You're not choosing the wrong people—you're choosing what feels familiar. When love was chaotic or unsafe early in your life, your attachment system learned to bond through that dynamic. Adult relationships that mirror that pattern don't feel toxic at first. They feel like home. Your system is trying to complete old patterns with new people, hoping this time the ending will be different. It never is.
This pattern usually starts long before the relationship you're thinking of right now. If love and fear were tangled together early in your life, your attachment system learned to bond through chaos. Adult relationships that mirror that dynamic don't feel toxic at first—they feel familiar. And familiar feels like home, even when home was never safe. Your system keeps trying to rewrite the ending of old stories with new people.
Your system keeps returning to the same pattern because it's trying to complete old attachment needs with new people. When early relationships left you with unmet needs, your attachment system learned to seek out situations that resemble those early dynamics. This isn't conscious. You don't choose toxic partners because you want them. You choose them because your nervous system recognizes the pattern and believes this time it can get the need met. But the ending is always the same because the pattern is the same.
The Cost of Staying Unaware
When unconscious patterns run your relationships, you keep ending up in the same situations with different faces. You believe you're choosing love when you're actually choosing familiarity. Over and over, you repeat the cycle until you start believing this is all that's possible. Your identity becomes organized around managing toxic dynamics rather than building healthy ones. You lose years to relationships that can never meet your needs because you're trying to get different results from the same pattern.
The Shift
The shift isn't about choosing different people through willpower. Your nervous system will keep pulling you toward familiar patterns until those patterns are addressed at the source. The real shift happens when you recognize the dynamic as it's forming and choose not to participate. This requires building internal safety so you don't need the pattern to feel regulated. Over time, you stop choosing familiar chaos and start choosing genuine connection, not because you're trying to be good, but because chaos no longer feels like love.
You are not choosing the wrong people because something is wrong with you. You're choosing what feels familiar to your nervous system. As you address the old patterns at their source, your attraction to toxicity naturally fades. You don't have to force yourself to choose better. Your nervous system naturally starts choosing differently.