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Okay, I want to start today with a question that I know lives inside a lot of you. Maybe it comes up when you're lying in bed at night replaying things. Maybe it shows up when you finally start a therapy and your therapist asks you to think back. Maybe it's the question you've been too embarrassed to say out loud because you think the answer says something terrible about you. Why did I choose him? Or the version that comes with a little bit more bite. Why do I keep ending up in the same situation with different men? And if you sit with those long enough, there's usually one more underneath them. The one nobody wants to admit that they're asking. Is there something actually wrong with me? Here's what I need you to hear right now before we go anywhere. No, there is nothing wrong with you. But it also wasn't random. And understanding the difference between those two things, between nothing is wrong with you and this wasn't random, is what this whole episode is about. So settle in. We're gonna go through this together. And I promise that you'll come out the other side seeing yourself very differently than when you walked in. Hi, I'm Lisa, and this is Pattern Breakers Collective, the podcast where we dig into the patterns that shaped us, the ones that kept us stuck, and the work of finally breaking free from them. Quick note before we start: I usually say he when I'm describing the person causing harm, because that reflects my own experience and the women I work with. But I recognize that abuse is not limited to one gender or one type of relationship. If your story looks different from what I described today, the patterns that I'm talking about still apply. The details change, the psychology doesn't. Today is one of those episodes that I've been wanting to do for a very long time. Because this question, why did I choose him, is one of the most painful questions women carry around after leaving a toxic relationship. And it's painful not because it's unanswerable, but because of what we think the answer means. We think it means we're stupid. We think it means we should have known. We think it means something is fundamentally off about how we're built. And I want to spend the next half hour or so taking that apart, gently but completely. Fair warning, we're gonna cover a lot of ground today. Why certain people feel magnetic to us, how those connections form faster than we've realized, why leaving was so much harder than it looked from the outside, what actually changes as you do this work, and maybe most importantly, why you are absolutely not destined to repeat this. Let's go. And look, there's a tiny grain of truth buried in those statements. But the way they get delivered, it almost always sounds like blame. Like you went out looking for chaos and found exactly what you deserved. That is not what happened. What actually happened is that your nervous system, the part of you that decides what feels safe, what feels threatening, what feels familiar, was doing exactly what it was built to do. It was pattern matching, looking for what it knew. And here's the thing about what we know we learn it long before we have any say in the matter. Think about how your early picture of what a relationship feels like got painted. Not what you were told, what you absorbed, what you watched, what the energy in your house felt like on any random Wednesday afternoon when you were eight years old. For some of us, that picture was mostly stable. Love felt reliable, adults were relatively consistent. When there was conflict, it got resolved and things went back to normal. And when that's the template you grew up with, your nervous system goes looking for that version of normal in adult relationships. But for a lot of the women listening to this show, the picture looked a little different. Maybe love in your house came with conditions. Maybe you had to be good enough, quiet enough, helpful enough to earn it. Maybe the affection was real, but inconsistent. Warm some days and withdraw on others, without you ever quite understanding why. Maybe there was a parent whose mood set the whole temperature of the house, and you, even as a little kid, learned to read that mood before you even walk through the door. You knew from the sound of the footsteps on the stairs whether it was going to be a good night or a night that you should just stay in your room. You learned to scan, to adjust, to make yourself useful or invisible depending on what the situation required. Maybe there was chaos that was followed by sweetness, a blow up and then an apology, tension and then warmth. And you learn to wait out the hard parts because the good parts always came eventually. Or maybe nobody was cruel or explosive. They were just not very present, checked out, going through the motions. And love in that house felt like something that you were always reaching for, but never quite getting a full grip on. Whatever version of this you grew up with, your nervous system built its whole map of this is what connection feels like around it. And maps are powerful. They run automatically, they don't ask your permission. So when as an adult you meet someone who recreates that same feeling, even if the surface looks completely different, your nervous system lights up in a way that feels significant. It goes, I know this. This is familiar. This feels like something that I understand. And here's the part that trips people up. Familiar doesn't feel like this is gonna hurt me. Familiar feels like home. Your body doesn't go looking for abuse. It was looking for the feeling it knew. Those are completely different things. And collapsing them into one is where the self-blame starts. And I want to get real specific here because I think abstractions don't help anyone. Think about the woman who grew up in a house where her father was warm and funny and great at parties and completely emotionally unavailable at home. He was there physically, he just wasn't really there. She spent years trying to get his attention, trying to be interesting enough, trying to say the right thing to get him to actually see her. And then she meets a man in her 20s who's charming and charismatic and lights up every room he walks into. And when he focuses on her, when she has his attention, it feels like winning something that she's been trying to win her whole life. She's not drawn to him because she loves chaos. She's drawn to him because he feels like the resolution to something that she never got to resolve. Or think about the woman who grew up watching her parents fight constantly, screaming matches, door slamming. That particular kind of tension you could feel in your chest before anyone raised their voice. But then there were the makeup periods where everyone was warm and close and the family actually felt like a family. That cycle, the rupture and repair, rupture and repair, became her dysfunction of what love feels like. Love is intense, love is charged, love is this push-pull that keeps you a little off balance. So she meets someone volatile, and in the beginning, she calls it passion. Or think about the woman whose mother was wonderful but deeply anxious, always worried, always expecting something to go wrong, always needing reassurance. She became her mother's emotional caretaker from a pretty young age. She was the steady one, the responsible one, the one who didn't add to the pile. So she meets a man who is emotionally fragile, who needs her, who tells her she's the only person who really understands him. And something in her clicks into place because this is the role that she was built for. None of these women were broken. None of them were looking for pain. They were following a map that their nervous system drew before they were old enough to read. Now, here's something I want to make really clear because I've seen this conversation go sideways. This is not about blaming your parents. Most parents are doing the best they can with what they were given, which often wasn't enough because their parents weren't given enough either. We are not here to put them on trial. What we're doing is tracing a thread so that you can understand yourself, because you cannot change a pattern that you don't understand. But once you understand it, once you can see where it started and why it made sense then, you can start to have some actual power over it. And those qualities that you developed along the way, the hyper-awareness of other people's moods, the ability to read a room, the resilience, the empathy, the patience, those are real. Those serve you. They just need to be in the driver's seat consciously now instead of operating on autopilot. Let's talk about what happens once someone who fits your map actually shows up. You meet someone. Within the first few conversations, it already feels different from other people you've dated. He asks questions nobody usually asks. He listens in a way that makes you feel like what you're saying matters. Maybe he shares something vulnerable early on, something about his past, something hard, something that makes you think, wow, he trusts me with this. Within a few weeks, he's talking about the future, your future together. He says things like, Wow, I've never felt this way. I've never told anyone this before. And you're different from everyone else. And it feels incredible. Not in a quiet, steady way, in an electric way, in a this is the most alive I've ever felt kind of way. The texts come constantly. He wants to see you all the time. He makes big plans. He makes you feel maybe for the first time in your life like someone has been looking for you specifically, right? Here's what's happening underneath that. Your brain's reward system is getting flooded. Dopamine, the same chemical involved in any kind of exciting reward, surges. And surges feel like meaning. They feel like something real is happening. They feel like this is it. If you spent time feeling unseen, like you were always reaching for connection, but it kept slipping, that surge hits especially hard because it's meeting something that was hungry. And hungry things don't ask a lot of questions when they're finally getting fed. Now add in that vulnerability piece. When someone shares something painful early, tells you about his difficult childhood, his difficult exes, the way he's been hurt, it creates a bond fast because you feel trusted. And if being trusted, being needed, being the one he lets in, if any of that is tied to your sense of worth, it feels like purpose. It feels like you are already important to him before you've even figured out who he is. I want to pause and say something about the intensity because I think this is where the confusion really lives. Most of us were raised on a story about what love is supposed to feel like. Every movie, every song, every romance novel, they all say the same thing. The racing heart is the signal, the electric feeling is the proof. If it's not intense, it's not real. But here's what those movies never show you. Sometimes the racing heart isn't chemistry. Sometimes it's your nervous system recognizing a pattern, going, I know this, I've lived inside of this. This feels like what love has always felt like for me. And recognition in the body can feel a whole lot like falling in love. Let me give you a few of the scenarios I see most often. There's a guy who's all in immediately, calling you his girlfriend within two weeks, talking about moving in together after a month, making you feel like you two have something so rare that normal timelines don't apply. And it feels romantic. It feels like he just knows. But what's actually happening is that the speed itself is working on you. Because when someone collapses the distance fast, you don't have time to observe. You're swept up before you've had a chance to watch how he handles conflict or disappointment or not getting his way. Then there's a guy who presents as wounded. He's been through so much. His ex was terrible to him. His childhood was rough. He's never really let anyone in before. But there's something about you. And you find yourself wanting to be worthy of that vulnerability, wanting to be the one who finally makes him feel safe. And because you're focused on what he needs, you don't notice for a while that this dynamic only runs in one direction. Then there's the guy who's extraordinary in public and difficult in private. He's generous with everyone, funny, well-liked, the kind of person people are always happy to see. And in the beginning, you were included in that warmth. But somewhere along the way, the warmth became something that you had to earn. And by then, you were already in. You were already attached to the public version and holding on, trying to get back to him. In every one of these, the feelings were real. I want to be clear about that. The connection you felt was not a hallucination. The love was real, the attachment was real. It's just that intensity alone doesn't tell you whether someone is safe. It only tells you that your system is engaged. Feeling something deeply doesn't mean it's the right thing. It means it hits something in you that was already there, something old, something familiar, something that had been waiting to be recognized. And one more thing about this, because I think women need permission to hear it out loud. If you've ever found yourself in a new relationship with someone genuinely kind, someone steady and consistent and emotionally available and thought, I don't know. That just doesn't feel like anything yet. That's not a sign that he's wrong for you. That might be a sign that your nervous system hasn't experienced this tempo before. It doesn't know what to do with peace because peace was never the starting point for you. Peace can feel underwhelming when you're used to electricity. But give it time. Because what starts to emerge from study is something that adrenaline never gave you. Trust. Actual bone deep trust. And that turns out to feel a whole lot better. But let's not skip ahead. Because what I really want to get into next is the thing that carries the most shame. Why didn't you leave right away once you figured it out? Okay, I have to say something before we go into this section because it really bothers me. Women who have been in toxic or abusive relationships get asked, well, why didn't you just leave? Constantly. By people who mean well and by people who don't, by family members who are confused and frustrated sometimes by the little voice in their own heads at three in the morning. And the word just in that sentence does so much damage. Just implies it was simple, that there was an obvious door and you kept walking past it. That the only explanation for staying is something is wrong with you. It wasn't simple. And you're about to understand exactly why. The first thing to know is that these things don't start at their worst. They start really, really well. Which means by the time the bad stuff becomes undeniable, you are already deeply attached. You're not attached despite the red flags. You're attached because of what came before the red flags. And love, real genuine love, doesn't evaporate because harm shows up alongside it. You can love someone and be hurt by them at the same time. You can see clearly that something is wrong and still not be ready to blow up your whole life over it. And that's before we even get to how things slowly escalate. Think about the woman whose partner started criticizing her appearance subtly at first. A comment here, a suggestion there, nothing that would obviously register his abuse. Maybe she even laughed it off. And then the comments became more frequent. And then they started happening in front of other people. And then he started suggesting what she wore. And by the time she was asking his permission before getting dressed in the morning, she couldn't tell you exactly when any of it started because it had happened so incrementally that there was no single moment to point to. That is not a failure of perception. That is erosion. Slow, constant, hard to track because you adapt to each small thing before the next one arrives. Then there's the push-pull, the intermittent warmth. This is the one that keeps people in longer than almost anything else. And I don't think it gets enough attention. If every single day were terrible, leaving would eventually become clear. But it wasn't every day. There were good days. There were moments that felt like the early version of him where the person that you fell in love with showed back up and you thought, there he is. That's the real him. That's the one I've been looking for. And those moments, those genuine, warm, loving moments kept the hope alive. Hope that this version was more him than the other version. Hope that if you could just figure out what you were doing wrong, you could keep this version around. That hope is not stupidity. That's love. Love does what love does. It holds on. Even when holding on is making you miserable. And then there's gaslighting, which I need to talk about here because I think it's one of the most underestimated reasons why women stay. When someone consistently questions your memory, tells you you're imagining things, that you're too sensitive, that you misunderstood, that what you clearly remember happening actually didn't, something happens to your ability to trust your own judgment. It erodes slowly until you start checking your own perception against his before you even decide what's real. God, I remember doing this, going back over conversations in my own head, trying to reconstruct what was actually said versus what I thought was said. Wondering if I'd heard the tone wrong. Apologizing for things I wasn't sure I'd done. When you're in that state, when your own internal compass has been deliberately messed with every day, making a clear, decisive choice to leave is genuinely hard. You're not being indecisive. You are navigating a version of reality that someone else has been actively scrambling for you. Then there is also the practical reality that almost never gets acknowledged. Leaving is not just a feeling. It is a logistical problem. Maybe you share finances and you don't have your own money. Maybe you have kids and leaving means custody arrangements and disrupting their lives and the terror of knowing that he'll still have access to them. Maybe your whole social circle is connected to him and you're not sure who would choose you. Maybe you've been out of the workforce or your earning capacity was affected by the relationship. Maybe you're not sure you can actually afford to live alone. These are not excuses. They are very real structural barriers. And the woman who is trying to figure out how to leave while managing all of those things at once is not weak. She is doing something incredibly hard under genuinely difficult circumstances. And then there's the piece that I think carries the most shame of all. The piece where women say very, very quietly, I still loved him. Yeah, you did. Of course you did. You don't get to choose when attachment ends. It doesn't just switch off because someone showed you who they really are. If it did, this whole thing would be a whole lot simpler. Attachment is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It is the same system of what makes humans able to bond in the first place. When it attaches, it holds. So when women ask me, why couldn't I just leave? I always want to ask back. What do you think should have made it easy? What are you imagining you were missing that everyone else apparently has? Because from where I'm standing, what I see is a woman who loved someone, who adapted to an increasingly difficult situation, who tried everything she could to make it work before finally accepting that it wasn't going to, and who has now decided to blame herself for the time it took. The version of you who stayed was not naive. She was attached and managing a complicated situation with the tools that she had at the time. There is no timeline for leaving that is correct. The right time was when you were ready and you got ready. So instead of why didn't I leave sooner, I'd like to offer you a different question. What did it do? Take for you to finally leave? Because that answer, that's where your strength is. At some point in this work, women ask me a version of the same question. Okay, I understand the pattern now, so how do I make sure I never end up there again? And I want to answer that carefully because I've watched what happens when women get access to all this information and go too hard with it. They start treating dating like a threat assessment. They overanalyze every interaction. They talk themselves out of genuine connection because something feels vaguely familiar and they think familiarity automatically means danger now. They close off and they call it healing. I'm gonna be honest with you, that is not healing. That is just fear with better vocabulary. What we're actually going for is something more subtle and more powerful. The word I use for it is discernment. And discernment is not the same as distrust. Distrust says, everyone is a threat until proven otherwise. Discernment says, I'm gonna watch, I'm gonna take my time, I'm gonna let someone show me who they are over months, not weeks. And I'm gonna trust what I see more than how I feel in the first flush of it. And that right there, taking your time, is one of the most underrated tools you have coming out of this. Because here's what's true intensity can sustain itself for weeks, sometimes months. Someone can show up beautifully for a long time, that character always emerges eventually. Who someone is when they're disappointed, when you say no to something, when life gets inconvenient, when you're not at your best, that information will surface if you give it the space to. You get that space by slowing down, not pulling back emotionally, just not collapsing the timeline, letting the natural pace of things do its job. The other shift that happens when you understand your patterns is that you start paying attention to different things. Before, you may have been focused on how someone made you feel, the energy, the chemistry, the way he looked at you, whether the spark was there. Now you can start watching behavior. How does he treat people who can't do anything for him? The server, the person at the help desk, his ex when she comes up in conversation, his friends, does he talk about them with respect, or does everyone in his life seem to have wronged him somehow? How does he handle it when he doesn't get his way? Does he sulk, go cold, get aggressive, turn it around on you, or does he handle it like an adult? None of this requires suspicion. It just requires presence, showing up and watching rather than just feeling. There's also something that shifts in how you handle that uncomfortable feeling when something is off. A lot of women in these dynamics got really good at overriding their discomfort, explaining it away, giving the benefit of the doubt, and then giving it again, and then giving it a third time because it felt unfair to judge. You didn't want to be someone who runs at the first sign of imperfection. What changes is not that you become paranoid. It's that you stop arguing yourself out of what you're noticing. When something feels off, not just unfamiliar, but specifically off. You let yourself notice it without immediately explaining it away. You don't confront, you don't run, you just don't dismiss it. You file it, you watch for whether it shows up again. That pause between noticing and deciding is new territory for a lot of women and it's incredibly powerful. And here's what I want to say about the other thing: the thing women are sometimes embarrassed to admit. You may still feel drawn to intensity. You may still meet someone who creates that charge and feel it pull at you. That doesn't mean you're doomed. It doesn't mean all of your work was for nothing. It means you get to do something that you couldn't do before. You get to feel it and still ask the question. You get to be attracted to someone and also be watching. You get to feel the pull and slow the timeline down anyway. Attraction doesn't have to be a trap anymore because now you have something running alongside it. The goal here is not to stop feeling, it is to feel and watch at the same time. Emotional openness and clear observation running parallel. That's the combination that actually protects you. And one more thing about what changes, because I think this actually is the most important one. You start to trust what you observe more than what you're told. Because a lot of what kept women in these situations was believing the narrative he was spinning rather than trusting what they were seeing. He would say, I know I get angry, but that's because of my past and I'm working on it. Or I know I said that, but you know I didn't mean it. Or I know how it looks, but you're the only one who really understands me. Women would watch behavior that was clearly a problem, and they get handed an explanation, and the explanation became more real to them than what they'd seen with their own eyes. Now, words are information. Behavior is evidence. And when those two things don't match, that mismatch is something to pay attention to. That's it. That's the shift. It sounds simple and it changes everything. I mean very seriously. A lot of women come into this work, whether through therapy, through podcasts, through books, through conversations like this one, and they absorb all of this information about patterns and attachment and trauma and then turn it into a new form of self-attack. They say, so I was basically programmed to pick people who hurt me and I didn't even know it, which means I can't trust my own instincts at all. And I'm gonna push back on that really hard because that is not what any of this means. Your instincts were not broken. They were calibrated to a specific environment. And they did exactly what instincts are supposed to do. They kept you functioning inside that environment. They kept you safe by making you adaptive, perceptive, skilled at reading situations, able to manage difficult people. Those instincts served you. They just got applied in a context that was bigger than what they were designed for. There's a version of this story I've seen play out more times than I could count. A woman grows up in a house where love was inconsistent, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, always a little unpredictable. She becomes hyper-attuned to people. She can read a room like no one's business. She knows when someone is pretending to be fine. She's the friend people call when they're falling apart because she actually shows up. She's generous, she loves deeply. She ends up in a relationship with someone who is fundamentally, emotionally unavailable, charming and magnetic, and incapable of genuine closeness. She pours herself into it. She adapts, she tries, she stays longer than she should. She eventually leaves. And then she sits across to me and says, What's wrong with me? And I want to say, and I will say, nothing, not a single thing. She was built for connection. She is extraordinarily good at it. She just took that capacity and put it in the service of someone who could not receive it. That's not a character flaw. That is a mismatch. One of the things that I have come to really believe from my own experience and from doing this work is that the women who end up in these relationships are often some of the most emotionally capable, empathetic, resilient people in the room. The capacity to love that hard, endure that much, and still try to understand rather than just hate, that's not weakness. That is a remarkable amount of emotional strength. It just needs to be in the service of the right thing. That's what this work is. It's not about becoming less, it's not about closing off. It's not about never trusting anyone again. It is about aiming that enormous capacity more accurately. I also want to say something about the fear that shows up for a lot of women at this stage. The fear that goes, well, what if I do all of this work and still end up with the same kind of person? What if I actually can't change this? I hear that fear and I want you to know change doesn't have to be dramatic to be real. It shows up in small moments. The moment you notice something feeling off and you don't immediately explain it away. The moment someone moves too fast and you feel that pull and also think, you need to slow down. The moment a kind, consistent, emotionally available person comes along and instead of feeling nothing, you feel something starting to grow slowly and you recognize that it's something worth staying for. Those moments of new choice, those are the pattern breaking in real time, not loudly, quietly, one decision at a time. And the question changes. It goes from why did I choose him to what do I actually want? It goes from what's wrong with me to what do I know now that I didn't know then? That shift from self-blame to self-knowledge is everything. It is literally everything. So let me say this clearly, as clearly as I know how. You are not broken. You are not destined to keep repeating this. You are not naive for having loved deeply. You are not stupid for having stayed. You are not beyond understanding or healing or building something completely different. You are someone who is shaped by circumstances that you didn't choose, who survived things that were genuinely hard, who is now doing the work of understanding herself with more honesty and compassion than most people ever manage. That deserves real respect. You were never someone who attracted abuse. You were someone who brought your whole self, your entire capacity for love and connection and hope into a situation that couldn't hold it. That says everything about what you're capable of, not everything about what you deserve. Carry that with you. Take a big breath because that was a lot to sit with. If this episode stirred something in you, if you feel seen or recognized, or maybe a little relieved that someone finally said it plainly, I am so glad that you were here for it. And if it hits something that still feels raw, that's okay too. That's actually the work working. You're supposed to feel things. Just be gentle with yourself today. I have a few things that I want to ask you before we close this out. First, if this episode meant something to you, please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It takes 60 seconds and it genuinely helps more women find this show. There are women out there right now asking, why did I choose him at three in the morning, beating themselves up over something that they don't understand yet? A review gets this episode in front of them, so if you felt something today, please take a minute to say so. Second, think about who in your life needs to hear this. Not as a hint, not as something you forward with a pointed message, just a gift. A friend who's been stuck in a relationship she can't quite explain, a sister who keeps ending up in the same situation, someone who's been carrying that shame question, send it to her. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do for someone is just put the right words in front of them at the right time. And third, if today's episode hits somewhere deep, if you're sitting with the recognition that understanding this isn't enough, that you want to do this work with real structure and real support, I want to tell you about my 12-week program, Healing from Toxic Love. It was built specifically for women who are ready to break the pattern at the root, not just learn about it, actually move through it. We go deep on everything we touched today and a whole lot more in a structured container with actual support. It is truly transformative work. I've watched women come in carrying years of shame and walk out understanding themselves in a completely different way. If that sounds like where you are, head to my socials. All the information is there. Reach out, ask questions, there's no pressure, just an open door. Okay, that's it from me. Be patient with yourself this week. This kind of understanding doesn't land all at once. It sinks in over days, sometimes weeks. Let it. Until next time, keep breaking every pattern that was never yours to carry on.