It's become a bad habit.
Why do you keep dating losers?
There are four major concepts that could contain your sticking point.
- Repetition compulsion comes from early childhood. Our neurotic defense mechanisms try to rewrite history. Childhood wounds are trying to be rectified in adulthood.
- Trauma bonding stems from cycles of abuse where there are intermittent reinforcements of punishment and reward, creating powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change. The victim is worn down over time and becomes used to the cycle as "normal." You share similar trauma with your abuser.
- Co-dependency is the result of pain in adulthood that comes from being harmed in childhood. You attach yourself to external things for safety. You try to fix people in order to fix yourself.
- Attachment style has a spectrum of secured attachment through disorganized attachment. Only 65% of people are securely attached. There is disharmony when you have a clingy personality attached to a detached personality.
Interventionist Jane Mintz shares why you go for the wrong partner, time and time again.
Jane Eigner Mintz, MA, LPC, Chief Clinical Strategist and Crisis Intervention Specialist at Realife Intervention Solutions, LLC, is a thought leader and veteran crisis specialist that works with acute, reactive individuals and their family systems that suffer from a variety of addiction and behavioral health challenges. Jane is a licensed clinician with thousands of intervention cases under her belt.