I posted this quote on Instagram.
“The subconscious will pick a partner who feels like home. If home wasn’t pleasant, neither are they. Eventually, we grow up and leave home. This is when we come home to self.”
I created that quote when I was reflecting on relationships. If you guys watch my channel often, you know I love talking about highly sensitive people, but also attachment trauma, love addiction and all that kind of stuff. I, myself have gone through many of the things that I talk about and my clients have gone through the other things and I tend to just dive in and feel into the experience and get new insight.
So, that’s what I share here if you’re new to my channel. On the subject of relationships and attracting, you know I have multiple clients who come to me that say, “I don’t know why I keep attracting this thing, it brings up this childhood stuff dah dah dah dah. Why am I just attracted to these types of people? Why can’t it be attracted just look normal, boring whatever healthy… or healthy which is not boring, I’m just saying.”
I say there’s a couple of different reasons. The first main reason that we attract people who may not be good for us is probably because it’s resembling something we came from. The familiarity quotient is huge and so often we disregard that. We don’t realize that our inner self, our subconscious is attracting things that remind us of previous experiences or our perception of previous experiences. So, that’s why often times people, especially therapists will say that we date our parents… one or the other, especially the one we had trauma with, because we’re really trying to still work that out.
If our mom or dad never gave us the love that we needed or you know weren’t emotionally available, chances are we will attract an emotionally unavailable partner, because that subconscious need is still trying to be met. Meaning? If I can get someone that’s unavailable emotionally to finally give me an emotional connection, then I heal my childhood wound. But that’s not how it works.
In fact, what actually is happening in these circumstances is that we attract the emotionally unavailable partner and we get so sort of re-wounded. It’s almost like the original wound pops up again to be healed and we get so frustrated that we either leave that relationship and do it again or we finally wake up and we realize that we are never going to get our emotional needs met by an emotionally unavailable person like mom or dad.
So, maybe we can be that emotional intimacy for ourselves. Maybe we can finally wake up and realize that we don’t need a savior, but we will need to save ourselves. And what that looks like sometimes is having the boundary around understanding that this person just isn’t capable even though that hurts our inner child.
As children, we can’t conceptualize the fact that a parent might not be emotionally available. I’m just using this as an example. We make it our fault. What can I change so I can get my needs met? How do I make mommy or daddy happy, because if they’re happy then they’ll provide and then my needs will be met? And we do this in our relationships a lot and what we start to realize is… we don’t need that person to fulfill that need to survive, but we do need ourselves to be with ourselves to survive. And we keep rejecting ourselves or abandoning ourselves thinking that someone else is gonna come in and save us. We are in essence rejecting ourselves again or abandoning ourselves again for the love of someone else.
So, I was saying this because we often recreate the original scenario. Our idea of love is actually the love we had in our home. If our home was broken, our love will be too – our love relationships. If our home was toxic love, so will our relationships. 99.9% of the time, until we start to wake up to ourselves and to understand how to love ourselves and heal ourselves and fill ourselves – that’s a big piece.
The second thing I want to talk about, which has been coming up a lot in my work lately is Attachment Trauma. I have this new client who is 58 years old. I love her. She’s gorgeous and brilliant, and amazing, and she’s just not feeling confident. It’s really the first time in her life that she’s been in a relationship with someone that’s actually got a healthy secure attachment style. She has a very insecure attachment style. And so what’s interesting is when we are insecurely attached, we often attract other people a lot of the time for a lot of years.
We’re also not attached in the secure way and the reason we do this is because that sort of unhealthy attachment feels safe for us, because we know that they’re not healthy as well. Unconsciously, we know this or subconsciously we know this and so we know that it’s almost like this push-pull addiction, love addiction like we know they’re never gonna get over us. And so we feel safe in that. But that’s not healthy and it’s not real and it’s not real love. But it feels like real love, because it’s the only love that we know. It’s what our attachment style has attracted.
What’s interesting with this client is this man that she loves, that she has attracted into her life, because she’s done some healing work is securely attached and she gets extremely triggered by him, because he doesn’t have an attachment trauma. He doesn’t have to know where she is every five minutes or texting her all the time. He doesn’t have to be that way. So, she feels less secure. What’s interesting and perfect about this relationship?
Before I go into that, I want to just mention that the reason people who are insecurely attached have issues with healthy mates and usually don’t attract them until they’ve done some inner work is because the mate is not going to play those games. The mate doesn’t have the same types of coping mechanisms that the insecurely attached person has, which is why we usually keep attracting or feeling attracted to people who have the same unhealthy attachment style.
But what I wanted to go into with her is the major gift in this man for her, because he’s not going to fuel her old patterns. He’s not going to allow old behaviors of this coping mechanisms and she’s almost being forced into being healing with this person. So, our sessions are very much about healthy attachment style and why it’s so triggering and how to be with the part of herself that is so triggered and to welcome it back home.
So, I want to go back to this quote that I created really quickly, because I have something else to say about it.
“The subconscious will pick a partner who feels like home.” Now, that means subconsciously and it means it’s an attraction sort of feeling.
“If home wasn’t pleasant neither are they.” In the beginning, it feels really exciting and like… “Oh this is gonna be my healing,” but really it’s just another wounded soul that we’re gonna do a dance with for a little bit until we heal ourselves.
“Eventually, we grow up and leave home.” This is when we come home to ourselves when we start to finally realize that we deserve healthy love. And maybe we don’t know what that looks like yet, but we know we have the desire.
That’s the moment where we start to learn how to have that courage to come back to ourselves and the way we start to come back to ourselves is really outing what we’re feeling. I’m getting real about what I feel, but now I’m gonna act on behalf of that – not act crazy. But you know what? This is what I need. I need you to just stop doing that behavior for a while, because it’s triggering me. I know it’s crazy, but it is a trigger and I’d really love for you to be on board with, supporting me with that.
So, instead of saying, “God I should be over this by now” or saying, “You know what, I’m not though and I’m working on it.” And what do I need right now, because when we say I shouldn’t be where I’m at and I shouldn’t feel things and this attachment, shit’s crazy. When we do that we’re doing a bypass and we’re not allowing ourselves to come home to self, but we’re then still separating and blaming and creating shame and judgement.
And what we need to do instead is re-parent that experience and say, “You know what, home may not have been the best perfect place but I can make home inside lovely and harmonious.” The way that we do this is by tending to how we really feel and having our own back and not needing it to be any different and doing it in a loving mature way by asking for what we need so that others know how to help us go home to self.
I’ll see you soon.
Namaste.
