3 Reasons You Keep Repeating the Same Relationship Patterns |
No one enjoys suffering. People who persistently find themselves in relationships with emotionally unavailable partners aren’t ending up there because they like neglect or because they gravitate toward chaos. And yet, so many of us look back at our romantic history with that same horrible sense of déjà vu.
After a certain point, it gets hard not to internalize this repetition as a personal flaw. We ask ourselves, “Why do I keep ending up here?” or, “Why does this keep happening to me?” And, often, we reach for moral answers about our poor judgment, low self-worth or invisible baggage. In fairness, those explanations do occasionally contain a kernel or two of truth. But, for a vast majority of people, the primary driver of these repeated patterns isn’t that we lack self-respect or intelligence.
According to psychological research, these patterns are most likely a byproduct of your nervous system’s preference for what it already knows. Here are three reasons why this leads us to choose partners that aren’t good for us.
One of the strangest yet most enduring truths in psychology is that familiarity can feel safer than happiness. In this sense, when a relationship dynamic resembles something we’re already acquainted with, it registers as known territory first, and as something unpleasant second. As counterintuitive as this sounds, research on trauma bonding helps to explain why this........