Why You Keep Attracting the Same Type of Person (And How to Actually Break the Pattern)

You ended the last relationship swearing it would be different this time. You promised yourself you'd spot the red flags earlier, set better boundaries, choose someone who actually shows up. And yet here you are: different name, different face, same exhausting dynamic.

Maybe they're emotionally unavailable again. Or controlling. Or they love-bomb you at first then pull away the second you get close. Maybe you're the one sabotaging right when things start going well, finding reasons to leave before they can hurt you.

Here's what I want you to know: this isn't bad luck, and you're not broken. If you keep attracting the same type of person, it's not a cosmic joke, it's feedback. Your nervous system is trying to tell you something, and until you listen to what's underneath these patterns, you're going to keep recreating them.

As a therapist specializing in breaking cycles in Fairfield County, I work with high-achieving adults and young adults who are exhausted from repeating the same relationship patterns. You're smart, successful, self-aware, hell, you know you're doing it. The question isn't whether you're stuck in a pattern. It's why you're still here and how to actually break free.

The Pattern You Can't Unsee

Let's be real about what's happening. You're not randomly "attracting" the same person, you're choosing them. And before you get defensive, I'm not saying it's your fault. I'm saying it's your pattern, and there's a massive difference.

Your brain isn't malfunctioning when you feel drawn to someone who's going to hurt you. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it's designed to do: seek what feels familiar, even when familiar equals painful. Because to your nervous system, familiar means survivable. You survived it before, so it must be safe enough.

This is why you keep attracting the same type of person in relationships: your system recognizes a specific emotional frequency and mistakes it for connection. When your dad was emotionally distant, you learned that love feels like working hard to earn someone's attention. So now? Someone who's actually available feels wrong - not because you don't want it, but because your nervous system doesn't recognize it as love.

You're not after familiarity. You're after the specific feeling-state you've coded as "this is what connection feels like," even if that feeling-state includes anxiety, uncertainty, or having to prove your worth.

The 5 Pattern Types: Which One Keeps You Stuck?

Through my work with clients breaking relationship cycles, I've identified five distinct pattern types. Most people have one primary pattern, though you might recognize pieces of several. Understanding which pattern drives your choices is the first step to actually changing them.

Pattern Type 1: The Familiarity Seeker (Attachment-Based)

You're recreating the emotional dynamics you experienced growing up, particularly with your primary caregivers. If your mom was critical, you might find yourself drawn to partners who subtly (or not so subtly) criticize you. If your dad was inconsistent - warm one day, cold the next - you might be attracted to hot-and-cold dynamics because the unpredictability feels like home.

What it feels like: "I can't explain why I'm drawn to them, they just feel right even though I know they're wrong for me."

Why it happens: Your attachment system formed based on your earliest relationships. Those relationships created a template for what love looks like, how much you can trust others, and what you have to do to maintain connection. As an adult, you're drawn to people who activate that same template because it's the relationship operating system your brain downloaded first.

The trap: You might consciously want someone stable and available, but stable feels boring or smothering because your system doesn't recognize it as the real thing. Meanwhile, someone who keeps you guessing feels electric, not because it's passion, but because your nervous system is saying "Yes! This feels like love!"

Pattern Type 2: The Wound Healer (Repetition Compulsion)

You're trying to rewrite history by choosing people who represent an unresolved wound from your past. This is repetition compulsion: the unconscious drive to recreate painful dynamics in hopes that this time you'll get it right. This time, you'll earn their love. This time, you'll prove you're worthy. This time, you'll change the ending.

What it feels like: "If I can just get this person to love me, commit to me, see my value, then I'll finally feel good enough."

Why it happens: There's an old wound that never healed, and your psyche is still trying to resolve it. Maybe you never felt good enough for a parent, or you were abandoned by someone important. Your unconscious mind keeps choosing people who mirror that original wound because it's hoping you'll finally get the validation or love you needed back then.

The trap: You're choosing people who by definition can't give you what you need. If you're trying to heal an old wound through a new relationship, you'll unconsciously choose someone with the same limitations as the person who created the wound in the first place. The math doesn't math. You can't heal childhood abandonment by getting an emotionally unavailable adult to commit to you.

Pattern Type 3: The Worth Matcher (Identity-Based)

You attract people who match your internal beliefs about what you deserve. If deep down you believe you're too much, not enough, fundamentally flawed, or unworthy of real love, you'll find yourself drawn to people who confirm those beliefs. You're not consciously choosing partners who treat you poorly, you're choosing partners whose behavior aligns with your self-concept.

What it feels like: "I want someone who treats me well, but when someone actually does, it feels off. Like they don't really know me, or they're going to leave when they see the real me."

Why it happens: Your core beliefs about yourself - formed in childhood and reinforced through experience - act like a magnet. If you believe you're only lovable when you're useful, you'll attract people who need you to fix them. If you believe you're too damaged for healthy love, you'll find people who can't do healthy love. It's not attraction; it's confirmation bias playing out in your relationship choices.

The trap: When someone treats you better than you believe you deserve, your system rejects it as "not real" or "too good to be true." You might even sabotage it because the dissonance between how they see you and how you see yourself becomes unbearable. Meanwhile, someone who treats you poorly feels honest, they're just confirming what you already believed about yourself.

Pattern Type 4: The Safety Saboteur (Fear-Driven)

You choose emotionally unavailable or unsuitable people because it keeps you safe from real intimacy. If you pick someone who can't fully show up, you never have to risk being truly seen, known, and potentially rejected. The pattern isn't about attraction, it's about protection.

What it feels like: "I say I want a relationship, but every time someone gets close, I lose interest or find fatal flaws. Or I'm drawn to people who are clearly unavailable from the start."

Why it happens: Real intimacy is terrifying when you've been hurt before, especially if early relationships taught you that being vulnerable leads to pain. Choosing unavailable people lets you experience the fantasy of connection without the risk of actually being known. You can long for them, work for their attention, feel the highs and lows all while staying protected from the vulnerability that comes with being in a real, reciprocal relationship.

The trap: You convince yourself you want intimacy while your choices ensure you'll never have to face it. You might blame your partners for being unavailable, but on some level, their unavailability is exactly what you were drawn to. It keeps you in the familiar role of pursuing while never having to risk being fully seen.

Pattern Type 5: The Need Negotiator (Unmet Needs)

You're attracted to people based on what you think you can get from them rather than who they actually are. Maybe you choose partners who need rescuing because being needed feels like being loved. Maybe you pick high-status partners because their success makes you feel valuable by association. You're negotiating for needs to be met rather than connecting authentically.

What it feels like: "I'm drawn to people I can help, or people who make me feel special because of what they bring to the table. But somehow I always end up feeling resentful or empty."

Why it happens: When your needs weren't met consistently in childhood, you learned to negotiate for them strategically. You might have learned that being useful, entertaining, or accomplished is what keeps people around. So now you choose relationships where you can leverage those strategies - you're needed, or admired, or valued for what you provide - rather than being loved for who you are.

The trap: The relationship is transactional from the start, even if neither of you realizes it. You're not actually connecting; you're filling a role. And eventually, the role gets exhausting, or the other person stops needing what you provide, and the whole thing falls apart. Then you find someone else to fill the need, and the pattern repeats.

Why You're Still Stuck Even Though You "Know Better"

Here's the part that frustrates my clients the most: they're incredibly self-aware. They can describe their patterns, identify where they came from, name the red flags they ignored. They know what they're doing.

And yet they keep doing it.

But here’s what I need you to understand: insight isn't the same as healing. Your intellectual awareness of why you keep attracting the same type of person doesn't change the emotional programming driving your choices.

Think of it this way: your therapist-self lives in your prefrontal cortex, reading articles, making lists of green flags, promising to do better next time. But your nervous system lives in your limbic brain, and it doesn't speak English. It speaks in feelings, sensations, and survival responses. You can know someone is wrong for you while your nervous system is screaming "YES, THIS FEELS LIKE HOME."

Awareness without processing just creates shame. You know you're repeating the pattern, but you can't stop, so now you feel stupid, weak, or broken on top of everything else. That shame makes you more likely to settle for whoever will take the shame away temporarily… which, irony of all ironies, is often the exact same type of person you're trying to avoid.

This is why breaking relationship patterns requires therapy, not just self-help books. You need to heal at the level where the patterns were formed - emotionally, somatically, in relationship with another person who can help you process what your nervous system is holding. Cognition can't override survival wiring. You need embodied change, not just mental understanding.

How to Actually Break the Pattern (Not Just Manage It)

If you're reading this thinking "Great, now I understand my pattern, but how do I stop?" here's the honest answer: you're going to have to do deeper work than you probably want to do.

Breaking the pattern of attracting the same type of person isn't about learning to spot red flags faster or making better choices. It's about healing whatever is underneath the pattern, the attachment wounds, the unresolved trauma, the core beliefs about your worth, so that you stop being drawn to those dynamics in the first place.

Understanding Where Your Pattern Originated

In my work with clients, we start by exploring where your specific pattern developed. This isn't about blaming your parents or dwelling in the past, it's about understanding what your nervous system learned about relationships, love, and safety based on your earliest experiences.

Using psychodynamic therapy, we'll explore the unconscious patterns and unresolved conflicts driving your relationship choices. What did love look like in your family? What did you have to do to get your needs met? What beliefs formed about your worth, your lovability, your right to have needs?

This depth work helps you see that your pattern isn't random, it's a response to what you experienced and survived. And once you understand what your pattern is protecting you from or trying to resolve, you can start to address the actual wound instead of just managing the symptoms.

Processing What Keeps the Pattern Alive

Understanding is necessary but not sufficient. You also need to actually process the emotions, memories, and experiences that keep your pattern locked in place. This is where trauma-focused modalities become essential.

I use EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and ART (Accelerated Resolution Therapy) to help you process traumatic or painful experiences that fuel your relationship patterns. Whether it's childhood neglect, a past relationship that left you shattered, or accumulated hurts that taught you love isn't safe, these experiences need to be metabolized, not just understood.

EMDR and ART allow you to reprocess these experiences so they're no longer driving your present-day choices. When the old wound heals, you stop needing to recreate it in your current relationships. The pull toward unavailable people loosens. The familiar anxiety of pursuing someone who won't commit stops feeling like love.

Rewiring Your Thought Patterns

Alongside the deeper work, we'll use CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) to identify and change the thought patterns keeping your relationship patterns alive. Beliefs like "I'm only lovable if I'm useful," "If I let my guard down, I'll get hurt," or "I don't deserve someone who actually shows up for me" aren't just thoughts, they're relationship operating systems.

Together, we'll challenge these beliefs, test them against reality, and build new ones that actually serve the life you want to create. This isn't toxic positivity or affirmations, it's rigorous cognitive work that helps you see where your thinking is keeping you stuck and what different thought patterns might look like.

Practicing New Patterns in Real Time

Breaking relationship patterns isn't just insight work, it's behavior change. You'll need to practice tolerating what feels uncomfortable (like someone being consistently available) and sitting with the unfamiliar (like setting a boundary and not immediately apologizing for it).

In our sessions, you'll have a space to notice your patterns as they show up - how you relate to me, how you talk about yourself, what feelings come up when we get close to vulnerable topics. This real-time awareness in a safe relationship is where change actually happens. You can't think your way out of relationship patterns; you have to experience something different in relationship.

What Changes When You Do This Work

Breaking the pattern of attracting the same type of person doesn't mean you'll suddenly find yourself in a perfect relationship or never feel drawn to old dynamics again. What changes is your relationship to the pattern itself.

You'll notice the pull toward familiar dysfunction, but you won't automatically follow it. You'll feel the anxiety that someone healthy brings up, but you'll recognize it as your nervous system adjusting to something new rather than evidence that something's wrong. You'll catch yourself about to repeat an old behavior, (apologizing for having needs, tolerating disrespect, pursuing someone who's not interested) and you'll pause instead.

Most importantly, you'll start trusting yourself differently. Not because you're making "perfect" choices, but because you're making conscious ones. You're choosing from a place of healing rather than wounding. You're responding to who someone actually is rather than who your pattern needs them to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to break relationship patterns?

There's no standard timeline because everyone's pattern is unique, and what's underneath it varies. Some clients see significant shifts within a few months if we're addressing a more recent pattern or surface-level belief. Deeper patterns rooted in childhood trauma or complex attachment wounds typically take longer - often 6 months to 2 years of consistent work.

What affects your timeline: How ingrained the pattern is, whether there's trauma underneath it, your readiness to do vulnerable work, how much you practice new behaviors between sessions, and whether your current life supports change or reinforces old patterns.

The work compounds. The insights from month three build on month one. The boundaries you practice setting get easier. The old patterns lose their grip. You start showing up differently without consciously trying.

Can therapy really change who I'm attracted to?

Therapy doesn't change attraction like flipping a switch. You might always notice people who fit your old pattern - your nervous system recognizes familiar dynamics quickly. What changes is your response to that recognition.

When you've healed what's underneath your pattern, you stop confusing “familiar” with “right.” Someone triggering your old pattern might catch your attention, but you won't mistake that activation for chemistry or connection. Meanwhile, someone healthy might not create the same intensity initially, but you'll have the capacity to recognize their consistency, availability, and genuine care as valuable rather than boring.

Attraction shifts as your nervous system updates what "safe" and "loving" feel like. Healthy starts feeling good instead of foreign.

What if I'm already in a relationship with the same type of person?

If you're currently in a relationship that fits your old pattern, therapy can help you figure out what's actually happening. Sometimes the relationship itself isn't the problem itself, sometimes the problem is that you're bringing your pattern to it, and working on your side can shift the dynamic. Sometimes you're actually in an unhealthy situation, and therapy helps you see that clearly and make decisions from a grounded place.

Either way, breaking your pattern means changing how you show up. That will either improve the relationship or make it clear it's not serving you. Both are useful outcomes.

Why am I attracted to people who hurt me?

You're not attracted to people because they hurt you, you're attracted to people who feel familiar, and familiar happens to include dynamics that hurt. Your nervous system prioritizes recognition over wellbeing. It would rather be right about what love looks like than risk the disorientation of something new.

If you grew up with criticism, criticism feels like attention. If you experienced inconsistency, inconsistency feels like excitement. If you had to earn love, having to work for someone's approval feels like meaningful connection. Your attraction isn't broken, it's just based on an outdated definition of love.

Can I break patterns without therapy?

Awareness and self-help can definitely support change, and some people do shift their patterns through books, reflection, and intentional choices. But if you've been trying that approach and you're still stuck in the same cycle, it's because the pattern exists below the level of conscious choice.

Patterns that persist despite awareness usually need therapeutic intervention because they're rooted in your nervous system, not just your thoughts. You need someone trained to help you access and heal what's underneath, and you need a safe relationship where you can practice showing up differently in real time.

How do I know if my pattern is about attachment or trauma?

Often, it's both. Attachment wounds are a form of relational trauma, even if they don't involve dramatic events. Growing up with inconsistent caregiving, emotional neglect, or having to suppress your needs to keep your parents comfortable are all experiences that shape your attachment system and can be traumatic.

In therapy, we'll explore what's driving your specific pattern. Whether it's attachment-based, trauma-related, or both, the treatment approach remains the same: we need to heal what's underneath so you're no longer compelled to recreate it.

Ready to Break the Cycle?

If you're exhausted from attracting the same type of person, ready to understand why you keep ending up here, and willing to do the uncomfortable work of actually changing your patterns, I can help.

I work with adults and young adults in Fairfield County and throughout Connecticut, Vermont, and South Carolina who are done repeating the same relationship dynamics. My approach combines the depth of psychodynamic therapy with evidence-based modalities like CBT, REBT, EMDR, and ART to help you heal at the root level.

I offer both in-person sessions at my office in Southport, Connecticut, and virtual therapy for clients throughout Connecticut, Vermont, and South Carolina where I'm licensed. As an out-of-network provider, I'm able to provide personalized, depth-focused care without the constraints of insurance companies, and I can provide superbills if you'd like to seek reimbursement from your insurance.

If you're curious about working together, reach out for a free 15-minute consultation. We'll talk about what's bringing you to therapy, what you're hoping to change, and whether my approach feels like the right fit for your specific situation. If we decide to move forward, I'll send you paperwork to complete before our first session, and we'll schedule your intake appointment.

From there, we'll meet weekly for 50-minute sessions. Some clients prefer the consistency of a standing appointment at the same time each week; others schedule their next session at the end of each meeting. We'll figure out what works best for your life and your process.

Breaking relationship patterns isn't comfortable, but it's absolutely possible. And you don't have to do it alone.

Ready to start? Contact me to schedule your free consultation.