ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIPS

5 Reasons Why You Are a Magnet For Abusive Partners

And what to do about it

Have you noticed how some people end up in one abusive relationship after another whilst others don’t?

Here are five reasons you might be ending up in these relationships more often than others.

1. You seek out abusers

In our lives, all kinds of people cross our paths. Whom we feel attracted to is strongly related to our childhood experiences. Our attachment to primary caregivers sets an example of what our future relationships will look like for the rest of our lives.

For instance, in my personal experience, my mum was emotional, overprotective, and controlling. My dad, on the other hand, was distant and emotionally unavailable. Therefore, I felt that my mum was the source of my problems because she was too emotional, while I idealized my dad as a strong person.

Consequently, I was attracted to men who had avoidant features because I believed men who didn’t feel an emotional attachment to me wouldn’t try to control me and therefore were safe. The problem was abuse results from insecure attachment styles, and I was essentially seeking out men who were avoidantly attached and therefore abusive.

On the other hand, healthy men would put me off because they were emotional and “unsafe”. So my childhood gave me the wrong idea as to who is ideal and safe and who is not.

How to counter:

If you continuously end up in dysfunctional relationships, you need to look at your attachment issues. People attract what they are because we like people similar to ourselves. If you have a personality disorder, including co-dependency (Dependent Personality Disorder), you are very likely to attract someone who also has a personality disorder.

Remember that people with personality disorders have impaired reality testing and an external locus of control. This means that the way they interpret events is different from healthy people, and they regulate their moods by trying to control their external environments. They also externalize blame, which is why they firmly believe that they are the victims in most cases.

You might mistakenly assume that you can control the situation’s outcome — that you can somehow understand the other person or communicate only if you try hard enough. What you must do instead is to let go of the notion that you can change someone. You don’t control other people, and you cannot help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. Even if they did want help;

• It is not your responsibility.
• It is a difficult job that you cannot manage — even psychologists who specialize in personality disorders fail in most cases.

2. You have dysfunctional beliefs about love

People with attachment issues either believe they are not worthy of love or consider love a weakness. Either way, it’s because they associate love with pain and see it as something to be feared and avoided.

When your self-esteem is damaged, this creates an energy that you’re broadcasting out to the people around you. If you don’t feel that you deserve love, how will you accept that someone else can love you?

If you believe that you don’t deserve love or that love is a weakness, you will attract people with similar beliefs because someone who gives you genuine love will repel you as they don’t conform to your worldview and expectations.

How to counter:

You must first learn to love yourself. Low self-esteem is the result of black-and-white thinking. You must train yourself to see the world in less absolute terms and start focusing on the nuances to fix this. When you begin to do that, you will notice a gradual reduction in your perfectionistic tendencies and an increase in your confidence levels.

You must also stop seeing love as something special. Love is an ordinary human emotion. There is nothing about it that would make you or anyone else undeserving of it. You don’t need to be unique in any way to have someone love you. It is not scarce either — there are millions of people in the world. Undoubtedly one of them will like you.

If you feel otherwise, you need to remember that your own assumptions and biases will turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. If you cannot find love, it’s not because something is wrong with you but because you have unhealthy assumptions about love, which pushes people away.

If you believe love is a weakness, you must learn to recognize this as a trauma response. The reality is humans have evolved to live together, and falling in love and forming relationships is a natural phenomenon that helps us stick together and survive as a species.

I personally struggle with this belief a lot — even knowing that it is a trauma response, I cannot shake the feeling that love and wanting a relationship are weaknesses. It is so deeply ingrained that I literally feel no conscious desire to seek out a relationship.

I try to deal with this in two ways:

• Learn to focus on the benefits you get from the other person

You can work on your communication, conflict management, and mentalisation skills within a relationship. You can begin to understand people better and apply the techniques you have learned in therapy to improve yourself.

In other words, instead of seeing people as causing me problems as I always have, I now try to think of them as helping me become more resilient because they provide me with opportunities to work on myself.

• Resist the desire to walk away too quickly

I find all kinds of faults in people. They are always too enthusiastic, dysfunctional, needy, emotional, difficult, or “something”. I always look for reasons we can’t be together, starting from the day I meet someone. I also constantly feel the urge to end things even from minor conflicts at the beginning of a relationship.

With these, I have learned to take a deep breath and check with my friends before I walk away to see if I’m overreacting. I try to take a step back and assess whether the benefits of the relationship outweigh the cons and remind myself I have no reason to leave as long as the relationship affects me positively most of the time.

3. You are commitment-phobic

Commitment-phobics are avoidantly attached, and in my experience, they tend to prefer dysfunctional people. This is because if the other side is open to having a relationship and displays too much enthusiasm too quickly, it triggers avoidance. Conversely, people who are slow to attach or hide their attachment are less likely to make avoidants freak out in the initial phase.

Commitment-phobics are counter dependent. They have a fear of intimacy and want to be completely self-reliant. I’m probably a very extreme case, and I have noticed that I feel safer around dysfunctional people. Not just because of my childhood but also because I know we’re never going to work out.

I have been on a date with many secure men over the years but never seen any of them after the first date. In the past, it was because I found them too emotional. But, after gaining self-awareness, it’s because I don’t know what to do with them. I don’t want a relationship, and I can’t plan too far ahead into the future, so I don’t see the point of giving someone false hope.

On the contrary, dysfunctional men are safe and provide me with what I know a relationship to be: constant fighting and defending myself. In a way, I have no idea what would happen if there was no fighting. The thought of living together or even relaxing on the sofa, cuddling, and casually watching a movie together seems very strange and foreign to me. I am not even sure I would enjoy that. All I know is to fight and get out.

How to counter:

I haven’t fixed this issue yet. However, I have noticed that I am no longer attracted to abusive behaviours after healing. In the past, someone’s abusive conduct would make me feel more attracted to them because I idealize resilience, and I saw anger and lack of empathy as signs of strength. In comparison, now, continuous abusive behaviours make me detach from the person.

This was possible through self-introspection and therapy, which allowed me to change my beliefs. I am still attracted to strength and resilience, but I see different qualities to be representative of these. For instance, if someone thought empathy was a weakness in the past, this would make me feel more attracted. In comparison, now, if someone cannot mentalize and believes empathy is a weakness, it puts me off. This is because I am aware that lack of empathy results in black-and-white thinking and, therefore, insecurities and low self-esteem.

In other words, analyzing your thinking patterns and reframing dysfunctional beliefs will help with this. I doubt my lack of desire for a relationship will ever change. Still, I believe that through further healing, I may eventually be able to feel attraction towards securely attached men.

4. You are afraid of being single

One of the main things that can get you into a lot of trouble is being desperate for love and acceptance because you will subconsciously project this desperation out to the world around you.

This can result in getting involved with the wrong kinds of people who think you don’t deserve anything other than the bare minimum. You might also ignore big red warning flags because you don’t want to be alone.

Some people are so afraid of being alone that they prefer to remain in an abusive relationship rather than let go and be single. Unfortunately, this means they are easy targets and more likely to suffer worse and prolonged consequences compared to others who end up in abusive relationships.

How to counter:

If you recognize these behaviours, start observing and learning from your mistakes. You must seek to unfold your patterns until you understand them and figure out what kind of relationship you need and deserve. You also need to work on your self-esteem issues and get comfortable with the idea of being alone. Remember that you do not need other people to feel good about yourself.

Consider whether you might have a personality disorder. For example, people with narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, and dependent personality disorders tend to constantly seek out others’ company and have a low tolerance for being alone. This is because narcissists and histrionics use attention to regulate their self-esteem, borderlines have a deep desire to find love and intimacy, and co-dependents don’t trust themselves enough to manage things on their own without someone else’s approval.

To manage any of these disorders, you must be willing to put in the work for deep self-introspection and identify the dysfunctional patterns you developed in your childhood. You must also work on your black-and-white thinking, which is the key to developing high self-esteem.

5. You have a victim mentality

Most people with personality disorders have a victim mentality. They always believe they are the mistreated party and blame the other person for most of the problems. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because people with these disorders often date each other. However, I have noticed that the attraction is mainly because they confirm each other’s worldviews.

For instance, I had a situation with a guy a few years back, and this was probably the angriest period of my life. He was pushy, and annoying and often tried to manipulate me. But I remember telling him, “You conform to my worldview. I believe people will try to manipulate me and control me, and you are actually trying to do that, so I don’t feel bad for my temper.”

Before him, I was in a relationship with a more quiet and passive guy, and sometimes a joke or something minor would set me off. Afterwards, I would feel dysfunctional for having such an overreaction because he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. But, in my eyes, this new guy deserved my anger, and I no longer felt crazy for being overly paranoid and hypervigilant. It was easier to see my reactions as justified.

Some people also identify with their victimhood to garner sympathy. The acknowledgment of your victimization may feel good and make you want to hold onto that feeling. Whatever the reason, you continue to seek what makes you feel good, especially when you’re dealing with the pain of attracting abusive people in your life. This reaction typically happens on a deeply subconscious level, so you might not even realize that you’re doing it at first.

How to counter:

Simple. Get rid of your victim mentality. Learn to understand people and empathize with them instead. This doesn’t mean that you let them abuse you or stay in a dysfunctional relationship, but that you can let go and move on peacefully.

Feeling like a victim will make you feel resentful and vengeful. My first ex provoked these feelings in me for years, and I was still obsessing over my hatred of him long after the breakup.

• Don’t give anyone that kind of power over you
• Don’t let anyone turn you into what you hate

Ruminating over someone means you let them win — you remain preoccupied with them and ensure the pain they caused you never goes away. This will also make you unduly suspicious and paranoid in your future relationships because you will project your past onto your new partner. You will end up destroying what you currently have.

If you believe that being a victim makes you somehow unique, try to analyze where this comes from. I had a friend who had such a huge victim mentality that she would try to one-up everyone who shared their trauma. She would even make up stories to always portray herself as extremely victimized and beyond any help.

Some people who have been victimized in the past eventually start developing a bias where they start to see how everyone has advantages and privileges but them. They start to take pride in their victimhood. Victim mentality will eventually create entitlement, leading one to believe they have a right to mistreat others. Try to stay away from any victimhood identity. Instead, focus on the positive aspects of your life and what you can do to change your situation.

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