Why You Are Still Dating People Who Hurt You

Stop trying to make the wrong people love you the right way. — Jazz Zo Marcellus

If you find yourself time and time again in toxic relationships, struggling with setting and preserving healthy boundaries, or if you are having serious commitment and trust issues, the chances are high that you have developt an inherent unhealthy attachment style or even an attachment disorder.

You have learned how your primary caregivers react and treat you. For example: When you cried to signal that you need something, what did they do? Did they do anything at all or left you sobbing?

This way, you discovered what approaches work best to survive and what’s just a loss of energy.

Negative experiences throughout our early childhood manifest as patterns. Often they get substantiated trough further bad experiences, resulting in unhealthy attachment styles that make it troublesome for you to find and create healthful relationships.

As long as you are not addressing your challenges, you will probably end up with another energy vampire, commitment-phobic, abuser — or whatever is your type — again and again. You will relieve your trauma and drama until you have learned your lessons.

But there is good news: Though it is hard work you can heal and earn a secure attachment style as an adult.

If you know yourself, it is much easier to reflect and operate upon your behaviours, patterns and preferences that — unconsciously — keep you searching for the same kind of injurious people.

The first, hardest, most influential and time-consuming step on this journey to overcome your unhealthy attachment style is to recognize, admit and understand it.

The impact of unhealthy attachment styles on our lives

Our attachment style determines our relationship with other people. We acquire it throughout childhood, and it continues to function as a working model in adulthood.

Children who are unable to develop a secure attachment style have to face a lot of insecurities and problems throughout their life.

Some of us look for toxic partners (friends, bosses) who treat us miserable, probably suffering different unhealthy attachment style or even psychological problem themselves.

Sometimes we can’t help but act like maniacs, too, if we are feeling miserable but can’t free ourself from the situation or relation. Occasionally, we even hurt others to be violated as a result again, too — just because we are suffering deeply already.

Deep down, we assume that we are not worthy of love or that we cannot trust other people in general, because everyone is going to leave us anyway.

We also tend to look for people who confirm our insecurities with their behaviours. This is how we inevitable create a self-fulfilling prophecy, that confirms our fears once again. In the worst case, this becomes a downward spiral that will not stop.

Attachment Styles

There are four attachment patterns. Sometimes they have slightly different names, but basically, they come with the same four different flavours. PhD Lisa Firestone summarizes them as follows:

Secure Attachment

Securely attached adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships. Children with a secure attachment see their parent as a secure base from which they can venture out and independently explore the world. A secure adult has a similar relationship with their romantic partner, feeling secure and connected while allowing themselves and their partner to move freely.

Anxious Preoccupied Attachment

People with an anxious attachment tend to be desperate to form a fantasy bond. Instead of feeling real love or trust toward their partner, they often feel emotional hunger. They’re frequently looking to their partner to rescue or complete them. Although they’re seeking a sense of safety and security by clinging to their partner, they take actions that push their partner away.

Dismissive Avoidant Attachment

People with a dismissive avoidant attachment have the tendency to emotionally distance themselves from their partner. They may seek isolation and feel “pseudo-independent,” taking on the role of parenting themselves. They often come off as focused on themselves and may be overly attending to their creature comforts.

Fearful Avoidant Attachment

A person with a fearful avoidant attachment lives in an ambivalent state, in which they are afraid of being both too close to or too distant from others. They attempt to keep their feelings at bay but are unable to. They can’t just avoid their anxiety or run away from their feelings. Instead, they are overwhelmed by their reactions and often experience emotional storms. They tend to be mixed up or unpredictable in their moods. They see their relationships from the working model that you need to go toward others to get your needs met, but if you get close to others, they will hurt you.

Why developing a secure attachment style is key

People with a secure attachment style learned when they were very young that they could rely on others to care for them. As children and later on, as adults, they are more likely to:

Have better self-regulation
Learn more easily and quickly
Show more persistence and ‘grit’
Succeed at creative tasks
Become part of strong social networks

Dr Phillip Shaver and Dr Cindy Hazan found in their research that only about 60 percent of people have a secure attachment style.

The other 40 percent have one of the other three unhealthy attachment styles.

The good news: You can heal and earn a more secure attachment style

The attachment pattern you have developed early on doesn’t have to define your way of relating to others for all of your life.

If you learn about yourself you can uncover a lot. You can unlearn your unhealthy habits, reactions, insecurities and triggers.

It is a long and challenging journey, but it is possible and it is worth it.

The first step is the hardest, but also the most important one

The first, hardest, most important and time-consuming step on your journey of recovery is to uncover und acknowledge that you are suffering from an unhealthy attachment style.

That is the necessary starting point. Your journey begins here. After you have achieved that you will be able to take deliberate steps to heal yourself.

You will realize that it is not about you or other people being inherently bad or worthless, or about whose fault it is. It is about a psychological pattern you suffer from, and other people do, too. And that something can be changed.

This realization enables you. It creates a lot of power, and hands the control back to yourself.

If you find yourself time and time again in unhealthy relationships and think your learned attachment style could be a reason for that, take this test as a very first step. It helps you to determine your patterns and learn about how it is affecting your life.

The result can serve you as an initial impulse and later as a pivotal point on your journey to healing.

There is no doubt; this journey will be challenging. You will have to work vigorously on yourself. But after you have pushed through, it will all have been worth, with your life evolving for the better as you let other kinds of people in, reflecting and adapting your behaviour, too. Some day you will experience your closest relationships as something that lifts and enriches you instead of dragging you down.

I don’t just believe that or have read about it; I have lived through this process and came out on the other side — stronger, more self-confident, happier and healthier than ever. If I can do it, you can do it, too.

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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.

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