What You’re Really Chasing When You Chase Someone
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Clayton Leavitt is an attachment-based coach and counsellor who helps people uncover and transform the emotional patterns shaping their relationships. His work blends attachment theory, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and emotional intelligence to create deeper self-trust and connection.
There's a particular kind of pain that comes from wanting someone who keeps pulling away. You reach out. They go quiet. You try again, more carefully this time, more thoughtfully worded, at a better moment. Still, the distance doesn't close the way you need it to. From the outside, this looks like love. From the inside, it feels like love, urgent, consuming, and full of meaning. But there's something worth looking at closely here. What we call love in those moments and what is actually happening beneath the surface are often two very different things.
What the chase actually is
When someone you care about creates distance through withdrawal, unavailability, inconsistency, or simply going quiet, something activates in the nervous system. Not gradually. Fast.
Attachment researchers call this the protest response. It's the nervous system's mechanism for restoring threatened connection, and it has deep evolutionary roots. For a young child, maintaining closeness to a caregiver wasn't a preference. It was survival. The protest response existed to make sure that closeness was restored as quickly as possible. Reach out. Signal distress. Do whatever it takes to bring them back.
That response was intelligent. In the context in which it developed, it worked. The problem is that it doesn't stay in childhood. It transfers into adult relationships, where the nervous system continues to respond to distance, even ordinary, benign distance, as if something essential is at risk. The urgency that rises when someone pulls away isn't proportional to the actual threat. It's proportional to what distance has historically meant.
So the chase begins. But here's what's worth sitting with: the chase, at its core, isn't really about the other person. It's about regulation. The nervous system is dysregulated, activated, alert, and scanning for threat, and it has learned to regulate itself through the proximity of another person.
The pursuit isn't driven by love in the fullest sense of the word. It's driven by the need to restore internal equilibrium through an external source. This doesn't mean the feelings aren't real. They are. But feelings and their source are not always the same thing.
The absence of self-love underneath the chase
If you could fully regulate yourself, if your sense of okayness didn't depend on their response, the chase would lose most of its grip.
This is the self-love dimension that rarely gets named clearly enough. Not self-love as affirmation or bubble baths or positive thinking, but self-love as the capacity to remain on your own side regardless of what someone else is doing. To have a stable enough internal foundation that you don't collapse when someone goes quiet. To be able to sit with discomfort without immediately moving to resolve it through someone else's behavior.
When that internal foundation isn't there, when the nervous system has never developed the capacity to regulate itself through uncertain periods in connection, another person becomes the regulator. When that person becomes unavailable, the entire system destabilizes.
The chase is what a destabilized system does. It's the system doing what it learned to do when the ground beneath it becomes unsteady.
Self-love, in this context, is the slow and often difficult process of building that ground from within. Not to become someone who doesn't need others. That's not the goal, and it wouldn't be healthy if it were. But to develop enough internal steadiness that the need doesn't become desperation, that the reaching doesn't become grasping, and that the love you have for someone doesn't require their constant reassurance to remain intact. That's a very different way of loving. It starts with a very different relationship with yourself.
Why healthy love can feel like nothing
Here's the paradox that doesn't get talked about enough. The person who chases most intensely is often the person least able to receive love when it's offered freely.
Not because they don't want it. They do, deeply. But because freely offered love, consistent, uncomplicated, and available, doesn't activate the nervous system the way anxious love does. It doesn't produce the same urgency, the same aliveness, or the same consuming sense of meaning.
Healthy love can feel quiet to someone whose nervous system was calibrated to uncertainty. It can feel flat. Even suspicious. The absence of the chase, the absence of the push and pull, the highs and lows, the hunger and the relief, can register as the absence of love itself.
This is one of the most painful and least acknowledged aspects of anxious attachment. The very thing being sought, genuine, stable, reciprocal connection, can feel underwhelming when it arrives. Not because it isn't good, but because the nervous system doesn't know what to do with something it has no template for.
Inconsistency produces intensity. Intensity gets mistaken for depth. So the relationships that feel most like love are often the ones least capable of sustaining it.
The person who is warm sometimes and distant at other times, who gives enough to keep you engaged but not enough to let you settle, isn't offering a richer relationship. That's a nervous system being kept in a state of chronic activation. Chronic activation, when it's what you've known long enough, starts to feel like home.
What the chase is pointing toward
There's a reframe worth offering here, not to dismiss the pain of the chase, but to offer a different lens for what it might mean.
The intensity of the pursuit isn't a character flaw. It isn't evidence that you love too much or too desperately. It's evidence of a nervous system that never developed the internal resources to regulate itself through uncertainty and that learned to seek those resources in the responsiveness of another person.
That's a wound, not a weakness. Wounds heal differently than deficiencies get fixed. Healing in this territory isn't about caring less. It isn't about becoming harder or more detached or learning not to need people. It's about gradually developing the internal capacity that should have been built earlier, the capacity to stay with yourself through the discomfort of not knowing without immediately moving to resolve that discomfort through someone else's behavior.
It's about learning to turn some of that relentless outward reaching energy inward. Not in a self-absorbed way, but in a genuinely caring way, extending to yourself the same attention and concern you so readily extend to the people you're chasing.
It's about slowly developing the capacity to receive what healthy love actually offers. To let consistency land without suspecting it. To tolerate the quiet without interpreting it as distance. To stay present with something good without waiting for it to become uncertain again.
That last part is the hardest because the nervous system doesn't update its expectations quickly. It needs repeated experiences of safety, small, accumulating experiences of closeness that don't rupture, before it begins to believe that things can be different. But they can be.
The chase points toward something real: a deep capacity for connection, a hunger for intimacy, and a willingness to move toward people even at the risk of pain. Those aren't things to be extinguished. They're things to be redirected toward relationships that can actually hold them and toward a relationship with yourself that doesn't require someone else's proximity to remain intact.
That's what's really being chased underneath everything else. Not the person, but the feeling of being okay. That feeling, it turns out, was always an inside job.
Where to begin: Building the internal ground
If this is resonating, the natural question is, what does this actually look like in practice? How do you begin building the internal capacity that the chase has been trying to find externally? A few entry points are worth exploring.
Somatic awareness
The chase almost always begins in the body before it becomes a behavior. There's a tightening in the chest, a restlessness, a sudden urgency that arrives before any conscious decision.
Learning to notice that physical signal, to name it rather than immediately act on it, creates a small but significant pause. In that pause, choice becomes possible. The practice isn't suppression. It's recognition. What is my body doing right now, and what is it responding to?
Self-inquiry
When the impulse to reach out or pursue arises, a simple question can redirect the energy: What do I need right now that I'm trying to get through this person? The answer is often something like reassurance, safety, or a sense of mattering. Naming what you actually need, rather than channeling that need into pursuit, begins the process of turning the outward-reaching energy inward.
Heart brain coherence
One of the most direct ways to regulate the nervous system in real time is through heart brain coherence practice, a technique that involves slow, rhythmic breathing focused on the heart center, combined with the intentional cultivation of a positive feeling state such as appreciation or care.
Research from the HeartMath Institute has shown that this practice shifts the autonomic nervous system from sympathetic activation toward a more regulated, coherent state. For someone in the grip of the protest response, activated, scanning, and reaching, even a few minutes of coherence practice can create enough internal steadiness to respond rather than react. This is the inside job made practical.
Titrated exposure to healthy love
When healthy love does show up, consistent, uncomplicated, and available, the tendency is to dismiss it as underwhelming or to move past it quickly. The practice here is deliberately slowing down and letting it land. Notice the small moments of genuine connection. Stay present with them rather than scanning for the next uncertainty.
The nervous system updates through accumulated experience, and these small moments of allowed safety are the raw material of that update.
None of these are quick fixes. They are practices, things that build over time with repetition and patience. But they point in the same direction: toward a relationship with yourself that doesn't require someone else's proximity to remain intact.
Deeper understanding and real change can begin there.
Read more from Clayton Leavitt
Clayton Leavitt, Attachment-Based Relationship Coach and Trained Counsellor
Clayton Leavitt is an attachment-based coach and counsellor who helps people understand and transform the patterns shaping their relationships. His work blends attachment theory, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and emotional intelligence to support big lasting change. Through his writing and coaching, he creates a space where people can begin to see themselves more clearly, feel more deeply, and relate with greater authenticity. His work is rooted in the belief that when you understand your patterns, you can transcend them and create something new.
References:
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
