction and the Cycle of Emotional Abuse

About two years ago, I sent an email to my coach trying to make sense of a dynamic that didn’t sit right. I went back and reread it recently. I had written about the pattern I was seeing in my relationship — the push and pull, the tension, the constant undercurrent of something being off. And when I sat with it again, I realized: what I was describing wasn’t confusion. It was clarity. I was naming the Cycle of Abuse.

I had said, “It almost feels like he’s addicted to the chaos of it.”

And I meant it. There was never just a normal day. There always had to be something — a misunderstanding to fix, a feeling to decode, a tone to analyze, an argument to resolve. There were almost no stretches of quiet. If things were too calm, something would erupt.

It felt like he could not control it.

If you’ve been in a relationship where peace feels like a threat — where your partner seems to need drama to stay engaged — I want you to hear this: you are not crazy and you are not imagining it. This pattern isn’t about communication issues or emotional differences. It’s about emotional instability being engineered as normal.

And it’s not an accident.