Are You Attracting Love or Just Repeating Your Trauma?

Are you sure you’re in control of your love life?

Or is it possible you’re repeating one relationship over and over again?

I know you think you might’ve outgrown certain patterns by dumping an ex or setting higher standards, but unless you’ve directly challenged your old habits, toxic patterns, and lingering traumas, you probably haven’t changed as much as you think you have.

Thus, setting higher and higher standards each time might work, but this is more like getting prescribed an increasingly higher dosage of medicine as your body builds tolerance — all for an illness you haven’t directly treated.

What I’m trying to say here is simple: most people don’t actually choose their partners.

Their past does it for them.

The anxious-avoidant cycle: the most common type of toxic relationship

By far, one of the most prevalent dysfunctional relationship patterns is the anxious-avoidant trap.

Colloquially, and in everyday conversations, we don’t call it that. However, this is essentially what’s happening.

It’s a manipulative game where anything goes, and nothing is “off the table,” so to speak.

The anxious partner uses their avoidant lover as a blank canvas for all their fears, hopes, and dreams, believing that their partner can finally make them feel happy and whole.

Meanwhile, the avoidant uses their anxious partner as a proxy, rather than confronting their own childhood issues concerning their parents, paints them as the villain and the source of all their stress and anxiety.

Then the avoidant distances themselves from the relationship.

In short, it’s a toxic back-and-forth that often ends in heartbreak.

Neither person is actually present in the relationship. They’re just two actors unknowingly replaying old attachment wounds.

Both people believe the other person is the problem.

The endless pursuit of happiness is why people keep looking for the wrong thing

I’ve noticed that a lot of people get into relationships so that they can “feel happy.”

But what does that even mean?

I bet you if I asked a hundred people what “happiness in a relationship” meant for them, I’d get a hundred different answers.

And “happiness” is going to vary wildly even between the two people in the same relationship.

Plus, I’d be a lying hypocrite if I said I hadn’t tried to use love, sex, dating, or relationships to make me feel happy or more complete.

It’s even more noticeable when people use relationships as a means to achieve happiness, given how often they abruptly end.

The thought process: It’s not making me happy, so it must be the wrong one.

But it’s ridiculous to expect another human being to be your never-ending source of happiness. It just won’t work.

Happiness ebbs and flows.

If you chase happiness instead of compatibility, this is how you end up partner-hopping because feelings change, emotions fluctuate, and things won’t always be static.

4 keys you can use to unlock real love and ditch the toxic relationships for good

Once you can drop your ego and admit that you’re drawn to the same toxic relationships, it’s time to pause and look inward.

1. What triggers your relationship choices?

Identify your attachment style and what triggers you.

Fear of abandonment? → Anxious

Fear of losing control or independence? → Avoidant

Knowing what they are will give you a good clue as to what attachment style you likely have.

This is the first step toward change.

From here, your options open up dramatically once you understand what triggers you and how to manage it. Because without this self-awareness, you’re going to just continue repeating the same bad habits.

2. Build self-sufficiency

Relationships are meant to be a conscious choice, not a need. Nor an obligation.

People often justify jumping into relationships with the excuse, “But humans are wired for connection.”

That’s true… but it doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to trade loneliness for toxicity.

But the problem is that many couples confuse having needs in a relationship with needing a relationship.

For example, you might need clear, consistent communication from your partner to continue staying in a relationship with them.

Yet you don’t need a relationship to continue on living.

So consider a “need” more like a requirement to participate in something optional.

Needs should be requirements for a relationship to work, not just reasons to have one.

If you feel like your “needs” are overriding your rational decision-making, consider sitting in the discomfort.

Because the less you rely on someone else to “complete” you, the more likely you are to choose people from wholeness.

For example, if you’re an avoidant, and you often “need” to pull away and distance yourself, sit in the discomfort of the situation.

And this works for anxious attachers as well.

Common situation: You’re dating someone, and they don’t text you back for hours.

• If you’re anxiously attached, your immediate response is probably going to be something like double or triple texting “Hey, are you okay?” and then convincing yourself they’ve ghosted you.
• If you’re an avoidant, you react to all the triple texting by withdrawing emotionally. You might think, “This is just way too much effort and I’m sick of dealing with this,” and completely check out.

Both responses are rooted in unhealed or overactive attachment patterns, not mature, rational decision-making.

In that scenario, you need to:

1. Notice the trigger. One person feels abandoned; the other person feels overwhelmed.
2. Pause. It’s easier than you realize to simply refrain from sending that message. And ignoring all the crazy thoughts in your head about an exit strategy.
3. Stay in it as long as possible. Let the physical discomfort pass without reacting to it. Over time, this builds tolerance and helps break out of the cycle.

3. Develop empathy:

A majority of us would go so much further if we stopped to think about this for five minutes.

Avoidants and anxious attachers seriously suck at empathy.

APs are too caught up trying to get someone else to fulfill their needs and not realizing that other people have lives outside of them and the relationship.

Avoidants are often too self-absorbed and fail to see that their partner just might be feeling lonely and frustrated because they won’t invest in the relationship like they said they would.

In short:

Not everything is about you.

Taking space isn’t always rejection, and asking for more effort isn’t always some kind of attempt to control or manipulate.

4. Address any lingering emotions

Unprocessed emotions remain trapped in your body energetically.

This energy shapes your behavior, which shapes your reality. (And that means it influences who you attract — and who’s attracted to you)

Most people don’t know this, and they try to outsource their emotional regulation to someone else. This dire need to pair up with someone is often an elaborate and complicated form of distraction from inner turmoil.

You have options here:

• Self-reflection
• Therapy
• Mindfulness

The main goal here is to transition upward into higher emotional frequencies. It might sound a bit too “out there,” but what I mean by this is honestly quite simple.

Emotional states are a result of remaining stuck in one particular state of emotion for longer than necessary.

Most human beings remain trapped in the following competitive low-vibe states (Descending from highest frequency to lowest frequency)

• Anger
• Desire
• Fear/anxiety
• Grief
• Apathy
• Guilt
• Shame

As a result of being stuck emotionally like this for months (often years even), we tend to get addicted and even used to certain low-vibe emotional frequencies.

To let go, you need to physically let the emotions pass, as I previously described in the last section. If you’re interested in reading more, you can click here and read this article on letting go.

Thus, we tend to attract people in a similar emotional state.

I used to find myself in these kinds of paradigms with my girlfriends:

• Unhealed grief and phantom exes
• Anger and neglect
• Anxiety and confrontation

Final thoughts,

If you keep repeating the same toxic dynamics, you have to be honest with yourself.

The common denominator is you. Not them.

While that might sound like a bad thing, it’s actually not. It’s the best news you could hear, because now you know you have the freedom to make the change.

Because you have complete control over your behavior. You can change.

You have the power to change.

You can set boundaries with your future partners, but you don’t have to set unrealistically high standards just to avoid further pain and toxicity.

If you need guidance on setting boundaries and communicating with avoidants, I built this 13-page PDF on this topic that you can find here.

It’s been a highly effective tool to use in the dating world when everything these days is unpredictable. But with this guide, you will know how to respond when someone tries to push your limits and ask for too much.

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