How you find the people who help you continue your unhealthy patterns.

If you were raised by a parent who depended on you emotionally, how do you end up with a partner you have to take care of?

If you were raised in a home with physical violence , how do you end up with a partner who might beat you?

If you were raised by alcoholic or parents with addictions, how do you end up with a partner who struggles with or might later struggle with alcoholism?

There are cues that lead you to partners with whom you can perform your childhood role.

Your attitude towards partners who are healthy and less needy or not as abusive as you are accustomed to, determines how you choose partners like your parents. People who relate with you in a healthy way are unfamiliar and not challenging. They do not give you the "job" to fix

While the partner you choose is not exactly like your parents, we refer to them as such because in a relationship with them, you are able to feel the same way you felt in childhood while facing the same challenges you encountered while growing up.

You repeat the same strategies you adopted in childhood that are familiar, and these are what constitute love to you. Even though these strategies might be uncomfortable and might not have worked in your childhood, you feel a sense of belonging with someone who seems to "know" and understand you. This is why you might want so much to make the unhealthy relationship work.

Your lover allows you to experience the same emotional pain and turmoil, helplessness from childhood, and they feel like a good fit. If you have a lot of pain from childhood, you will be even feel more inclined to renact and master that pain as an adult. You renact your childhood pain and try to resolve it.

As a child experiencing pain , this pain will appear reccurently in your activities until you master the experience. Watch how children play with other children. For example, if you were told to stop crying and grow up, rather than engage in conversation to resolve issues, you might have developed coping strategies to supress your emotions, and therefore avoid any healthy conflict resolution engagements.

You might therefore not respond positively to any suggestions to resolve conflict, because there is nothing for you to fix. You use your protest behaviours and cause chaos when someone tries to resolve conflict in a helpful way.

You end up gravitating towards people who do not open up to conflict resolution, or those who use manipulation to resolve conflict, so that you continue to renact your childhood. At the same time, you are hoping that you can resolve your pain in the people you meet. This is what you know.

You might decide that you do not want a certain type of unhealthy relationship partner. Yet, you end up going back to this same person or similar, due to familiarity and the desire to fix. We have people who call people they live with names, and we wonder why they still live with them or even want them after a break up. This is why....through the life skills that they have attained, this partner or ex feels right to them subconsciously.

Partners that fit like a jigsaw puzzle

1. A person who feels like a victim and an aggressive person prone to controlling tendencies

2. A cruel partner meets a self-sacrificing martyr.

No matter how much you might try to shy away from your childhood, your relationships will bring attention to it.

What to do

1 Identify your self-sabotage patterns and begin to change behaviours.

2. Recognise feelings associated with your behaviour using SIFTSEM tool on Amazon.

3. Start self-care to invest in yourself.

4. Heal your inner child.