LOVE. Why do I Keep Picking the Same Type of Person?

“He’s just like all the others–distant, only texting me when he feels like it, but then he says he loves me and I just feel so good.”

While the people we date may be different, we often find ourselves dating similar patterns. What’s funny is that we perceive the ‘bad boy syndrome’ is generalized to the public population. Why do all the women go for the bad boy? It may actually be more complex than that. Over the course of our adult lifetimes, including the time as children, we’ve developed styles of attachment to other human beings because at some points it was most beneficial for our survival (physically or emotionally) to do so. For instance, as a child we may have imprinted on our brain that our needs may or may not be met, so keep quiet and take care of it yourself and your mom will acknowledge “what a good girl you are. You’re so easy.” Now in moving forward, we try to apply similar strategies when we have emotional/physical and may not actually be to our benefit for creating healthy, long-term, relationships. As an adult maybe we downplayed our needs in order to ensure the person stayed or maybe it was the opposite and we got our needs met by creating screaming fits about how he/she is never there for us—which brought them to be there with us and pay attention to us.

GAH! So what do we do about this?

Here’s where power in the insight is the first step. In adult atta