Why do I always attract the wrong type of people?
Always find yourself with the wrong type of person? Maybe you’re in a cycle of meeting the wrong person, falling in love and being hurt - there’s a pattern of going after the wrong person, but you can’t get out of it.
It’s not your brain that’s in charge here, it’s your unconscious attraction.
What is Unconscious Attraction?
I asked the amazing Dr Tari Mack, Clinical Psychologist and Celebrity Relationship Expert, about this. She explains “Unconscious attraction means that, even though consciously we can say what kind of partner we want, unconsciously, we are drawn to the same types of partners based on our childhood experiences, roles, templates of love and traumatic experiences.
There are two types of unconscious attraction. The first type says that we choose people who reinforce how we feel about ourselves. So the extent to which we value ourselves, we know our worth. We love ourselves and treat ourselves with compassion. We will be attracted to partners who do the same or vice versa.
The second kind of unconscious attraction says that we choose partners who help us recreate our patterns, roles, templates from childhood.
Both of those come into play when we're talking about this issue, which is that if we tend to always end up with emotionally unavailable partners, that means that there is a part of us that is emotionally unavailable.”
So What is Emotional Availability?
Emotional availability again, is on a spectrum. Like most things are, but really it means that you know yourself well enough that you can be authentic and honest about who you are, how you feel, what your preferences are, what your story is.
It means you can be vulnerable with safe people and you can tolerate, or even enjoy deep, emotional connection and intimacy.
You can only be as emotionally connected to someone else as you are emotionally connected to yourself. So many people have very superficial relationships without realising it because they are not tuned in emotionally to their internal world experiences, feelings or needs. Without being tuned in emotionally, you can’t bring that to a relationship.
Often, we had an idea in mind of what we want from a partner. They have to be tall, they have to be rich, they have to like music, whatever it is. Actually there is this layer below it, which is that, is this what you actually want? Or is this what you have been conditioned to believe? What I think we are missing in today's society is that even when people think that they are emotionally in tune or connected with themselves, often what they're connecting with is deeply ingrained beliefs and conditioning, as opposed to the truth.
A huge part of emotional availability is being able to be honest in the moment in the relationship with your partner and what gets in the way of that is fear. It’s fear of the other person’s reaction, fear of abandonment or rejection, fear of really being seen.
Many of us have never been in relationships where we've really been our authentic, true selves, because there are parts of us that do not believe that we are lovable. All of this goes back to childhood, depending on the amount of mirroring you got from your parents, which is your appearance reflecting back to you, who you are, what gifts you bring to the world, to the family and whether it was accurate mirroring, or was it mostly negative or critical, or was there just not any mirroring?
That's another big piece of emotional availability. There can be people that are open to love. They're very empathic. They want a relationship, but they're people pleasers. And in that way, they are not being honest with themselves or with the people that are close to them. They're too busy trying to get the other person or other people to like them.
If you think you have to earn love, what that means is you are unconsciously attracted to people who don't just give it to you, which means that they are inconsistent.
How to Change Your Unconscious Attraction
Unconscious attraction tends to follow patterns, and the first step is to acknowledge your own personal patterns. Everyone’s patterns are different. Everyone has different stories, conditioning and beliefs, but once you have awareness of those beliefs you can start to be more conscious of it. When you are aware of what’s going on, and you know this isn’t the guy you should be going after, for example, you can start to work to break your own cycles.
Dr Tari explains “until you start working on it, you're going to keep doing the same thing and getting the exact same result. It's just how it's going to work. Knowing that sometimes gives people motivation to lean into the uncomfortable, because awareness is the first step. Once people become aware of their unconscious attraction, if they do the love assessment and I tell them, this is who you're wired to be attracted to and why. And that alone starts to shift a little bit. It's still a trigger. You still get activated to some degree by the same partners, but it's leaning into the discomfort of knowing that you have to do it differently in order to change the course of your life and of your relationships.
If you are trying to change your unconscious attraction, and let's say you're not working with a coach or a therapist that gets this concept, do not ask your friends for their opinions or their advice, because they will give you the shittiest advice. It’s not because they don't love you, but because they don't understand. And that's not what you need.
They don't have the same lens. They don't know what your specific is that needs to be shifted.”
Changing your unconscious attraction isn’t an overnight thing, and it starts with small steps of awareness and small steps of action. It’s those micro decisions we can make that will take us towards a different outcome. Those small decisions are where we can start to break down the conditioning that we have.
How Do You Know If You’re Healing?
You’re healing when their inconsistency is unattractive.
As Dr Tari says “as we become more connected to ourselves, our feelings, our needs, our preferences, our experiences we don't find it attractive when other people can't connect with us in that way. Because we're changing our brain. We're changing our nervous system every time we show up for ourselves. As we learn to love and soothe and pay attention to ourselves, that's us becoming more emotionally available with ourselves, coming more into alignment. We then only want relationships that match. When we are out of touch with ourselves and we're focused on the external, like the hotness of somebody or the chase or getting that external validation, we are ignoring our own internal experience for the most part.
So as we come more in touch with ourselves, we only are attracted to people who have that ability and who are in touch with themselves.”
That's the part that I want people to understand when we say that you are attracted to emotionally unavailable partners, because there's a part of you that is emotionally unavailable.
If you resonate with this, what are the fears there? What are those parts of you? Does it relate to feeling unworthy, feeling like you're too much, feeling like you're not enough, feeling like nobody could ever really stick around if they really knew you - whatever fears are driving, that's where you need to start, because you're never gonna have a real relationship that goes the distance and helps you actually feel loved. We can't feel loved if we don't show our full selves. You can’t feel loved if you don't learn how to be more available emotionally with yourself.
As human beings, we all have this deep rooted belief that we are not really lovable, that we're not really worthy and that if we look prettier or we look skinnier or we make more money, then may someone will choose us. But the truth is we are all so chooseable just the way we are.
So I think my takeaway here is that it's out there. It's for you. It's waiting for you. You just need to break the cycles.
