An old proverb says, “The burnt child dreads the fire.” Once hurt, we learn to stay away from whatever hurt us.
Except human beings do not always work like that.
The title of French artist Dora Jeridi’s Autumn 2026 exhibition at Boesky Gallery in New York turns the proverb on its head: A Burnt Child Loves the Fire. Jeridi borrowed the inversion from Oscar Wilde, and it stopped me in my tracks because, psychologically, it describes something I have seen repeatedly over more than twenty-five years of working as a therapist.
Sometimes the burnt child does not dread the fire. Sometimes the burnt child grows up and keeps finding it. Not because they want to suffer. Not because they are weak, foolish or secretly attracted to being treated badly.
It can happen because what was once frightening also became familiar, and the human nervous system has an extraordinary capacity to confuse what is familiar with what is safe.
What does “a burnt child loves the fire” mean psychologically?
Jeridi’s exhibition is not a psychological thesis, and I do not want to impose one upon her work. Her paintings draw upon memory, cultural heritage, family history and domestic interiors while allowing something darker and more unruly to disturb those apparently familiar spaces.
But her title offers a powerful metaphor for something we know about human behaviour.
A child who grows up surrounded by unpredictability has no alternative childhood to compare their own to. If love arrives alongside anger, withdrawal, criticism, instability, addiction, emotional absence or sudden changes of mood, those experiences can become intertwined.
The child adapts. They learn to notice tiny changes in atmosphere. They may become exceptionally good at reading faces, voices and silences. They learn when to placate, when to disappear, when to perform and when to make themselves useful. They may become the funny one, the successful one, the quiet one, the responsible one, or the child who never asks for anything.
These are not necessarily conscious decisions.
They are adaptations to the emotional environment in which the child is developing.
Years later, the environment has changed, but some of those responses may remain.
This is where things become complicated.
Why do people repeat painful relationship patterns?
As adults, we understandably imagine we choose relationships based on what we consciously want. Kindness. Reliability. Affection. Mutuality. Respect. Yet attraction is not a job interview.
Something can happen beneath conscious reasoning. An emotionally inconsistent person may create a peculiar sense of recognition.
Someone difficult to please may feel compelling.
Someone affectionate one day and unavailable the next may generate an intensity that a consistently available person does not.
Calmness can even feel suspicious.
I have worked with people who could identify an unhealthy relationship perfectly well. They were not lacking insight. They could describe the pattern, understand where it came from and sometimes predict exactly what would happen next.
And still they went back. That is one reason I am wary of explanations that imply people stay in destructive relationships because they haven’t understood what is happening.
Often they understand it extremely well. Understanding and emotional change are not always the same thing.
When chaos feels more familiar than calm
Imagine growing up in a house where you never quite knew which version of a parent would walk through the door. Nothing catastrophic necessarily had to happen. Childhood distress doesn’t always arrive as one enormous event. Sometimes it consists of thousands of smaller experiences of uncertainty.
Is Mum all right? Is Dad angry? Have I done something wrong? Why has nobody spoken for two hours? What can I do to make things better? The developing child becomes practised at anticipation.
Then imagine that child thirty years later meeting somebody unpredictable. Consciously, they may hate the uncertainty. Their body, however, recognises the territory. Waiting for the message. Wondering what they have done.
Feeling enormous relief when affection returns. Trying harder when it disappears. Experiencing reconciliation as an extraordinary rush of closeness.
The relationship can become intensely compelling precisely because distress and relief repeatedly follow one another. The fire is painful, but it is familiar.
What is a trauma bond?
The expression “trauma bond” is now used so casually online that it risks losing its meaning.
A trauma bond is not simply a very strong attachment to somebody with whom you have had difficult experiences. The term is generally used to describe a powerful attachment that can develop within an abusive or coercive relationship, particularly where mistreatment alternates with affection, reassurance, remorse or periods of apparent safety.
That flip-flop of emotion matters. If another person were consistently unpleasant from the first meeting onwards, most of us would have relatively little difficulty avoiding them.
Intermittent warmth is different.
There is hope. The good version of the person keeps returning. When it does, the relief can be enormous. That relief can then be mistaken for evidence of the relationship’s depth.
It is one reason the question, “Why don’t you just leave?” can be so spectacularly unhelpful. Leaving may make complete intellectual sense while simultaneously provoking powerful emotional responses.
Are we trying to repair the original relationship?
An appealing psychological theory suggests we recreate unfinished childhood relationships because we are unconsciously trying to achieve a different ending.
There may sometimes be truth in that, but I think we should be cautious about turning it into a universal explanation. People do not necessarily seek replicas of difficult parents because some hidden part of them has devised an elaborate plan to heal childhood.
A simpler explanation can sometimes be more useful. We recognise what we know. If love historically required vigilance, striving or uncertainty, effortless affection may initially lack emotional voltage.
If being needed was once how you secured connection, somebody who needs rescuing may feel more attractive than somebody capable of standing securely beside you. If you spent childhood trying to win approval from an emotionally unavailable person, being instantly liked by an emotionally available adult may feel surprisingly uninteresting.
None of this means a person is doomed to repeat their childhood. It means some emotional learning can survive long after the circumstances that created it have disappeared.
Why insight alone may not break the pattern
This is the part that particularly interests me as a therapist. Someone can spend years understanding their childhood and still experience the same visceral reaction when a partner withdraws. They know they are safe.
They know they do not need to chase. They know this relationship resembles previous ones. They know the other person’s behaviour is not acceptable. And their whole system is screaming at them to do something. Send another message. Explain themselves better. Make peace. Apologise. Go back. Get reassurance.
That apparent contradiction makes much more sense when we stop assuming every emotional response comes from conscious thought.
Some responses have become automatic. You cannot necessarily reason an automatic emotional association out of existence simply because you now understand its origins.
How can therapy help change repeated emotional patterns?
For me, effective therapy is not about persuading somebody that their childhood was terrible or encouraging them to blame their parents indefinitely.
Nor is it about telling an adult what sort of relationship they ought to choose. The interesting question is what happens internally when the old pattern is activated now. What does rejection produce? What happens when somebody withdraws? What does silence mean?
What happens in the body when somebody is displeased? What makes the unavailable person so compelling? What does dependable affection feel like?
Sometimes the surprising answer to that last question is: uncomfortable. Therapeutic work can then focus on the emotional responses and beliefs that still operate automatically, rather than endlessly rehearsing the history. The aim is not to erase the past. It is to stop the past being the automatic go-to in every present relationship.
Where Orpheus can fit into this work
This is also where I see a potential role for the Orpheus therapeutic process alongside the other approaches I use.
Orpheus uses short structured audio processes designed to work with unwanted emotional responses and beliefs that continue automatically even when someone consciously wants to feel or respond differently. Some of the work can be done content-free, so a person does not necessarily have to repeatedly describe distressing experiences in detail.
In the context of repeated relationship patterns, I would not use Orpheus to tell somebody that a relationship is wrong, nor would I describe it as a treatment that simply “breaks a trauma bond”.
The work is more precise than that. We can identify what is being activated. It might be the panic associated with somebody withdrawing.
It might be the unbearable feeling of rejection, the compulsion to make contact, the belief that being abandoned means being worthless, or the sense that another person’s displeasure must be repaired immediately.
Those are different targets. Working with the automatic emotional charge can create space between the trigger and the familiar response. The person can then discover what they actually think and want when they are no longer being propelled so forcefully by an old emotional pattern.
That distinction matters because therapy should increase choice, not replace the therapist’s judgment with the client’s.
Breaking a trauma bond is not the same as becoming indifferent.
People sometimes imagine that healing means looking back at somebody they once loved and feeling absolutely nothing. I do not think that is necessary. You can miss somebody and still decide not to return. You can love somebody and recognise that living with them is damaging. You can remember the extraordinary moments without using them to cancel out everything else.
Perhaps one of the clearest signs of change is when emotional intensity stops deciding for you. The fire may still exist. You just no longer have to walk into it.
Can a familiar relationship pattern really change?
Yes, but recognising the pattern is only the beginning. Understanding where our responses came from has enormous value. Insight can replace shame with comprehension. It can reveal that apparently irrational adult behaviour once had a perfectly intelligible context. But there is another stage. The nervous system has to discover that the old response is no longer required. Calm has to become tolerable. Reliability has to stop feeling dull.
Another person’s disappointment has to become survivable.
A delayed message has to become a delayed message, not evidence of impending abandonment. Love has to become separate from uncertainty.
That is deeper work than simply promising ourselves that next time we will choose differently.
Which brings me back to Dora Jeridi’s extraordinary title. A Burnt Child Loves the Fire. Perhaps some burnt children do. But not because burning is what they truly want.
Sometimes we return to emotional fires because, somewhere along the way, we mistook their heat for belonging.
Therapy can offer something more useful than another warning to stay away from the flames. It can help make the fire feel less like home.
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