This piece was originally published on Substack and is shared here as part of the Sensual Institute’s body of work.
Feeling love-starved even when life looks full on the outside? Through a nervous-system lens, this piece talks about how inconsistent presence and emotional attunement lead the body to adapt by numbing longing rather than risking pain. It introduces a gentle path back to nourishment through awareness, safety, and embodied reconnection.
You can be surrounded by people, touched often, partnered, praised, productive…and still feel something in you shrinking from the inside.
A quiet emptiness.
A slow dimming.
A subtle tightening around the places where warmth should land.
People assume love-starved means lacking romance, or intimacy, or closeness.
But your body defines love differently.
To your nervous system, love is presence.
Consistency.
Attunement.
A rhythm you can trust.
And when that rhythm is missing, or unreliable, or only available in small unpredictable doses, the body recalibrates.
It stops reaching.
It stops asking.
It stops expecting to be met.
Not because you don’t want love.
But because somewhere inside, you learned that wanting meant waiting, and waiting meant pain.
So your system found a workaround.
It made numbness efficient.
It made low-grade longing livable.
It taught you how to function on emotional crumbs, calling it independence.
But here is something most people never tell you:
Being love-starved doesn’t make you unworthy.
It makes you adaptive.
Your body protected you with withdrawal.
Your heart protected you with silence.
Your chemistry protected you with minimal production of hope.
You survived a drought by lowering your desire for water.
And yet the truth quietly remains:
you were built for deeper nourishment.
Not intensity.
Not chaos.
Not grand gestures.
Just steady warmth.
Just consistent presence.
Just enough softness that your body remembers what it feels like to be received instead of tolerated.
If you feel the tug of this
that faint ache that says “I want more, but I don’t know how to want it safely”
you’re not regressing.
You’re thawing.
You’re coming back to the part of you that still believes in being held without having to earn it.
Slowly.
Gently.
At the pace your body trusts.
And if you want a small doorway into that return, a way to begin meeting the places inside you that stopped expecting nourishment…
I created something for you. A 7 day journal called Love starved.
And i’m giving you first chapter, its 4 prompts, and an audio guided body practice that help the words land in your nervous system .
Free, so you can feel what you’re stepping into before you say yes to anything else.
The link is below:
