Cults, Murders, and the Horrors of Love: The Dark Truth About Attachment Styles

I was still tender from the loss of my son-dog. And I was also trying to piece myself back together after the end of a significant relationship — I had given everything I possibly could, and then some. My mom, who is 89, had just fallen and broken her hip (and we all know how things tend to unfold from there). As if that wasn’t enough, an unbearable wave of heat had descended on my little beach town.

 I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to feel. I just wanted to disconnect, cuddle my chihuahua, and vanish into something mindless with AC. So, I prepared for a full heartbreak lockdown: popcorn, spicy Doritos, KitKats, mezcal, tissues — and subscriptions to HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. I canceled clients, bailed on social plans, and gave myself permission to take as many days as I needed. I was ready.

I first turned to cult documentaries — they never cease to surprise me. Not because it shocks me that people sign up for that, or because the cult leaders are evil, but because sometimes I catch myself believing some of the things they preach. And then I start spiraling… wondering if maybe I have a little cult leader living inside me, or if my teachers have somehow brainwashed me.

The pain started to resurface. (Where is my avoidance when I need it most!?).

I moved on to serial killer stories. They don’t just give me temporary relief; they also offer the chance to feel anxious about something other than my next steps in life.

Eventually, I got bored and figured I should be a little kinder to my subconscious—give it a bit of hope, fantasy, and maybe even a few smiles. I started watching a romantic series about relationships and dating. After everything I’d been watching, this felt like an innocent little binge.

At first, it was just mildly sad. I hugged my chihuahua and enjoyed my snacks. But then I started noticing things—subtle dynamics between the couples that made me squirm a little. 

By the middle of the series, I felt a heavy weight pressing on my shoulders and tension crawling through my whole body. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was officially terrified.

How weird was this? To realize that, these days, love and relationships are scarier than cult leaders and serial killers. And I don’t scare easily—neither on Netflix, nor in life, nor in love.

Maybe—just maybe—what I was watching could explain all this anxiety and avoidance bubbling up in my life and in my clients relationships.

Time for full disclosure. When I needed a break from cults and killers, I was deep in YouTube spirals about dismissive avoidant and anxious attachment. I was just trying to make sense of what had just happened in my own relationship.

So, there I was — chihuahua in one arm, notepad in the other — upgrading my binge-watching into full-blown field research. And what the actual fuck was I seeing?

People cutting each other off like they meant nothing. 

People using one another like they had no hearts.

People labeling others the moment discomfort arose.

People going through life with a distorted sense of self-importance.

Relationships treated as mere transaction instead of love,

A world where emotional needs are inconvenient — dismissed, rejected, or pathologized. 

Where depth is a liability.

Where connection is a contract. 

Where everything soulful — reciprocity, tenderness, compassion— is stripped down.

Love, reduced to a lifestyle accessory for a perfect Instagram reel.

This wasn’t romance or love. This was a horror show.

The Endless Friends telling friends to leave someone because they’re not enough.

And that — ugh, that. Nothing was ever enough for anyone.

Not the love.

Not the care.

Not the good sex, not the good looks, not the millionaire lifestyle, not even the devotion. 

Nothing could pierce the void.

No one stayed long enough to build anything real. It was one relationship death after another — and then, the worst part: they got up, dusted themselves off, and did it again. Like zombies. Like love’s walking dead.

So much grief. So much loss. So much devastation.

Love was murdered. Every. Single. Episode. It was a massacre.

I just had to lie down on my belly and cry. Not just because I missed having someone special in my life, but because I felt this overwhelming hopelessness — not only for me, but for all of us. All the humans on this planet, trying to love.

Eventually, I wiped my face, made myself a well-deserved coffee, and crawled back to YouTube. I wasn’t sad anymore — I was just completely drenched in guilt and shame; it was pumping through my bloodstream mixed with coffee. Guilt and shame for being a terrible, fearful, anxious, disorganized, avoidant twisted little person traumatized in childhood with so many wrong patterns replaying in her love life.

And then — a moment of sheer clarity.

What if a big part of what we’re calling “attachment issues”  — is actually just wounded responses to a horrific relationship culture that is extremely unsafe, unloving, unforgiving, and transactional?

In that kind of world…

 Of course, people go avoidant — shutting down, protecting their hearts. 

Of course, people go anxious — clinging to crumbs, fearing abandonment. 

These aren’t disorders.

These are coping strategies in a culture that doesn’t always honor connection and that is really terrifying.

My body began to remember all the moments in which it started to armor itself. Fearing that thing that we call love but has actually nothing to do with love.

Now I was feeling so much rage. For me, for you. For all those lost relationships and for our collective pain. This has to stop. We have to get this through our heads: it’s not us. It’s this culture, this system.

It keeps bugging me — we're questioning economic systems, political systems, healthcare systems, but why haven't we questioned the outdated, toxic, almost untouchable status quo of traditional romantic structures?

Traditional relationship rules were never built for our growth or expansion. They were built to control, to shame, to guilt-trip, to make us fear.

They were designed to make us feel inadequate, incomplete. To divide us and watch us fail over and over with their unrealistic, rigid standards.

How can we trust the frameworks around love that were built by a system that knows nothing of love?

Why are we still playing by these rules?

Sadly, we've all unknowingly joined the cult of transactional love, and with it, we’ve murdered love. It’s devastating.

But darling — I say this to you and to myself — all those broken relationships, it wasn’t about you or them... it was about that. This is not an individual pathology; it’s a systemic and cultural failure. Of course, it’s easier to blame us than to face how much suffering the system has inflicted upon us.

You are not wrong. You are not broken. And your desire for love is not wrong. But maybe it’s time to start questioning the frameworks we’ve been handed and create one that’s more in tune with your true self. We need to become radically critical of the narrative this system is feeding us because — and trust me, all the stats back this up — it’s not helping us love in the way we’re meant to.

There is a way out. There is hope.

We can create a new, conscious, loving paradigm — one where love is rooted in kindness, connection over obligation, and natural reciprocity instead of transactional dynamics.

A world where everyone gets to feel like they are enough.

And it starts here: recognizing that we all want this. We all deserve better.

No matter how deep the indoctrination runs, we can free ourselves — and begin building something more beautiful, more real, together.

This is our love revolution.