You promised yourself it would be different this time. You chose someone who seemed nothing like your ex. Different look, different job, different background. And yet here you are again -- that same sinking feeling in your stomach, the same arguments playing out with slightly different words, the same loneliness sitting right next to you in a relationship that was supposed to be the one that finally worked.
If this sounds familiar, I want you to know something important: there is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken, cursed, or destined to repeat the same heartbreak forever. What you are experiencing has a name, and more importantly, it has a way through.
In my work as an integrative psychotherapist in Kyneton and Melbourne, I sit with people every week who are caught in exactly this cycle. Smart, self-aware, deeply caring people who cannot understand why they keep ending up in the same relational patterns. The answer almost always lives in the same place -- not in who you are choosing, but in what you learned about love before you had any say in the matter.
Your First Relationship Was Your Blueprint
Attachment theory, first developed by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, gives us one of the most useful frameworks for understanding why we love the way we do. The core idea is straightforward: the way your earliest caregivers responded to your needs -- your cries, your bids for closeness, your distress -- literally shaped your nervous system and created an internal blueprint for how relationships work.
This blueprint was not something you chose. It was built before you had words, before you could think critically, before you could say "actually, this does not feel right." It was wired in through thousands of small moments -- a parent who was consistently warm and attuned, or one who was emotionally absent, or one who swung unpredictably between closeness and withdrawal.
And here is the part that catches most people off guard: this blueprint does not expire. It follows you into every adult relationship, quietly running in the background, shaping who you are drawn to, how you respond to conflict, and what feels like "love" to your body -- even when your mind knows better.
The Three Patterns That Keep Repeating
Researchers have identified several distinct attachment styles that develop in childhood and carry forward into adult relationships. Understanding which pattern you carry is not about putting yourself in a box. It is about finally making sense of behaviours that have felt confusing or shameful, and recognising that they were once your best strategy for survival.
Anxious Attachment
If your caregivers were inconsistent -- sometimes warm and available, sometimes distracted or overwhelmed -- you likely learned to turn up the volume on your needs. You became hypervigilant to shifts in mood, always scanning for signs that love might disappear. In adult relationships, this can show up as a deep fear of abandonment, a need for constant reassurance, difficulty tolerating space or silence, and a tendency to lose yourself in your partner's emotional world. You might notice that you feel most "alive" in the intensity of pursuit and reunion, even though the cycle leaves you exhausted.
Avoidant Attachment
If your caregivers were emotionally distant, dismissive of your feelings, or valued independence above connection, you learned that needing others was not safe. You built walls -- not out of coldness, but out of self-protection. In adult relationships, this can look like pulling away when things get too close, feeling suffocated by a partner's emotional needs, priding yourself on self-sufficiency, or shutting down during conflict. You might find that you are drawn to people initially, but as soon as real intimacy arrives, something inside you says "get out."
Disorganised Attachment
This is perhaps the most painful pattern, and it often develops when the person who was supposed to be your source of safety was also a source of fear -- through abuse, severe neglect, or their own unresolved trauma. You learned that love and danger live in the same place. In adult relationships, this can create a push-pull dynamic where you desperately want closeness but panic when you get it. You might find yourself swinging between intense pursuit and sudden withdrawal, feeling like you cannot live with or without your partner. Relationships feel chaotic, and your own responses can feel bewildering even to you.
Most of us do not fit neatly into one category. You might be mostly anxious with some avoidant tendencies, or you might shift between styles depending on the relationship or how stressed you are. The point is not to label yourself -- it is to start recognising the pattern so you can begin to interrupt it.
Why You Are Drawn to What Hurts
Here is the part that can be hard to hear: we are often drawn to partners who activate our attachment wounds, not because we enjoy suffering, but because our nervous system is wired to equate familiarity with safety. The chaos, the distance, the unpredictability -- if that is what love felt like growing up, then calm, consistent, available love can actually feel boring or suspicious to your body.
I have worked with many clients who describe meeting someone kind, reliable, and emotionally available, and feeling absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, the person who texts back inconsistently, who runs hot and cold, who keeps them guessing -- that person feels electric. That is not chemistry. That is your attachment system recognising something familiar and sounding the alarm that says "this is love."
This is not a character flaw. It is neuroscience. Your brain formed its understanding of love during a period of massive neural development, and it takes more than willpower to rewrite those circuits. But they can be rewritten. That is the genuinely hopeful part of this story.
The Dance Between Partners
Attachment patterns do not operate in isolation. They dance together. One of the most common pairings I see in relationship therapy is the anxious-avoidant trap. One partner pursues -- calling, texting, seeking reassurance, trying to close the distance. The other withdraws -- needing space, shutting down, retreating behind work or screens or silence. The more one pursues, the more the other retreats. The more one retreats, the more desperately the other pursues.
Both partners are in pain. The pursuer feels abandoned and unloved. The withdrawer feels suffocated and inadequate. And neither can see that they are locked in a cycle that has nothing to do with this specific relationship and everything to do with patterns set in motion decades ago.
Understanding this dynamic does not make it magically stop. But it does create a moment of choice where there was only reflex before. And that moment of choice is where everything begins to change.
Recognising Your Patterns?
If you are seeing yourself in these descriptions, you do not need to navigate this alone. Attachment therapy can help you understand your patterns and build more secure, connected relationships.
Relationship & Attachment Therapy in KynetonHow Therapy Rewires Attachment
I want to be honest with you: you cannot think your way out of an attachment pattern. I have seen brilliant, insightful people who can articulate exactly what they are doing and why -- and still find themselves repeating the same cycles. That is because attachment lives in your body, not just your mind. It lives in the tightening of your chest when your partner does not respond to a text. It lives in the numbness that washes over you when someone tries to get close. It lives in the way your shoulders brace for impact when you hear a certain tone of voice.
This is why the relationship therapy and attachment work I offer in Kyneton and Melbourne goes beyond conversation. We work with what is happening in your nervous system -- the felt sense of safety and danger that operates beneath conscious awareness. Through somatic approaches, guided visualisation, and the experience of a genuinely attuned therapeutic relationship, we create new neural pathways. We teach your body that it is safe to need, safe to trust, safe to be close without losing yourself.
In attachment therapy, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a kind of laboratory for secure attachment. You get to experience what it feels like to be truly seen, to have your feelings met with consistency and care, to express a need and have it responded to without judgement. Over time, this experience begins to update your internal blueprint. Your nervous system starts to learn that secure love is not just possible -- it is something you deserve.
What Secure Attachment Actually Feels Like
Many of my clients have never experienced secure attachment, so they do not know what they are working toward. Secure attachment does not mean the absence of conflict or the end of all relationship difficulties. It means having an internal foundation of safety that allows you to navigate those difficulties without losing yourself or your connection to your partner.
It feels like being able to ask for what you need without apologising for having needs. It feels like tolerating your partner's separateness without interpreting it as rejection. It feels like sitting with discomfort in a relationship and trusting that it will not destroy you. It feels like freedom -- the freedom to love fully, without the constant surveillance of your anxious mind or the fortress walls of your avoidant defences.
This is not a fairy tale. It is what happens when you do the work of healing your attachment wounds. I have watched clients move from cycles of painful, chaotic relationships into partnerships that feel steady and alive. Not because they found the "right person," but because they became someone who could receive love without running from it or clinging to it.
A Starting Point
If you have read this far and something is resonating, I want to leave you with this: awareness is the first step, but it is not enough on its own. The patterns you carry were built in relationship, and they heal in relationship -- whether that is a therapeutic relationship, a partnership, or both.
You do not need to have it all figured out before you reach out. You do not need a partner to do this work -- in fact, some of the most powerful attachment healing happens individually, giving you the internal security to show up differently in all your relationships. And you do not need to be in crisis. Sometimes the best time to start is when you notice the pattern and think, "I do not want to do this again."
I offer relationship and attachment therapy from my practice in Kyneton and Melbourne, as well as online in Australia or internationally. If you would like to explore what your patterns are telling you -- and what might be possible on the other side of them -- I would be glad to hear from you.