Why You Keep Choosing the Wrong People: Attachment Wounds Explained
If you keep finding yourself in relationships that leave you feeling unseen, anxious, smothered, or just plain lonely, take a deep breath. You’re not broken. You’re human. And likely, you’re acting out a pattern that started long before your first kiss.
You’re bright, successful, self-aware - and totally confused by your romantic patterns. If you’ve ever wondered:
Why do I attract emotionally unavailable people?
Why do I give so much and get so little?
Why do I shut down the moment things start to get serious?
Why does it feel hard all the time?
...then perhaps I can help you find some answers. The answer isn’t that you’re stupid or needy or too much. The answer, often, is attachment.
The Mystery of Repeating Relationship Patterns
Let’s normalize this for a second: smart, kind, insightful people can still make wildly confusing relationship choices. We all have seen it in other people too. The reason why…. because the emotional blueprint we work from in love (and platonic relationships) isn’t based on logic - it’s rooted in our nervous system and can be called your attachment style.
When the Relationship Was Truly Toxic
Let’s be clear: if you’ve been in a toxic or abusive relationship, it’s not your fault. Abuse is never justified, and nothing you did or didn’t do caused someone to mistreat you. You are only responsible for yourself. At the same time, healing often involves a period of self-reflection - not by blaming yourself, but by gently exploring why certain red flags might have felt familiar or even "normal." This isn’t about taking responsibility for someone else’s behavior. It’s about understanding your side of the pattern so you can break it, rebuild trust with yourself, and protect yourself to the greatest extent possible while moving forward. Healing doesn’t mean excusing harm - it means choosing to grow from it.
The Hidden Blueprint: What Is Attachment?
Attachment is basically your relationship framework. It guides how you connect with others, particularly when emotions are heightened through intimacy, stress, or vulnerability. especially when things get intimate, stressful, or vulnerable. We all develop an attachment style based on our early emotional environment. It’s not a judgment on your parents, less "Were my parents good or bad?" and more "How safe did I feel to be myself?"
Attachment as Nervous System Learning
Attachment is learned not just through words but through repeated emotional experiences. If love early in yout life came with expectations, if the affection your craved was only given rarely, if closeness felt overwhelming, or if your needs weren’t consistently met, your nervous system adapted.
These patterns didn’t come out of nowhere. They were your nervous system’s best effort to protect you. But they often show up later as:
People-pleasing or over-functioning
Fear of intimacy or chronic emotional distance
Push-pull behavior—wanting closeness, then panicking when it comes
Self-sabotage when a relationship feels too good
Here’s the important reframe: these behaviors aren’t flaws. They’re adaptations to your environment. They come from a part of you that is protective. They worked for you, at some point in time. And now… they may not work for you anymore. But that can change, through becoming more aware of them, self-compassion, and practice.
“Why Do I Keep Choosing the Wrong People?”
Your emotional self has memory. Your nervous system has memory. Those adaptations adopted in early life become the default pathway. They are not inevitable, but they are the well-worn path that your brain takes you down, particularly when under stress. They are familiar. But familiar doesn’t always mean safe. You may have been on repeat since childhood, trying to connect with emotionally unavailable partners, over-functioning, and low-key chaos. Familiar might feel oddly comforting - even if it’s not actually good for you.
Attachment wounds don’t always come from Big T traumas. You don’t have to have experienced huge losses or upsets in your childhood to have a wound. They come from those sneaky little moments that taught you:
"I’m too much"
"I have to earn love"
"I can’t count on anyone"
"Closeness comes with a cost"
These thoughts create an internal belief system that informs how you enter and maintain relationships throughout your life. And your caretakers had an emotional blueprint based on their past. And their caregiver too, over and over back into history. We don’t grow up in an empty box, and sometimes these attachment wounds can be traced back generations.
These patterns might show up as:
Anxiety when someone pulls away
Discomfort when things get too emotionally close
A fear of being abandoned or smothered, and sometimes both at the same time
Over-giving, over-apologizing, or going emotionally numb when things get hard
The Path to Healing
While these patterns are often so deeply ingrained they feel like a part of your personality, they can be challenged. This process involves building self-awareness around the patterns, learning to ground and soothe yourself without walking the ‘familiar’ path, and working hard to practice new ways of connecting in safe relationships. You don’t need to become someone else. You just need to get curious about the version of you that’s been protecting your heart all along. That first step of recognizing the pattern is critical. And without judgment, accepting what it is and why in order to let it go.
I plan to explore some of the most common attachment-based patterns I see in therapy in future blogs, in particular drawing out :
The People-Pleaser — loses themselves to avoid rejection
The Self-Saboteur — pulls away just as things get good
The Push-Pull Partner — craves closeness, then panics
The Intellectualizer — lives in their head to avoid vulnerability
Each post will explore, where these patterns come from, what they look like in dating and long-term relationships, and steps for healing and creating secure connections.
If this is something you’d like to explore, you can book a consultation.