Different person, same relationship

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.

Most of us don't sit neatly in one of these. You might be mostly anxious with an avoidant streak, or shift between them depending on who you're with and how stretched you are. 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.

Both people are hurting. The one reaching feels left and unwanted. The one pulling away feels crowded and like they can never get it right. And neither of them can see, in the heat of it, that the loop has very little to do with this particular relationship and almost everything to do with patterns set running decades back.

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.

Why this work happens in the body

I'll be honest with you: you can't think 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 lives in the body — in the chest that tightens when a text goes unanswered, the numbness that rolls in when someone gets close, the shoulders that brace at a certain tone of voice before you've consciously clocked it.

So the attachment work I do goes underneath the talking. We slow down enough to notice what's actually happening in your nervous system in the room — the felt sense of safety, or of danger, that runs below your awareness and was doing its job long before you could name it. Working with that directly, gently and at a pace you can stay with, is how the old wiring starts to soften.

And the relationship between us does some of the work itself. Over time you get to feel what it's like to be met consistently — to say a need out loud and have it land without judgement, to be seen without having to perform being fine. That experience, repeated, slowly updates the template. Your body begins to learn that closeness doesn't have to cost you yourself.

What secure attachment actually feels like

A lot of the people I see have never really had 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 Kyneton, in the Macedon Ranges, 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.