If You Lacked Affection As A Kid, You've Likely Developed These 4 Behaviors Without Even Realizing It
The little kid inside you is still looking for love.
LightField studios | shutterstock.com It doesn’t seem logical that so many women fall in love with emotionally unhealthy men or end up in unhealthy relationships. They are smart, wise, self-confident, and should know better. Right?
Wrong! Those strengths can melt away and leave us sucked dry emotionally and mentally. Sadly, many of these reasons develop from a lack of affection as a child and continue to drive our behavior, even when we know better and want to have a healthy relationship with a healthy person. Knowing why we tend to fall into unhealthy relationships is the first step toward breaking the self-destructive cycle.
If you lacked affection as a kid, you've likely developed these four behaviors without even realizing it:
1. Being drawn to people you can 'fix'
Women who have a healthy relationship with their fathers tend to grow into healthier, happier, and stronger women, suggested a 2012 study. Unfortunately, for many of us, those healthy relationships don’t exist. If you are one of the lucky ones, good for you! If you are one of the rest, like me, then you know what I mean.
My father was absent. He was one of those dads who worked a lot and left the childcare to my mother. He was around but not present. And when he was present, he was very sarcastic. Whenever I told him about a goal or accomplishment, he just put me down, saying I wouldn’t be able to do it.
My parents divorced when I was 13, and he found a new wife who hated me, and they moved to Australia. Since then, he has repeatedly chosen his wife over me, which, in combination with the sarcasm, left me feeling abandoned and unloved. It was the same for my sister.
Since then, my sister and I have both been in a series of relationships with unhealthy men. We are drawn to men like our father, ones who we can "fix" and hopefully make up for the pain our dad caused.
I have a habit of choosing men who lie. As a result, I can never trust them, and that leads to a downward spiral in the relationship and always leaves me heartbroken.
I did this over and over until I finally started understanding my relationship with my dad was what the causing it, and I didn’t have to bring the baggage into my relationships.
So, how is your relationship with your father? If it isn’t a good one, it might explain why you fall in love with unhealthy men.
2. Feeling discomfort with security or peace
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I don’t know what it is about human beings, but some of us feel as if we always need to be challenged, especially in relationships. Be honest. How many times have you been in a relationship and said he was "too nice," or he was boring, or he didn’t "challenge you?" And how many of those relationships are you still in?
The thing about bad guys is that they are a challenge. We see them as damaged puppies who just need the love of a good woman to make them whole. And we women love to take on challenges. Especially if we grew up in a chaotic home.
I can’t tell you how many of my clients reach out to me because they are in a toxic relationship they can’t get out of. Without exception, as they tell me their story, they indicate their person came to them with some issues, some red flags that they ignored because they wanted to believe this person was their person.
As a result of ignoring those issues, my clients are stuck in relationships with unhealthy men who sometimes get dangerous. People who have unprocessed issues can be prone to anger and violence, and, unfortunately, the person who is often on the receiving end of that anger and violence is the partner.
So, take a look at your inclination to pursue unhealthy guys. Is it because of the challenge he might present to you, or the drama might make things interesting?
I know you just want a healthy relationship, and you don’t want to play games. And I get that and agree. But a healthy relationship is found in the balance between bad boys and boring.
A healthy relationship is one where you feel challenged, but you also feel good about yourself.
3. Struggling with low self-worth
Unfortunately, many women who find themselves attracted to unhealthy men are women who don’t feel very good about themselves.
I have a client who has spent her entire life struggling. She let herself be abused by everybody in her life in the hopes of being loved.
She eventually pulled her life together and started a successful business. But, despite her success, she still didn’t feel good about herself. She didn’t believe she deserved anyone other than an unhealthy man. Why would a healthy man want to be with her, after all?
As a result, she found herself in a toxic relationship after a toxic relationship. She would continue to degrade herself, trying to get her partner to love her and treat her well. Unfortunately, so many of the men she attracted because of her insecurities were also deeply damaged and incapable of making any woman feel good about themselves.
So, my client was repeatedly going down this rabbit hole of choosing unhealthy, even dangerous, men because she just didn’t believe she deserved any better, as supported by a study on self-esteem and romantic relationship quality. It is only once she started taking a good look at herself and who she was in the world that she started to see her self-worth and make wiser choices when it came to men.
4. Dreading being alone
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So many of my clients live in mortal fear that they will never find their person. They will be left alone and childless, and they will be miserable.
As a result, my clients aren’t picky about who they choose to love, and thus, they fall in love with emotionally unhealthy guys. They figure some guy is better than no guy and, at least, they won’t be alone.
Unfortunately, what my clients discover is that being in a relationship with an unhealthy man is often worse than being alone. They do have a partner at their side at social events, and they might have children, but the reality of their lives is much different.
Perhaps their person is abusive. Or perhaps their person suffers from a mental health condition that makes them unable to care for a family. Or perhaps they have trust issues from a past relationship.
No matter what the issue, big or small, it can have a disastrous effect on a relationship. So, consider this next time you are leaning towards falling in love with an emotionally unhealthy man. Are you doing so because of the man in front of you, or are you doing it because you are scared of being alone?
So many women fall for unhealthy men. Whether it’s because of their past issues with their fathers, the influence of media, their need to be challenged, or their fear of being alone, women who choose, and stay with, emotionally unhealthy men are destined for a relationship that will not be an easy one.
So, take a good look at the perspectives you have about relationships. Do you need a challenge? Do you want to fix someone? Understanding what you think you want vs. what you want is a good way to find the healthy relationship you seek so you can be happy, once and for all!
Mitzi Bockmann is an NYC-based Certified Life Coach and mental health advocate who works exclusively with women to help them be all they want to be. Mitzi's bylines have appeared in The Good Men Project, MSN, PopSugar, Prevention, Huffington Post, and Psych Central, among many others.
