Do You know what keeps Attracting You into a Bad Relationships and How You can avoid them?

What do you think "Attracts" men and women into a Bad Relationship?

Let me ask you first, before we get deep into into this informative article together a simpler question......

What qualities do you look for in a partner? 

Charming, sweet, good smile, sexy, smart, good to their family and so on? 

So many men and women look for similar qualities in a partner, but it’s common to see men and women in relationships where their partner can be hurtful, neglectful, disrespectful, or downright mean at times.

How did they and maybe you end up with this kind of person and relationship?

Attraction is an interesting and tricky psychology in humans (although far simpler in human biological terms) and in order to shed some light on why people at times choose partners who are unhealthy for them, it’s first necessary to understand how attraction works in a psychological sense.

What Causes People to Become Attracted?

If your answer is “good looks,” know it or not, this is hardly an indicator of what causes a person to choose a relationship. 

Finding a person to be “attractive” is not the same as being sexually and emotionally drawn to them.

Who you are attracted to has a lot to do with how you grew up. 

But it’s not as simple as finding someone who reminds you of your parents. What’s crucial in attraction is that you find a person who re-creates the psychological environment of your childhood - an emotional comfort zone - while also setting up the potential for the repair of issues that were present in your childhood.

This comfort zone was created psychologically as you grew up, based on the role you played with your parents or caretakers.

How Do Your Parents Fit In?

As you developed into the world, you learned to suppress emotional pieces of who you are based on experiences that you had. 

For example, if you learned through consequences that showing anger was bad, anger may have become a piece of your disowned self since you learned to disconnect from anger.

You may have learned to smile when angry, or joke, or anything that will help you avoid being in touch with your anger, since experiencing anger was somehow threatening to you.

But with attraction, you become drawn to someone who can connect to the emotional areas that you have disowned - e.g. someone who can be outwardly expressive of anger would be very attractive to someone who’s disowned outward feelings of anger.

You are attracted to people who encompass positive and negative qualities of our caretakers. 

Early in relationships, the comfort zone described above brings a sense of euphoria, fooling you into thinking that you are finally going to repair those issues from your childhood that you never repaired with your parents.

Early in the relationship, your subconscious interprets your partner’s negative qualities as the potential for repair (potential holds a positive emotion). 

However, after the honeymoon phase of a relationship passes, those same negative qualities that helped bring two people together start to become annoying and irritating. 

They can even become abusive and destructive to your "confidence" and lower your "self-esteem" and value.

You start to see that your new relationship is not really going to resolve your childhood issues, and now you are left to deal with similar frustrations of similar issues that you experienced in your childhood!

Comfortable Is not Always Healthy

There’s more to the attraction mechanism than this (e.g. attachment, relationship role modelling, etc.), but what’s important here is that your subconscious seeks familiarity, potential for repair and someone who can elicit your suppressed emotional self, whether or not it’s a healthy relationship for you.

So for people who were abused by their caretakers as children, it makes sense that they could end up with a person who is also abusive. 

In a sense, the comfort zone says, “I’ve lived in this type of environment before, and therefore I already know how to function in it and deal with it. It’s comfortable to me and I feel at home here.”

Understanding these properties of what emotionally draws you to someone, it’s part of your awareness to learn about your own relationship patterns, especially if you have had a history of unhealthy relationships. 

If your upbringing has wired you for unhealthy relationship environments as an adult, it may take some professional therapy to psychologically re-wire your attraction mechanism to seek healthy relationships.

No one is destined to unhealthy relationships - you are moulded into it, and you can be moulded back. 

With coaching, motivation and determination, it is possible to have the healthy relationship you desire.

Seeking Authenticity and the path to true happiness

What does it mean for someone to be truly authentic? 

And how many people do you know actually fit that description? 

Do you feel that you’re authentic? 

Let’s take a look at what this word truly suggests and just what blocks you from achieving authenticity.?

Naturally, the word authenticity evokes an image of something pure or unadulterated. A letter of authenticity confirms that a certain object or work of art is not a counterfeit. The act of authenticating is a process of determining that something is indeed genuine, as it is purported to be. Experts receive training to authenticate precious objects, memorabilia, and documents, among other rare items. Yet you have no such method for ascertaining the authentic nature of people. 
 
Short of being caught in a bold-faced lie or transgression, methods of determining an individual’s authenticity often go unexplored. 

One’s authentic nature is revealed in their ability to express and share what they think or feel in a relatively unadulterated form. Diplomacy, political correctness, false flattery, people pleasing, avoidance and silence may, in fact, be designed to mask the authentic, unfiltered self.

What does the dictionary have to say? 

The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines authentic "as a quality of being genuine and worthy of trust. Hence, a person who is completely trustworthy is deemed to be authentic." 

Yet to be genuine requires a certain transparency, whereby others can witness the unfiltered personality, without any masking.

Most of us are too concerned with what others think of us. 

As such, you may disguise or manipulate features of your personality to better assure that others aren’t judgmental or adversely reactive to us. 

If you worry about what others think of you, then you manipulate your personality and communication, either to seek approval or avoid disapproval. 

This masks your true or authentic self. 

Although this personality trait is commonplace, it is far removed from authenticity.

There appears to be an inverse correlation between one’s sensitivity to what others think of them and the ability to be authentic. 

Authenticity requires a genuine sharing of your inner self, irrespective of the consequences. 

Very often, your actions in a given moment are intended to avoid certain consequences. 

And so you alter your communication or behaviour to assure that those consequences won’t be negative or problematic. 

These tendencies diminish your authenticity and they constrain your growth and self-esteem. 

Being authentic requires a genuine sharing in the present moment. 

Ordinarily, though, your thoughts conspire in a tangle of excuses as to why you can’t do something. 

These are the consequences to which I was previously referring. 

This is the core of inauthenticity; your words or actions become disguised from their original intent since you choose to mask them. When this occurs, you literally subvert your genuine self.

You might think to yourself, “What’s the big deal? 

It’s just a little white lie,” or, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings,” or, “They won’t really care about how I feel.” 

It’s actually much larger than that. 

The greater harm done may not be to the other but to your own self. 

When you alter your thoughts and feelings for the purpose of a safer communication, you limit your own development. 

It’s as if you suppress your authenticity in deference to a safe and non-challenging communication. 

This devolving from your more genuine self typically begins in childhood as you encounter any host of emotional challenges. 

If you experience abuse, disappointment, fear, or devaluation, you begin to alter your personality as you attempt to cope with these wounds. Although the coping mechanisms are adaptive at that time, over the course of a lifetime they become masks that distance you from a more actualized sense of self.

Troubled Relationships

Even more problematically, the opportunity for a more meaningful dialogue that might generate a better understanding between parties becomes blocked, as the truth never quite gets revealed. 

And so the relationship remains stuck. 

Two individuals who struggle with their own authenticity unconsciously conspire toward an inauthentic relationship. 

In fact, this is one of the largest impediments to successful relationships. 

Two individuals struggling with their own authenticity would not likely experience a thriving relationship. 

Very often, what you might refer to as a troubled relationship is, in fact, a manifestation of the challenges each individual face in their own personal evolution, but just further projected onto the external relationship.

I am not suggesting that you be callous or insensitive to others’ feelings. 

Learning how to communicate challenging matters in a delicate and compassionate manner opens the pathway to an evolving relationship. 

And a commitment to personal development honours authenticity. 

When you devote yourself to such a path, you actually cast off the burden of fear and anxiety about what others may think of you and begin to honour your own authenticity.

An authentic person may be sensitive to what others think yet choose not to subordinate themselves to the opinions or judgements of others. 

They are less likely to be influenced by others and make their own choices and will not be dominated as the man or women with low-self esteem would.

This is a key source of genuine self-esteem. You might begin to think of the departure from being genuine as a self-betrayal. And self-betrayal is a terribly destructive action, after all. 

It has many faces. 

Being a people pleaser or avoiding confrontation betrays your own authenticity, as you submerge yourself in deference to others. Conversely, being controlling or acting out in anger distances you from being genuine. In these circumstances, you may be more comfortable wearing the mask of anger than revealing your vulnerability. Fear and insecurity are often at the core of anger. As an aside, when people communicate their vulnerable feelings, others actually tend to listen, and validation becomes a possibility. Angry people may be feared or avoided, but they are seldom validated. 

Genuine self-esteem requires avoiding self-betrayal. 

You can’t be true to yourself and betray your authenticity at the same time. 

This is not to suggest that you should not act from compassion and generosity toward others, but you shouldn’t undermine yourself in the process. 

It’s the exceptional individual who seeks authenticity. 

Much of the problem lies in the fact that being genuine is devalued in our culture, while success, achievement, and avoiding criticism are highly prized. 

Our prevailing cultural imperative does little to value authenticity. 

This goal appears nowhere in the curricula of our education. 

If our primary education provided coursework that taught us how to achieve emotional intelligence and the skill set of genuine communication, you might realign your priorities accordingly. 

The competitive spirit honours the winners, not the most sincere. 

And within that motif there is such thinking that being authentic may impede success. 

Yet one need not preclude the other. 

If you un-tether yourself from insecurity and fear, you can set the stage for a self-empowered life. 

Freeing yourself from the tribulations of worrying about what others think of you emboldens you to be genuine.

You are less likely to be attracted to those people who would cause you a lot of problems.

What you will find is that in order to have a “healthy authentic relationship,” these questions can be answered any number of ways; in fact, “maybe” is a suitable response for all of them. 

But if you are in a healthy marriage, there are cultural, legal, and religious standards that provide definitive “yes” or “no” answers to each and every one of those questions, and many more.

When you say, “I do,” you are accepting and affirming the pre-existing answers to these critical questions that govern your relationship. 

Healthy relationships do not afford this luxury. 

And, problematically, most people in relationships answer these questions for themselves, but never tell their partners.

20 Questions to Help you Define the Relationship

So here are 20 questions to get you started in figuring out if a “healthy relationship” is right for you: 

1.    Should we be monogamous?

2.    How do we define “faithfulness” in our relationship?

3.    Should we take precautions when having sex to avoid getting HIV and other STIs?

4.    While in the relationship can we produce children outside the relationship?  

5.    Should we think of it as a “long term” relationship? And what is long term? 

6.    Should we make a public declaration of our relationship?

7.    Should we live together? 

8.    Should we own property together? 

9.    What are our obligations to one another when one of us is sick or loses a job? 

10.   When we run into serious relationship problems, should we seek formal/professional help?

11.   Should we share similar views on childrearing?

12.   Should we share in decision-making?

13.   Should we be concerned about getting along with each other’s families?

14.   Is there a formal way to end the relationship that will protect each of our legal rights?

15.   Should we help pay for each other’s education?

16.   Should we make sacrifices in our careers, education, etc. to advance the other’s?

17.   Should we fully invest ourselves emotionally in the relationship?  And what does it mean to fully invest ourselves? 

18.   Should we share important personal information, such as social security numbers, bank account information, etc?

19.   Should we combine money/finances and save for each other’s retirement?

20.   Is it beneficial for us to share similar views about the role of faith/spirituality in our lives?

Now let me ask you some questions.....
 
Are you constantly finding yourself in "bad" relationships because you are lacking "Confidence" and suffer from low self-esteem and all it's problems?

Now "Imagine" what would happen if your "Confidence" was rock solid, your personal self-esteem was "High" and you "valued" your self and others "valued" you.....

You had "control" in your life, love and relationships.

Imagine what would your life be like?

Because you can have all the above and more.

So.....Are you wanting to be in a "Loving" relationship?

If not, what fears and insecurities is "stopping" you?

Will you take the ACTION to work with me and I will show you "how" you can have Love and a Great Relationship?

Are you ready for the next step to grow and develop you?


And as ever...Always leave a man or a woman all the better for knowing you. Average men and women know only the rules. Masculine Men and Feminine Women know and are the EXCEPTIONS!

For Love and Intimacy...

Ange Fonce

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