Why Do I Keep Ending Up in Unhealthy Relationships?

This is often the entry point for people starting therapy as adults. They've had success in their careers, maintain good friendships, and feel generally satisfied with their lives, yet they repeatedly choose partners who aren't good for them. Sometimes they've given up on dating entirely because they find themselves attracted to people they know are unhealthy.

Many have years of therapy and considerable self-awareness, but the pattern persists. Why?

The Blueprint We Inherit

The short answer: You're choosing unhealthy partners because your blueprint for relationships was unhealthy.

The longer answer involves attachment, brain development, and years of reinforced relational dynamics. You can't discuss adult relationships without understanding attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth and colleagues (1978).

Understanding Attachment Styles

Attachment theory has become popular in recent years, but many people only scratch the surface of what it means. By the time clients come to work on this, they usually know their attachment style, social media has made terms like "anxiously attached" and "avoidantly attached" ubiquitous.

Here's a brief overview of the four main attachment styles identified by Ainsworth et al. (1978):

Secure Attachment: Formed with sensitive, responsive caregivers. Children trust their base, explore freely, and seek comfort when distressed.

Insecure-Avoidant: Children learn to suppress distress when caregivers are unresponsive. They appear independent but are emotionally detached.

Insecure-Ambivalent (Anxious): Inconsistent caregiving leads to unpredictable comfort-seeking. Children show distress upon separation but may resist comfort when reunited.

Disorganized Attachment: Often linked to frightening or inconsistent care (Main & Solomon, 1986). Children show contradictory behaviors, reflecting fear and confusion.

The Fundamental Distinction

Here's what most people miss: while we talk about four attachment styles, the most important distinction is whether you developed a secure base or didn't. The different insecure styles: avoidant, anxious, and disorganized, are different survival strategies children developed in response to different types of inadequate care."

This matters because 50-60% of people have secure attachment (Bakermans-Kranenburg & van IJzendoorn, 2009). That's good news: one pathway to healing insecure attachment is being in a relationship with someone securely attached. Unfortunately, those with insecure styles often seek each other out, choosing partners who mirror their primary caregivers. The pattern continues.

Why Knowing Your Style Isn't Enough

Understanding your attachment style is helpful, but knowledge alone won't heal attachment wounds. According to both attachment theory and contemporary neurobiological research (Schore, 2012; Cozolino, 2014), insecure attachment can only be healed through experiencing healthy, secure attachment relationships.

This could happen with a romantic partner, but since we're drawn to familiar patterns, we often don't get there on our own. This is where therapy becomes essential.

What This Looks Like in Real Life: Clinical Examples

Understanding these styles conceptually is helpful, but seeing how they play out in real relationships can be even more impactful. The following are composite examples (not actual individuals) but patterns I've observed across many clients over more than twenty years. Each represents common ways these attachment styles show up in adult dating life.

Caleb: The Avoidant Pattern

Caleb is a 45-year-old man who sought therapy because he's still single and wants a family. Although he says he wants to find a partner, he has trouble getting past three dates before finding someone incompatible. The women aren't smart enough, ambitious enough, or physically fit enough. The women he does start relationships with are much younger and not ready for a family, or they're long-distance, or married to someone else. These relationships are comfortably doomed from the start, so he'll engage for a while before ultimately breaking it off. When asked what type of person he's looking for, a long list of attributes comes quickly, but the list is so extensive he's made it statistically impossible to find what he wants.

In the therapy room, Caleb is asked to track his sensory responses as he goes on dates. The more he notices how he's feeling inside, the clearer the pattern becomes: he feels trapped, anxious. The activation grows until he leaves the date and is on his own again.

As he notices the panic, memories surface. Caleb begins revealing more about his childhood with an intrusive mother who treated him like the man of the house. He had no privacy, even as a teen, he wasn't allowed to shut his door. His mother was "too loving," inappropriately so, then used guilt to manipulate him into acquiescing. Caleb fears engulfment in relationships, so he either picks inappropriate partners or breaks it off with anyone who might threaten his autonomy.

He struggles with naming his mother's actions as inappropriate, often minimizing or rationalizing her behavior.

Caleb's work in therapy requires slowly acknowledging his mother's emotional manipulation and abuse. If he can see that this relationship was unhealthy, there's hope he can choose differently as an adult, someone who supports his autonomy. He'll need to learn self-support and boundaries before a relationship will feel safe.

Maya: The Anxious Pattern

Maya is a 38-year-old woman who comes to therapy frustrated that she keeps choosing men who are emotionally unavailable. She dates men who are dismissive, withholding, who pull away when she tries to get close. She feels chronically alone in her relationships, constantly wondering where she stands, checking her phone obsessively for texts that don't come. When her partner is distant, she becomes more pursuing, trying harder to connect, to prove her worth, to earn the love she desperately wants.

She knows these relationships aren't good for her. Friends tell her to leave. But she can't seem to walk away. There's always a reason to stay, maybe this time will be different, maybe if she just tries a little harder, maybe he's just stressed right now. The idea of being alone feels unbearable, so she stays in relationships that leave her feeling alone anyway.

In therapy, Maya talks about her childhood. She smiles as she describes being alone in the house for hours after school while her parents worked. "It was fine," she says. "I was independent. I didn't need anyone."

But as she tells these stories, I notice I'm feeling sad. Really sad. I share this with her: "I notice you're smiling as you share this memory of being alone so much as a child, but I'm feeling really sad hearing this. What's it like to hear me say that?"

She's confused at first. It was fine. She was fine. But as we explore this more, she begins to access something different. I ask her to imagine her younger self alone in that house. How did she feel? Slowly, she begins to touch the loneliness, the fear. She needed parents to care for her, to notice her, to make her feel safe and protected. No one modeled for her how to attune to herself or protect herself, so now she doesn't know how to recognize when someone isn't meeting her needs or when it's time to leave.

Maya is drawn to avoidant partners because on one hand, this dynamic is familiar, being alone while desperately wanting connection. On the other hand, she feels perpetually unsatisfied. The anxious-avoidant pairing is one of the most common in adult relationships: her pursuit activates his withdrawal, his withdrawal intensifies her pursuit. It's a painful dance where neither person feels safe.

Maya's work in therapy involves learning that her needs for connection aren't too much, that she deserves consistent love, and that being alone temporarily is less painful than being with someone who makes her feel alone all the time. She'll need to develop the capacity to self-soothe and reality-test, to ask herself, "Is this person actually available, or am I trying to earn love again?"

Sarah and Crystal: Two Faces of Disorganized Attachment

Disorganized attachment is the most complex style because it develops when a caregiver is both the source of comfort AND the source of fear. The child needs closeness to survive but finds closeness terrifying, an impossible bind with no solution (Main & Hesse, 1990). This creates contradictory survival strategies that can look very different in adult relationships. Disorganized attachment doesn't always look chaotic, sometimes it looks like an inability to recognize abuse.

Sarah: The Push-Pull Pattern

Sarah meets someone kind, stable, and genuinely interested. Initially, she's euphoric; finally, someone sees her. But as he continues being consistently available, she becomes increasingly anxious. She picks fights, accuses him of things he hasn't done, and suddenly ghosts him for days. When he stays and tries to understand, she's flooded with shame and confusion: "Why am I doing this? He's exactly what I said I wanted."

The unconscious logic: "If I let myself need you, you'll hurt me. Better to destroy this before you do."

Sarah's pattern is the classic presentation of disorganized attachment: intense longing for connection paired with terror of intimacy. She pursues connection intensely, then abruptly withdraws when her partner responds. She sabotages relationships when they feel "too good" because safety feels unfamiliar and dangerous. Her approach-avoid-chaos is the visible face of the impossible bind. She can neither get close nor stay away.

Crystal: The Freeze-Comply-Idealize Pattern

Crystal grew up with a mentally ill mother. She experienced verbal, physical, and psychological abuse by her mother. When she came to therapy, not only was she picking unhealthy partners, she was unaware these relationships were abusive. She idealized her mother and each person she dated. Because her mother was so volatile and unpredictable, the mandate she internalized was that she had to be very careful, walk on eggshells around everyone. While she chose people with different attachment styles, they were all abusive. She didn't know what a caring, healthy relationship felt like.

Crystal's mother was both the source of terror AND the only attachment figure, the same setup for disorganized attachment as Sarah experienced. But Crystal's survival strategy became freeze, comply, idealize rather than approach-avoid-chaos. Both are responses to the impossible bind of needing an attachment figure who is also the threat. For Crystal, the disorganization manifests as an inability to differentiate safety from danger. She stays in abusive relationships not because she's anxiously attached and fears abandonment, but because her attachment system never learned to recognize threat.

Therapy for Crystal would have to be slow. Since she entered therapy while still in a relationship with her abusive mother, trust would have to be built first. The safety of the therapy room would need to become a place where she could start to have some safety in her nervous system. She would need time to settle, to differentiate safety from threat. Eventually, the abuse of her mother would be made explicit, but because it was all she knew, it would take time for her to have other experiences to compare to.

These would be the building blocks for attachment. First in therapy, she could establish safety, then in friendships, then work, and finally in romantic relationships.

The Role of Therapy in Healing Attachment

As these examples show, therapy ideally provides a place to form healthy attachment and create a new relational blueprint. If you have attachment trauma, you need to work with a relational therapist. You cannot heal relationship patterns without being in a relationship.

The process begins simply: you talk about your daily life, gain insights, and slowly build trust. A good therapist offers unconditional positive regard (Rogers, 1957), consistency, and reflection, both of your words and their own internal experience.

How Therapy Creates New Relational Patterns

The therapeutic process recreates early mirroring you may not have received, as we saw with Maya. When a therapist asks "How does that make you feel?" they genuinely want to know. If you're unaware of your emotional reactions, the therapist might model this using their own experience:

"I notice you're smiling as you share this memory of being alone so much as a child, but I'm feeling really sad hearing this. What's it like to hear me say that?"

(This only works when authentic. No technique replaces a genuine, contactful relationship.)

Hearing about the therapist's experience might create cognitive dissonance or confusion initially. The therapist might ask you to imagine your younger self alone in that house and how she felt. Perhaps now you can access that sadness, feel protective of her. She needed parents to care for her, to feel safe and protected.

This is how therapy works with each pattern. For Caleb, the therapist stays present without intruding, respecting his autonomy while also gently challenging his isolation. For Maya, the therapist provides the consistent attunement she never had, showing her that her needs aren't too much, that she's worth staying for. For Sarah, the therapist stays consistent despite her push-pull, neither abandoning nor smothering her. For Crystal, the therapist will need to name abuse when Crystal can't see it, "When you describe him screaming at you and throwing things, I feel afraid for you. That's not normal conflict, that's abuse", teaching her nervous system to recognize the difference between safe and unsafe.

Why This Work Is So Difficult

For most of us who grew up with misattuned, neglectful, or abusive parents, we struggle to reality-test the gravity of their actions. We often disconnect or dissociate our pain from our parents' behavior because that protected the relationship. Our early relationships are vital, we cannot survive childhood without adult care.

Therefore, our unconscious strategy becomes: protect the parent's "goodness" at all costs, even if it means making ourselves the problem. This defensive mechanism (Bowlby, 1980; Fonagy et al., 2002) persists even as we age and gain insight, because holding parents accountable contradicts our basic survival instincts.

You see this with Caleb minimizing his mother's intrusion, with Maya insisting she was "fine" being alone, with Sarah unable to explain why she destroys good relationships, and with Crystal idealizing the very person who terrorized her. The attachment system is powerful; it kept us alive. Challenging it feels like challenging our right to exist.

But it can be challenged. With time, with a patient therapist, with the right relational experiences, new patterns can form. The blueprint can be rewritten.

If you already know your attachment style but find yourself stuck in the same patterns, it's time to do the relational work that actually creates change. Book a free consultation with one of our therapists to start building a new blueprint.

References:

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Erlbaum.

Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2009). The first 10,000 Adult Attachment Interviews: Distributions of adult attachment representations in clinical and non-clinical groups. Attachment & Human Development, 11(3), 223-263.

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1973). Attachment and loss: Vol. 2. Separation. Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss: Vol. 3. Loss. Basic Books.

Cozolino, L. (2014). The neuroscience of human relationships (2nd ed.). Norton.

Fonagy, P., Gergely, G., Jurist, E. L., & Target, M. (2002). Affect regulation, mentalization, and the development of the self. Other Press.

Main, M., & Hesse, E. (1990). Parents' unresolved traumatic experiences are related to infant disorganized attachment status. In M. T. Greenberg, D. Cicchetti, & E. M. Cummings (Eds.), Attachment in the preschool years (pp. 161-182). University of Chicago Press.

Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1986). Discovery of an insecure-disorganized/disoriented attachment pattern. In T. B. Brazelton & M. W. Yogman (Eds.), Affective development in infancy (pp. 95-124). Ablex.

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103.

Schore, A. N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22(1-2), 201-269.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. Norton.