It's a hard truth that we often don't like to admit. There is often a pattern in who we choose as partners. Most of us want the butterflies AND the stable partnership. We want to find a way to be deeply attracted to those who light us up, and ground us. We want stability and excitement.
Your first relationship taught you what love feels like
Attachment theory — John Bowlby's work in the late 1960s, and Mary Ainsworth's after his — is one of the more useful ways I know of to think about why we love the way we do. The idea underneath it is simple enough: the way your earliest caregivers met your needs, or didn't — your cries, your reaching for them, your distress when you were left — shaped your nervous system and laid down a kind of template for how closeness works.
You didn't choose that template. It went in before you had words, before you could stand back and say "actually, this doesn't feel right." It was built out of thousands of small, ordinary moments: a parent who was warm and tuned in most of the time, or one who was somewhere else, or one who ran hot and cold so you never quite knew which version you'd get.
Here's what tends to surprise people. That template doesn't expire when you grow up. It comes with you into every relationship, running quietly underneath, shaping who you're pulled toward, how you handle conflict, and what your body recognises as love — even when your thinking mind knows better.
The patterns that keep coming round
Researchers have named a handful of attachment styles that take shape in childhood and travel with us into adult relationships. Knowing which one you carry isn't about filing yourself in a box. It's about making sense of things you've done that have felt confusing, or that you've been quietly ashamed of, and seeing that they were once a clever way of staying safe with the people you had.
Anxious (preoccupied) attachment
If your caregivers were inconsistent — warm and available one day, distracted or overwhelmed the next — you probably learned to turn the volume up on your needs to get heard. You got good at reading the room, scanning for the first sign that love might be about to vanish. As an adult that can feel like a deep fear of being left, needing a lot of reassurance, finding silence or space unbearable, and disappearing into your partner's moods until you've lost track of your own. Preoccupied with the other's mind instead of your own. The chase and the making-up can feel like the most alive part of the relationship, even as it wears you out.
Avoidant (dismissive) attachment
If your caregivers were distant, brushed your feelings aside, or prized independence over closeness, you learned early that needing people wasn't safe. So you built walls and distance — not out of coldness, but to protect yourself. As an adult that can look like backing off when things get close, feeling crowded by a partner's needs, taking quiet pride in not needing anyone, or going flat and silent in conflict. You might be keen on someone right up until the moment real intimacy arrives, and then something in you says: time to go.
Disorganised attachment
This is often the most painful one, and it tends to form when the person who was meant to be your safety was also the source of your fear — through abuse, serious neglect, or carrying their own unhealed trauma. You learned that love and danger live in the same room and you organised yourself in response to that. As an adult that can become a push-pull: you ache for closeness and then panic the moment you have it, swinging between chasing hard and pulling right back, unable to settle either with your partner or without them. The whole thing can feel chaotic, and your own reactions can baffle even you.
Most of us don't sit neatly in one of these. The point isn't to pin a label on yourself. It's to start catching the pattern as it happens, because that's where the room to do something different opens up.
Why we're drawn to what hurts
This is the part that can sting: we're often pulled toward the very partners who press on our old wounds. Not because we want to suffer, but because the body learned to read "familiar" as "safe," and the two aren't the same thing. If love as a kid came with chaos, distance, or never quite knowing where you stood, then calm and steady and reliably-there can feel, to the body, like nothing at all — or like something to be suspicious of.
People often tell me they met someone kind, dependable, genuinely available, and felt flat. Nothing. Meanwhile the one who texts back whenever they feel like it, who runs hot then cold, who keeps them guessing — that one feels electric. I'd gently put it to you that what you're calling chemistry there is your attachment system spotting something familiar and ringing a bell that says: this is love.
None of this is a character flaw, and it isn't about willpower. Your brain worked out what love was during the years it was growing fastest, and you can't just decide your way out of wiring that old. But it can change. That's the part worth holding onto.
How two patterns lock together
Attachment patterns don't sit in their own corners. They hook into each other. The most common pairing I see in relationship work is the anxious one and the avoidant one, caught in the same loop. One partner moves toward — calling, texting, asking for reassurance, trying to close the gap. The other moves away — needing space, going quiet, disappearing into work or the phone. The harder one reaches, the further the other retreats; the further they retreat, the harder the first one reaches.
Seeing the loop doesn't make it stop on its own. But it puts a gap where there used to be only reflex — a breath between the trigger and the old move. That breath is small, and it's also where the whole thing starts to change.
Seeing yourself in any of this?
You don't have to work it out on your own. Attachment-focused relationship therapy is a place to understand your patterns and build steadier, closer relationships — with a partner, or with yourself first.
Relationship & attachment therapy in Bendigo & KynetonYou can't talk your way out of it
I'll be honest with you: you can't think or talk your way out of an attachment pattern. I've sat with sharp, deeply insightful people who can describe exactly what they're doing and why it started, and who still walk straight back into the same loop. That's because attachment doesn't live in the thinking mind. It formed in the first two years of life: it is preverbal, precognitive, before you even had a sense of who you are, because it is what first made your sense of who you are.
So the attachment work I do goes underneath the talking. I trained in Integrative Attachment Therapy (Level 1 of the Three Pillars model, Brown & Elliott), which works by helping you internalise the core conditions of secure attachment that weren't met the first time round, largely through guided imagery — the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol. You're not asked to forgive anyone or rewrite your history. You're given, in imagination and at a felt level, the experience of being parented the way you needed.
What are the core conditions of secure attachment?
- Being safe
- Being seen
- Being soothed
- Being valued
- Being safe to explore, and to become your best self
The more you can experience these conditions on a deeply felt level — somatic, emotional and symbolic — the deeper they get internalised, and the more they start turning up in your own life without any effort from either of us.
What secure attachment actually feels like
A lot of the people I see have never really had those conditions of secure attachment, so they don't quite know what they're aiming for. It isn't the absence of conflict, and it isn't a relationship that stops being hard. It's having enough steadiness inside you that the hard parts don't wash you away — you can hit a rough patch with your partner and not lose yourself, or lose them, in the process.
It feels like asking for what you need without apologising for needing anything. Like letting your partner be a separate person without reading it as rejection. Like staying with the discomfort of a relationship and trusting it won't end you. It feels like freedom — the freedom to love all the way in, without the anxious part of you keeping watch, or the avoidant part of you manning the walls.
This isn't a fairy tale, and I'm not promising you a perfect partner. It's what tends to happen as the old wounds settle. I've sat alongside people as they moved out of painful, churning relationships and into ones that felt steady and alive — not because they finally found the right person, but because they'd become someone who could take love in without bolting from it or gripping it too tight.
Where it starts
If you've read this far and something keeps landing, here's what I'd leave you with. Seeing the pattern is the first step, but it isn't the whole of it. The patterns were built in relationship, and they mend in relationship: with a therapist, with a partner, or both.
You don't need to have it sorted before you reach out. You don't need a partner to do this, either — a lot of the deepest attachment work happens on your own, building the steadiness inside you that then changes how you show up everywhere else. And you don't need to be in crisis. Often the right moment is the quiet one, when you catch the pattern starting and think: I don't want to do this again. The aim, all the way through, is your own freedom — not needing me, in the end, but being able to be close on your own terms.
I offer relationship and attachment therapy from my rooms in Bendigo and in Kyneton, and online across Australia or further afield. If you'd like to find out what your patterns have been trying to tell you — and what life might look like on the other side of them — I'd be glad to hear from you.