Why You Keep Attracting the Wrong Partner 🧠
Why the little girl or little boy in you is still running your love life (8min Read)
TL;DR Summary:
You repeat painful relationship patterns because your inner child is still choosing your partners based on familiarity, not compatibility.
Imago Theory explains why you’re unconsciously drawn to partners who feel like your early caregivers — your brain is trying to resolve unfinished emotional business.
The “chemistry” you chase is often just recognition of old wounds, not real connection.
Healing requires differentiating your adult self’s needs from your younger parts’ survival patterns.
A 3-step process — awareness, inner child repair, and nervous-system retraining — helps you break the cycle for good.
Why You Keep Choosing the Same Partners
Newsflash: You’re not sabotaging yourself. You’re reenacting a story your nervous system still believes it has to finish.
You know that moment when you step back and think:
“Why do I keep ending up here? Why does it feel like I dated the same person five different times, just with different haircuts?”
You don’t mean to do it. You don’t want to do it.
You genuinely thought you were choosing differently this time.
But once again, you find yourself in the same emotional weather:
Walking on eggshells.
Over-functioning.
Chasing.
Shrinking.
Hyper-analyzing crumbs.
Feeling “almost chosen.”
And you wonder… How am I this aware, this intelligent, this reflective… and still falling into familiar pain?
Let’s get really honest: You’re not choosing your partners. The little girl or little boy inside you is.
And younger you isn’t looking for healthy love.
Younger you is looking for familiar love.
Even if familiar love hurt.
Let’s break it down.
Your Nervous System Has Been Choosing For You
When you meet someone new, you think you’re evaluating the usual:
Do we have chemistry?
Do we align?
Do they communicate well?
Are they emotionally present?
But your nervous system is quietly scanning for something else entirely: “Do they feel like the emotional environment I grew up in?”
Your limbic system, the emotional brain, doesn’t care about compatibility. It cares about predictability.
You might not consciously hear it, but somewhere in your system, a young part is whispering: “Oh… this feeling. I know this. I’ve survived this before.”
And that whisper becomes the “spark.”
People always say you can’t fake chemistry.
But what we call chemistry is often just familiarity colliding with longing.
The Part of You That Keeps Choosing
From an Internal Family Systems (IFS) point of view, these are your younger parts, the little boy or girl in you who still carries the fear, longing, confusion, ache, protective strategies, and the beliefs they formed around love.
If love meant chasing, that part still chases.
If love meant pleasing, that part still pleases.
If love meant silence, that part still freezes.
If love meant staying small to stay safe, that part still shrinks.
These younger parts aren’t trying to ruin your relationships.
They’re trying to protect you using the only methods they ever learned.
They think they’re doing the right thing.
They think they’re saving your life. Because once upon a time… they were.
Your Imago Type
This is the missing piece that almost no one explains well enough.
Your Imago is the internal blueprint your brain builds from the people who shaped you earliest, the ones who taught you what connection felt like.
For most people, this is their parents.
And this blueprint isn’t just made of their best qualities. It’s also made of their worst.
Your Imago is a psychological collage of:
how available or unavailable they were
how safe or unsafe they felt
how they responded to your emotions
how predictable or unpredictable they were
how much you had to earn connection
how much you were allowed to need
how much space you were allowed to take up
It’s like your nervous system took a snapshot of your childhood emotional landscape, pressed “SAVE AS TEMPLATE,” and now uses that template to choose partners.
It’s not a romantic choice. It’s a neurological one.
How Your Imago Forms
When you were little, your developing brain linked:
“This is what love feels like.”
“This is what closeness feels like.”
“This is what connection costs.”
“This is how much safety I deserve.”
“This is how I must behave to be seen.”
And your brain stored that information in implicit memory, the kind of memory you don’t consciously recall or think about, like walking.
The amygdala tags the pattern. The hippocampus stores the emotional tone. The insula records the body state.
So now, as an adult?
When you meet someone who matches that blueprint, even subtly, your body lights up like: “FOUND THEM.”
Not because it’s healthy. Because it’s familiar.
How Imago Plays Out Today
You might be living your Imago if you notice:
You’re drawn to people who feel slightly out of reach.
You feel “alive” around inconsistency.
You equate emotional intensity with connection.
Healthy people feel “too easy,” “too stable,” or “not exciting.”
You chase partners who remind you of someone you tried to win love from as a child.
You keep repeating the same emotional cycle even when the partner changes.
Your Imago isn’t trying to cause suffering.
It’s trying to complete the emotional lesson you never got to complete as a kid: “Maybe this time, I’ll finally earn the love I didn’t get then.”
But your nervous system doesn’t know that you can’t heal a childhood wound
with the same type of person who caused it.
Why You Don’t Notice the Pattern Until You’re Already In It
By now you’re probably wondering how on earth you’ve never noticed this…
That would be because the part of you that chooses is not the part of you that reflects.
Your inner child chooses. Your adult self reflects. And they’re not in the car at the same time.
Your younger parts fall in love. Your adult parts clean up the mess.
This is why you can give brilliant relationship advice to other people
and still get blindsided by your own patterns.
Wisdom isn’t the problem. Awareness isn’t the problem.
Childhood imprinting is.
It’s always right about now that I suspect you start to wonder, “Alright, so what can I do about this little kid in me, Cody?”
I’m glad you asked.
How You Actually Break the Cycle
Here’s the good news: You’re not doomed to repeat the pattern forever.
Your Imago is not destiny. Your inner child is not a curse. Your attachment style is not a life sentence.
Let me give you the process I teach clients when they’re ready to transform this from the inside out.
Step One: Identify the Pattern With Precision
Not judgment. Precision.
The next time you’re activated while dating or in a relationship, ask:
“What version of me is reacting right now?”
“How old do I feel in this moment?”
Get curious like a scientist with current and past relationships:
Does this feel like Dad’s distance?
Mom’s inconsistency?
A first love who taught me that anxiety = intimacy?
A childhood pattern where love meant earning?
Awareness pulls your adult self back into the driver’s seat.
You can’t heal what you can’t see.
Step Two: Repair the Little You (IFS Meets Neurobiology)
Once you identify which younger part is present, you meet them.
This is the heart of the work.
And surprise, surprise, I’d suggest an IFS therapist or practitioner for this kind of work.
It’s exactly what IFS was created for.
The best part about IFS is that you can do a lot of this work on your own, too, so ask little you, gently, the way you wish someone had asked you back then:
“What are you afraid will happen if I choose differently?”
“What did you learn love was supposed to feel like?”
“What do you still need?”
Your brain doesn’t heal through insight alone.
It heals through felt experience, especially corrective emotional experiences.
When your adult self shows up for your younger parts in ways no one did back then, those younger parts stop choosing your partners for you.
You become the safe adult you always needed.
And they finally get to rest.
Now you can date and be in relationships in a calm, clear, and connected manner.
Step Three: Retrain Your Nervous System to Recognize Safety
This is where real neuroplastic change happens.
Your body needs repeated, gentle exposure to: Calm, consistency, sincerity, and emotional presence without associating it with danger.
This looks like:
Letting someone show up for you, without pulling away.
Allowing small doses of healthy intimacy, without bracing.
Receiving affection, without waiting for the shoe to drop.
Pausing when you feel the urge to chase someone unavailable.
Each time you choose differently, your amygdala updates the file.
Your insula picks up a new body state. Your prefrontal cortex regains leadership.
And slowly, your brain rewires:
“This is what safety feels like.”
“This is what love feels like.”
“This is what home feels like.”
Not the old home. The one you deserved all along.
As a little bonus, I wanted to give you a question I suggest everyone ask themselves before falling into the trance of chemistry.
“Does this person make me feel safe… or do they make my childhood feel familiar?”
Familiar isn’t fate. It’s just the past asking for resolution.
And you’re allowed to choose differently.
A Final Word
There comes a moment in every healing journey when the little girl or little boy inside you finally stops running the show because they trust you to lead.
That moment changes everything.
Because when you begin choosing partners from your healed self, not your wounded self, your love life doesn’t just shift.
It transforms.
Not because you found someone different, but because you became someone who could finally choose differently.
And you will.
I believe in you, and until next time… Live Heroically 🧠
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Supporting Research
Ainsworth, M. D. S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Erlbaum.
Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Hendrix, H. (1988). Getting the love you want: A guide for couples. Henry Holt.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.
Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.
Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.