Love, Conditioned: What Survives When We Stop Performing

By Jane Devyn

How do we love once we realize that love was the first thing we learned to perform?

We inherit our way of being close to others the same way we inherit posture-not through instruction, but through watching, adapting, and surviving. LOVE, CONDITIONED looks at what happens when the strategies that once protected us as children slowly become the walls that keep us apart as adults.

Through steady, unguarded poems, Jane Devyn traces the shape of learned love: the instinct to accommodate, the apology offered too soon, the quiet we mistake for peace. Not to glorify awareness, but to ask what it costs-and whether seeing ourselves clearly is enough to change anything.

We disappear in the very roles that once kept us visible.

Self-awareness without action can feel like watching your own patterns from the front row, unable to stand up or walk out.

This isn't recovery literature. It's an attempt to live honestly with what you've learned about yourself-without the promise that understanding will fix everything, only that it might open better questions.

For anyone who has spent years becoming fluent in other people's needs and is only now learning how to listen to their own.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GJTBKLRB
• ISBN13: 9798245459875
• Release Date: January 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"