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“Why do my relationships never work out?!”
This is a question that is being asked and explored in the healing space for years.
People from different walks of life, at different stages, walk in with their baggage of relationships wondering what is happening in this part of their world and why.
Why is it that they give their all and get nothing in return? Or, why aren’t they happy in their relationship even when they have nothing to complain about?
Sometimes, they can see that things are obviously wrong yet cannot find a way to help themselves. They feel like a rat trapped in a maze. Some want something entirely different for themselves but don’t know how to get there, so they keep doing the same thing over and over again. Some don’t even know if they want something other than what they have, and some are still waiting for permission to think, want, and feel.
Let me tell you some interesting facts about how we as humans actually think and process the world:
1. Your brain loves what’s familiar, not what’s healthy.
It gravitates toward what it already knows, what feels safe to your nervous system, even if it’s painful.
2. Your nervous system confuses familiarity with comfort.
Anything that resembles your early emotional environment becomes your default blueprint for love.
3. Your childhood becomes your relationship template.
Not because you want it to, but because the subconscious works with repetition, not intention.
So what this means in the context of how we choose relationships and partners is this: if you grew up in an environment that was dysfunctional, chaotic, emotionally unpredictable, or where one or both parents were unhappy, misaligned, or unavailable, then no matter how logically you know it’s unhealthy, your subconscious sees that dynamic as normal. This is what “home” felt like, so this is what your nervous system will either accept as normal or run toward.
If your needs weren’t understood, acknowledged, or respected as a child, you learned that your needs don’t matter. So you never truly got in touch with them or were too afraid to express them. You may have grown up believing that making a relationship work is your responsibility because that’s how you earn love. That’s how you prove your worth.
Maybe you had to take on roles like caretaker, peacemaker, emotional firefighter, the quiet child, the good child…and that conditioned you to believe that being low-maintenance keeps you safe, conflict is dangerous, chaos is normal, emotional expression is inconvenient, and your feelings are a burden.
And all of this quietly created deep self-worth wounds that then become the driving force in your adult relationships. And this is where most people unknowingly end up choosing emotionally unavailable partners. Not because they want pain, but because their inner wiring is pushing them toward what it recognises.
Here’s what this often looks like:
1. You mistake familiarity for love. Even if it hurts, the emotional pattern feels known, predictable, and strangely comforting.
2. You’re drawn to what feels emotionally like home. Dysfunction feels familiar. Stability feels foreign.
3. You’re repeating your parents’ blueprint. The relationship you witnessed becomes the relationship you recreate.
4. You’re reenacting an old wound hoping it will heal this time. This is why you stay longer than you should, hoping the ending will be different.
5. You don’t recognise your own emotional needs. When you’re disconnected from your needs, you choose partners who are also disconnected.
6. You confuse emotional labour with love. You think the more you do, the more they will value you.
7. You believe you need to earn connection. So you apologise, bend, shrink, and settle, hoping it will finally click.
8. You have been conditioned to prioritise others and abandon yourself. Emotional unavailability in others mirrors the emotional unavailability you have learned toward yourself.
So when you meet emotionally unavailable partners later in life, even though you logically know something is off, you will still gravitate toward them, choose them, or stay longer than you should because the dynamic feels familiar. It feels like home, even though it hurts—because that was home. That’s what you saw. That’s what your body remembers.
So you explain, you justify, you shrink, you bend, you minimise your pain, you overemphasize theirs, and this becomes a lifelong pattern. And sometimes, these patterns even carry through lifetimes. Through my Akashic work, I’ve discovered that self-worth wounds often run through ancestral lines especially in women.
Emotional suppression, settling, silencing, and self-neglect can be generational karma, and in essence, people keep falling for unhealthy, unfulfilling relationships because of their core wound that says, “I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy. I don’t deserve a good relationship.”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” ~ Carl Jung
Wanting a different kind of relationship begins by changing the relationship you have with yourself. It’s about refusing to play the old story that stops you from treating yourself with respect, dignity, equality, and kindness. It’s about creating a story where you are the main character and not someone’s side character or emotional caretaker. It’s about starting to show up with value and respect, recognising your own needs, honouring your boundaries, getting clear about your intentions with yourself, and, most importantly, healing the part of you that feels it needs to prove its worth all the time.
At the end of the day, what triggers you in a relationship is not asking you to change the other person. It’s holding up a mirror, showing you what within you is asking to be healed. The lessons that are waiting for you to claim.
It starts with choosing you because the moment you stop being emotionally unavailable to yourself, that is when this cycle finally begins to break.
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