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Break the pattern.
By Orna & Matthew Walters — Written on Sep 08, 2022
What you really want is a man who adores you and makes you happy, instead you keep ending up with guys who are selfish, emotionally unavailable, or jerks.
Why can’t you find the forever love you are looking for? Do you have a magnet inside of you that keeps attracting the wrong guys to you?
It’s frustrating when you can’t seem to attract the right man for you to be happy. It can make you feel like there is something wrong with you, or perhaps you’re broken in some way. Does finding lasting love have to be so difficult?
The key to understanding why you keep attracting men who will never make you happy is hidden inside of your mind. Discovering the brain science of attraction and how it works will transform your love life so you can select an ideal mate and have a happy fulfilling love life.
The myth of 'attracting' unavailable men
Many people are under the false belief that they are attracting certain undesirable partners to them. As if there is some powerful force keeping them from the love they desire. The problem with this belief is that it leaves you feeling powerless to do anything about it.
Another issue with this theory is that it does not accurately describe why you find yourself stuck in the pattern of attracting men who will never make you happy. The truth is you’re not attracting a particular kind of man to you.
The reality is that your subconscious mind is highlighting these men for you.
A part of you recognizes certain character traits and highlights them for you so that these men stand out from the crowd.
Why is it important to make this distinction? Because it puts the power in your hands to change the pattern that’s been keeping you from having the long-lasting love you desire and deserve.
More than 90% of your behavior is controlled by your subconscious mind. From simple habits like how you tie your shoes to more complex emotional reactions, your subconscious is running the show. It is also the part of you that finds some men attractive and others not.
Your subconscious mind highlights certain characteristics as feeling familiar and you interpret this signal of familiarity as attraction and chemistry.
It does this through relationship homeostasis. Homeostasis is the state of equilibrium that your body is constantly striving to maintain. You have physical homeostasis (like body temperature or heart rate), but you also have behavioral homeostasis. You could think of your behavioral homeostasis as your emotional comfort zone.
Your subconscious mind recognizes certain familiar characteristics and highlights them for you. It’s as if a signal goes off in your mind and body saying, “This is familiar! This is familiar!” Unfortunately, your subconscious cannot tell you if this familiarity is good or bad because its job is to remain aligned with your relationship homeostasis. It cannot judge or analyze; it only highlights the familiar.
Where does your relationship homeostasis come from and why is it so powerful?
Your personal GPS directs you toward old wounds
Most people don’t realize that they have an internal GPS for love and relationships. The coordinates for your internal GPS are put in place at a very young age.
You learn how to give and receive love in your family of origin from the ages 0 to 8. The limiting beliefs, mental and emotional patterns, and behavioral strategies that you develop for giving and receiving love are called Your Love Imprint®.
When you’re born you come into this world with zero blocks to love. As a newborn baby, you give and receive love freely. However, the people who raise you are generally incapable of loving you how you desire to be loved. So early on you learn that love is conditional and develop specific strategies for surviving these conditions.
All children take full responsibility for their parent's behavior. You don’t have the capacity to see that your parents may be limited in their abilities. Instead, you think, “Why can’t my parent just give me a hug and tell me everything is going to be okay?”
You take on a limiting belief about yourself that explains their behavior. This initial wounding becomes the coordinates for your GPS for love. As an adult looking for love, your subconscious highlights familiar energetic situations that match the settings of Your Love Imprint.
You can recalibrate your internal GPS
The first step to overcoming this challenge is to realize that you are the common denominator in all your relationships. When you realize that the pattern lives inside of you and the problem isn’t other people, you are in the driver’s seat to change your internal GPS.
Everyone has unique strategies for love and relationships, however, there are some common patterns that keep you stuck being attracted to men who will never make you happy. Ultimately, the love you seek is inside of you and is reflected back to you through the eyes of your beloved.
Energetically, you are attracted to someone who matches the way you feel about yourself.
Seven reasons you keep finding yourself with men who can't make you happy
1. You don’t believe you’re worthy of love
Growing up in a family that doesn’t value you or respect you will foster feelings of unworthiness. Low self-esteem brings with it the expectation that a life partner will fill the void inside.
Ultimately this strategy will have you selecting guys without healthy boundaries, and you end up susceptible to toxic and manipulative people.
When you don’t feel worthy of love you will put up with unhealthy relationship dynamics and excuse bad behavior. After all, you don’t feel like you deserve better.
2. You’re making assumptions based on a feeling
You’re so focused on feeling an intense attraction with a partner that you ignore obvious red flags throughout the dating process. Part of you believes that without a super-charged feeling from the start that the relationship will not satisfy you. This attachment to how love is supposed to feel causes you to rush into relationships too quickly and give a stranger the benefit of the doubt.
If you hold this limiting belief, then you probably find yourself having intense, but short-lived relationships with guys who aren’t a good match for you in the long run.
3. You have a pattern of sacrificing for love
You can develop a strategy of abandoning your wants and needs when you come from an environment where you were asked to sacrifice for the family. Maybe you had a parent who was sick, depressed, or an addict? Or it was required of you to take care of younger siblings? Whatever the circumstances, you learned that love and acceptance must be earned by giving up something you value and taking care of others.
When you have this strategy for love you will be attracted to guys who expect you to always give in to their wants and needs. You put your partner’s needs above your own, end up sacrificing yourself, and feel angry and resentful that you’re needs are never fulfilled. A guy like this will never reciprocate to meet your needs.
4. You have low self-esteem
Low self-esteem causes you to tolerate people who don’t treat you with respect because it matches how you feel about yourself. You don’t believe that you deserve better, and you find yourself settling for the first man who is interested. You often find yourself apologizing for your behavior when you’ve done nothing wrong.
Low self-esteem will keep you stuck in a pattern of unfulfilling relationships, and you’ll struggle to meet a man who is willing to do what it takes to make you happy.
5. You are conflict-avoidant
When you avoid conflict and don’t speak up about what is bothering you, you can end up in a relationship with a man who thinks that you are happy as things are. When you finally do speak up and ask for things to change, he will be resistant because he’s been happy with the way things have been.
Avoiding conflict doesn’t make it go away. It ends up festering in the background until it tears the two of you apart. Conflicts are a natural part of being a human living with other humans. Discovering if you can navigate conflicts together to create a win/win is an important skill for long-lasting love.
6. You've lost your sense of self
Do you tend to merge with your guy and take on his likes and dislikes? Do your friends know they won’t be seeing much of you when you’re in a relationship? Maybe you have a pattern of losing yourself in your relationships. This strategy comes from a combination of having a fear of being alone and not having a strong sense of self.
You won’t be happy if you don’t know who you are and what you truly desire. Through the dating process, it’s just as important to know who to deselect as who to select for a relationship. If you just go along to get along it will be difficult for love to be lasting because you’re not showing up through the selection process. No man can fill a void that is inside of you, that is something you must do for yourself.
7. You’re attracted to a project
Are you attracted to a man’s potential more than you are to his current circumstances? If so, you may get your sense of self-worth from your ability to inspire him to live up to his potential. When you have this inner belief, then you are never going to meet a man who can make you happy because he will never live up to the vision of what you see for him.
You’ll also find yourself in a relationship with guys who don’t have their lives together and need you to help them straighten things out. You’ll end up feeling like the only adult in the relationship and handling all the responsibility instead of feeling like part of a team that works together.
Whichever relationship patterns that keep you from attracting men who will make you happy, it’s important to have the awareness that you have the power to change them! Once you recognize the strategies that aren’t serving you and understand the wounds that inspired those strategies, you can begin the process of healing.
You have the power to change your circumstances when you accept that you are the common denominator and that the problem isn’t with the type of men you meet.
Finding a coach or practitioner who can help you discover your unique patterns and give you a roadmap for creating new strategies will put you on the path to the long-lasting love you desire.
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Orna and Matthew Walters are Soulmate Coaches who have been featured guest experts on Bravo’s "The Millionaire Matchmaker." They're the authors of the free ebook, "7 Steps To Soulmating," which can be found on their website.