“I Keep Choosing People Who Hurt Me”
“I hate that this keeps happening. It’s like I know better, but I don’t do better. I end up in relationships—romantic or otherwise—with people who dismiss me, use me, or treat me like I’m easy to leave. And I keep going back. Or I replace them with someone just as harmful. I don’t understand why I can’t stop choosing pain.”
Dear Mayra,
There’s a kind of quiet devastation in what you wrote—because it’s not just about being hurt. It’s about feeling complicit in your own suffering. About seeing the pattern, naming the pattern, and still finding yourself stuck inside it. And that feeling—I should know better by now—often turns the pain inward. Instead of directing the blame where it belongs, we start to believe there’s something fundamentally broken in us.
But I want to start here: you’re not broken. You’re not weak. You’re not addicted to drama. What you are is patterned. And that pattern likely began long before you had any power to choose differently.
When you say, “I keep choosing people who hurt me,” what I hear isn’t foolishness. I hear history. I hear early wiring. I hear the story of someone whose nervous system learned to equate closeness with risk, and who now struggles to distinguish familiarity from safety.
Because we don’t fall into repetition by accident. We repeat what’s unresolved. What’s unhealed. What’s unfinished. Especially when the original injury wasn’t just painful—it was formative. It helped shape our template for love, attachment, and identity. And when the first people who taught you love were also the people who made you feel small, ashamed, unworthy, or invisible, then somewhere inside, love gets tangled up with hurt.
That’s not just a poetic metaphor. It’s a psychological truth. We gravitate toward what we know. Even if what we know is painful.
This is what Freud called repetition compulsion: the unconscious pull to re-enact past dynamics in hopes of mastering them. Not because we enjoy suffering, but because our brains are trying to resolve something. Trying to turn an old story into a new ending. If we can just get this person to stay, or treat us better, or see our worth, then maybe we’ll finally rewrite what went wrong the first time.
But that hope is a trap when the people we’re drawn to are incapable of giving us what we need. And it becomes especially hard to break free when we don’t believe we deserve something better. Because underneath the repetition is usually a core belief that says: This is what I’m worth. This is what love feels like. This is how it goes for me.
And so the cycle continues. The relationship starts with promise. With attention. With spark. But slowly, the patterns emerge. The distance. The criticism. The inconsistency. The absence of repair. And you begin the internal negotiation: Maybe I’m asking for too much. Maybe I’m being too sensitive. Maybe if I love them better, they’ll treat me better. You reach for self-blame because it feels more empowering than admitting you’ve been hurt again.
But the truth is, the version of you that keeps choosing hurt is not doing so out of weakness. She’s doing so out of longing. Longing for resolution. For redemption. For proof that love doesn’t always have to end in pain. And that longing is sacred, even when it leads you into harm.
What makes this so difficult to escape is that the early bonds we form—especially with caregivers—imprint deeply. If love was unstable, or conditional, or infused with guilt, you may unconsciously equate intensity with intimacy. Chaos with closeness. You feel something real, something strong, but it’s laced with the same anxious pull you felt as a child: Will they stay? Will I be enough? Can I fix this before it breaks?
That’s not love. That’s trauma bonding.
Trauma bonds keep us tethered to people who hurt us because they replicate the highs and lows we came to associate with connection. The intermittent reinforcement of kindness followed by coldness. The breadcrumbing. The longing. The waiting. These patterns activate the nervous system—not because they’re healthy, but because they’re familiar. And familiarity can be seductive, even when it’s unsafe.
So what now?
The goal isn’t to shame yourself for the past. The goal is to interrupt the present. To start paying attention not just to who you’re drawn to—but why. To notice the feeling in your body when someone is emotionally available, versus when they’re withholding. Often, people with secure, grounded love can feel boring or “too nice” at first—because they don’t trigger the survival dance you’ve come to associate with affection.
That’s okay. It takes time to retrain the nervous system. To teach yourself that steadiness is not the same as emptiness. That calm is not the same as coldness. That respect is not the same as indifference.
And that real love—sustainable love—doesn’t require you to audition for it.
You don’t have to earn what should be given freely.
You don’t have to contort yourself into someone else’s comfort zone.
You don’t have to keep choosing people who only know how to love halfway.
And when the part of you still feels drawn to those familiar dynamics, try not to meet it with contempt. Meet it with curiosity. That’s the part of you still looking for a place to resolve your earliest pain. That’s the part of you that didn’t stop believing love was possible, even when it hurt. That part deserves compassion, not punishment.
Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never be attracted to the wrong people again. It means you’ll notice the pull before you act on it. It means you’ll start asking: Does this feel safe, or just familiar? Do I feel whole here, or just temporarily seen? Am I loving from freedom, or from fear?
You are not doomed to repeat this pattern forever. But you do have to grieve it. Grieve the years you spent trying to prove your worth to people who couldn’t see it. Grieve the version of you who thought pain was the price of love. Grieve the endings you didn’t get to control. And then, gently, begin again.
You deserve relationships that don’t require you to bleed in silence. You deserve partners who choose you without conditions. You deserve to stop surviving love and start receiving it.
And that begins with choosing yourself more fiercely than you’ve ever chosen anyone else.
You’re not choosing pain anymore. You’re choosing truth.
–RJ