“Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.” — Dr. Bruce Perry

The challenge of acquiring, maintaining, or even desiring healthy relationships after foster care is that many of us are neurobiologically inclined to accept unsafe or unhealthy connection simply because it feels familiar. And layered on top of that is the reality that relationships often feel fragile, like they are always one moment away from being lost.

In this deeply personal episode, Angie names a shared but often unspoken struggle among adults with foster care experience: the longing for connection alongside the fear of abandonment. Drawing from lived experience, trauma research, and faith, she explores how early relational ruptures shape the nervous system, distort our understanding of love, and make trust feel terrifying to extend.

Angie reflects on how inconsistent caregiving, repeated abandonment, and the absence of repair taught her body to stay alert. She traces how survival-based definitions of love, rooted in compliance and self-abandonment, followed her into adulthood and even shaped how she once perceived God.

This episode is for anyone who desires healthy relationships but feels overwhelmed by closeness, conflict, or vulnerability, and for communities seeking to understand how to create environments where trust can grow slowly and safely.

• Why trust can feel fragile after foster care
• How early relational trauma shapes the nervous system
• The difference between love and compliance, and connection and self-abandonment
• How distorted views of love impact adult relationships and faith
• What Scripture offers as a grounded definition of love
• How healing happens through safety, consistency, and healthy connection
• Why trust is not rebuilt through pressure, but through presence

Where have you learned to shrink, comply, or silence yourself in order to preserve connection, and what might change if love no longer required self-abandonment?

Connect with Angie via email: Hello@angelaquijadabanks.com Follow on Instagram: @angelaquijadabanks Subscribe to The Cozy Glow Newsletter for behind-the-scenes reflections and spiritual nourishment Explore healing and identity resources at AngelaQuijadaBanks.com