CNN published a great article yesterday in their living section. The article pretty much summarizes everything I tell my clients about why they end up in bad relationships and what to do about it.
In essence, people tend to attract partners who are very much like their parents, specifically the opposite sex parent. If your opposite sex parent was loving and supportive, if the relationship with that parent was wonderful, then you are very likely to attract wonderful relationship partner(s).
On the other hand, if your opposite gender parent was emotionally unavailable, or critical, controlling, etc, you are very likely to have a negative relationship pattern and attract partners who cause you grief and pain.
Here are the reasons the CNN article lists for why people tend to attract partners who are like their opposite gender parent and my explanation:
• “Comfort in familiarity – that feeling of knowing someone your whole life”
People with traits similar to your opposite gender parent may feel familiar to you. You may not realize that this feeling of familiarity is not a good thing. It may feel comfortable, but it’s not a good kind of comfort in the end. It’s comfort in knowing that you will experience a very familiar kind of pain.
• “Wanting to resolve the parental relationship in relationship/marriage”
Parents who are less then loving leave behind life-long wounds in their children. These wounds may be well hidden in all areas but love relationships. That childhood pain wants to be resolved, which is why people often choose for partners people who will reject them or hurt them the same way their parent did. The unconscious hope is to overcome the rejection and to MAKE this person love you, so that the childhood pain can be finally healed.
• Working through family history in relationship/marriage
Similar to above, people will often attract partner who are like their parents in order to come to terms and learn to survive that kind of pain. It’s as if they are reliving their childhood, but this time they think they will overcome, heal and that will somehow set them free from the early-in-life pain.
Keep in mind that these three reasons are often subconscious. No one who has had less then stellar relationship with his or her opposite gender parent goes out and finds a partner like him or her on purpose.
Never the less, it would be safe to say that if your relationship with your opposite sex parent was less then great, you are nearly doomed to attract less than great relationship partners. At least that’s where the CNN article leaves it’s readers. The solutions for how to deal with this very real dilemma of attracting the wrong type of partner are, well, weak. They are: Don’t jump in, Don’t be afraid to disagree, Talk about life issues.
Let me tell you, you don’t need to know what to do when you once again attract the wrong partner. If you attract partners who cause you pain, what you need to do is learn to recognize your relationship pattern, learn to recognize potential partners who fall into that pattern, before you get into a relationship with them, and say no. And then you need to break your pattern, learn to attract a completely different partner and live happily ever after.
Let’s start here. I have created an ebook called PatternTracker to help you discover your relationship pattern. You can purchase the PatternTracker by clicking here. It’s only $15 and truly is an investment in you. If you diligently answer all the questions in the eBook, your relationship pattern will become obvious. Knowing what you keep repeating is the very first step to freedom from it.
Next, you need to know that even thought relationship patterns are natural and built in, breaking them, attracting partners who are not like your opposite gender parent is possible. How? It requires coaching, and the right kind of coaching.
I can’t exactly spell it out for you, because the process is somewhat different for each person. I am not trying to hide it, I wish I could lay it out to help you do it yourself. Breaking your relationship pattern is such deep and profound work, there’s pretty much no way to do it yourself effectively. But I can say that this is exactly the kind of work I do with clients in coaching – I fix their broken partner picker.
The process takes about six months of weekly coaching sessions and work between sessions on the client’s part. It’s definitely a time and financial investment. But in the process the clients gains the freedom from automatically attracting unhealthy partners and having bad relationships and starts to automatically attract loving, nurturing partnered. And that is priceless!
Please know that you very likely do have a relationship pattern, that it very likely has something to do with your childhood and parents and that you can figure out what it is, with help. And that you can change it and have the love you want, if you are willing to work on it.
