You’re intelligent, self-aware, perhaps even someone who’s read all the relationship books and knows what healthy love should look like. Yet somehow, you keep choosing partners who leave you feeling unseen, unimportant, or abandoned.
You wonder what’s wrong with you. Why can’t you choose differently?
Maybe you’ve noticed a pattern: you’re drawn to people who are emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, or who pull away just when you start to feel close. You know it’s not good for you. You can see it coming. Yet something in you keeps reaching for the same type of person, hoping this time will be different.
The truth is, this isn’t about intelligence or self-awareness. It’s about something much deeper, something that has nothing to do with being broken and everything to do with being human.
Key takeaways:
- You’re not choosing poorly because you lack intelligence or self-awareness. You’re choosing what your younger self learned to call love.
- These patterns are rooted in childhood attachment wounds and unmet needs — they’re adaptive survival strategies, not character flaws.
- Breaking this cycle requires more than insight. It involves embodied healing work that helps you feel safe in your own body and rewire what feels like home.
- Individual therapy provides a safe, supportive space to explore unconscious patterns and heal the wounds that drive them.
Table of Contents
Why This Keeps Happening (It’s Not What You Think)
We’re drawn to what feels familiar, not necessarily what’s healthy. This is one of the most important things to understand about human relationships.
When you were young, your brain learned what love looked and felt like based on your early experiences with caregivers. If those experiences involved inconsistency, emotional distance, or neglect, your nervous system wired those patterns in as “normal.” As an adult, that wiring doesn’t just disappear.
This is sometimes called repetition compulsion: the unconscious drive to recreate early relational dynamics in our adult relationships. It’s not about masochism or poor judgment. It’s about your brain seeking out what feels recognisable, even if it’s painful.
If your early caregivers were emotionally unavailable or unpredictable, your system learned to associate love with anxiety, pursuit, or uncertainty. A partner who is secure, consistent, and emotionally available might actually feel uncomfortable: too calm, too predictable, even boring. Because they don’t match your template for what love feels like.
It’s not that you’re making a bad choice. You’re choosing what your younger self learned to call love.
The Role of Unmet Childhood Needs
Unmet needs in childhood (whether that’s emotional neglect, abandonment, or inconsistent care) create unconscious blueprints for adult relationships. Part of you is still hoping to get it right this time, to finally be chosen, valued, or seen by someone who reminds you of the original wound.
This is an adaptive survival strategy, not a character flaw.
In my practice, I see this pattern frequently, and it’s not limited to any particular type of person. Some of the most intelligent, accomplished, self-aware people I work with struggle with this exact issue. If anything, I’ve noticed that highly intelligent people often feel even more shame about it because they believe they “should know better.” But intelligence doesn’t protect you from unconscious patterns formed in childhood. Understanding this can bring real relief.
Many people find themselves drawn to partners who withhold affection or pull away when intimacy deepens. Often, this mirrors an early experience of a caregiver who was warm one moment and distant the next, or who was physically present but emotionally absent.
Your younger self is still trying to get the love it needed. That’s not something to be ashamed of; it’s something to understand.
The painful irony is that the people who feel most “right” to you are often the ones who activate your oldest wounds. The spark, the chemistry, the intensity you feel with certain people isn’t always about genuine connection. Sometimes it’s your nervous system recognising a familiar pattern of longing and uncertainty.
Why Self-Awareness Alone Isn’t Enough
Here’s the frustrating part: you can know all of this intellectually and still find yourself making the same choices.
“I know this pattern, so why do I keep doing it?”
Insight lives in the thinking brain, the part of you that can analyse, reflect, and problem-solve. But attraction, safety, and relational patterns are governed by deeper, older parts of your brain: the limbic system and nervous system. These parts don’t respond to logic. They respond to what feels familiar and safe, even if that “safe” involves pain.
You can’t think your way out of an emotional pattern. You have to feel your way through it.
What It Takes to Choose Differently
Breaking this pattern isn’t about “choosing better.” It’s about healing the wounds that drive the pattern in the first place.
This work involves several layers:
Understanding your history. You need to make sense of your early attachment experiences and how they shaped your template for love. What did you learn about relationships from your family? What did you learn about your own worthiness of love and care?
Learning to notice when old wounds are driving current choices. This means paying attention to what draws you to certain people. Is it genuine compatibility, or is it the familiar discomfort of longing for someone who can’t fully meet you?
Building tolerance for relationships that feel different. Secure love can feel unfamiliar at first, even uncomfortable. It doesn’t have the drama, intensity, or urgency you might associate with connection. Learning to stay present with a partner who is emotionally available requires you to tolerate a different kind of feeling in your body.
And this is where the deeper work happens.
Healing isn’t just a cognitive process. It’s an embodied one. You can understand your patterns intellectually, but real change happens when you learn to feel safe in your own body. This means connecting with the younger parts of yourself that experienced the original hurt and abandonment: not just thinking about them, but sensing them, feeling them, being with them.
Much of this work involves helping your nervous system learn that you’re no longer in the situations that created those early wounds. It’s about creating a sense of internal safety so that secure relationships don’t feel foreign or wrong.
You can’t rush this. Grieving what you didn’t receive as a child is part of the process. So is learning to sit with discomfort when a partner shows up consistently, without the push and pull you’ve come to expect.
Choosing differently requires you to feel safe with someone who doesn’t activate your old wounds, and that can feel deeply uncomfortable at first. Breaking this pattern isn’t about willpower. It’s about rewiring what feels like home.
Why This Work Is Best Done with Support
These patterns are unconscious, emotionally rooted, and often wrapped in shame. That makes them difficult to work through alone.
Individual therapy offers a safe space to explore these wounds without judgment. It’s a place where you can begin to understand the deeper drivers of your choices, connect with the younger parts of yourself that are still seeking repair, and learn to inhabit your body in a way that allows for healing.
This isn’t something you can “fix” through willpower or self-help books. The work requires a relationship (a therapeutic one) where you can safely explore your patterns, feel your feelings, and gradually build new templates for what love can be.
You don’t have to keep repeating this pattern. And you don’t have to figure it out alone.
If you recognise yourself in this pattern, individual therapy can help you understand what’s driving it and begin to heal the wounds beneath it. You deserve to choose relationships that feel safe, not just familiar.
If this resonates, I’d welcome the chance to talk with you about how therapy might support you in breaking this cycle.
Do You Need Relationship Help?
Contact Clinton Power + Associates on (02) 8968 9323 during business hours to discuss your situation and find out how Clinton’s counselling services can help, or book an appointment online now.
Since 2003, Clinton Power has helped thousands of couples and individuals as a counsellor and psychotherapist in private practice in Sydney and online in Australia. Clinton regularly comments in the media on issues of relationships and has appeared on Channel 7, The Sydney Morning Herald, and ABC Radio. Clinton’s eBook, 31 Days to Build a Better Relationship is available through his website or Amazon. Click here to take Clinton’s relationship checkup quiz to find out how well you know your partner.
