Lucy Spicer's Expert Advice: Why do I keep choosing the wrong partners in relationships?

A common theme that has come up with our I AM ARLA members is that they feel like they keep choosing the wrong partners in relationships. This may resonate with you reading this right now. Are you trapped in always ending up in a relationship with the same sort of person and you don’t know where to even begin to change this? This can feel even more distressing if you find yourself always ending up in abusive relationships and you may falsely think of yourself as a failure or weak for doing so and not seeing the warning signs each time. My method to break the pattern of ending up in relationships with the wrong person, is to create the space for yourself to build up your confidence and self worth, scrap the belief that you will always end up with the same person and from this growth, create the freedom for you to feel empowered to be able to attract the person you ​deserve​ into your life.

Building up your self-confidence and worthiness

Let’s start by removing the narrative that you always fall for the wrong partners in relationships. By creating this belief for yourself you are telling your subconscious mind over and over again that this is your truth and something that you always do. This can then create a bias in your mind, which means that you subconsciously continually attract the same partner into your life and without realising it, filter out all the other suitors which can leave you feeling stuck in the same pattern.

Begin by letting go of the old story that you tell yourself about falling for the same partner again and again. This story isn’t serving you and will make you feel like change can’t happen and that it is how it’s going to always be. Instead, create a clean slate for yourself and your dating life and tell yourself that you have changed now and you are fully committed to attracting the right partner into your life (how much more liberating and empowering does this already feel?)

Take time out for yourself to do the real inner work around your self-confidence and self-worth; surround yourself with positive people, read the self help books, listen to the motivational podcasts, hire a coach. Get comfortable, no matter how uncomfortable it might initially feel, being with yourself. Let go of comparing yourself with other friends if they are settling down or of societal expectations of where you should be in your life right now and feeling like you need to rush into another relationship. Comparison is incredibly unhelpful as we are all on our own unique paths. By working on your confidence and self worth, it will mean that when you go into the next relationship you will be in a place where you can depend on yourself and feel more confident to end the relationship if it doesn’t fit with what you’re now looking for.

As well as focusing your attention on what you want from your new partner, get equal clarity on what it is you don’t want. You can do this by raising your awareness to identify the red fags from previous partners and their behaviours, which might be around control, abuse and gas-lighting. Set yourself boundaries so that if something doesn’t feel right early on, you feel empowered enough to trust your intuition and walk away, knowing that you are much better off on your own. Stepping away is strength and not failure.

Attracting your new partner into your life

Start by getting really clear on what qualities you want your new partner to have. These are likely to be very different from before and that’s great! If the partners you’ve picked before are something that you’ve only ever known (but not wanted), then looking for something completely different might feel daunting as you’re stepping into unknown territory. Your mind won’t like you stepping out of the ‘comfort zone’ of what you know by wanting something new, but let it have it’s hissy fit and tell it powerfully that you are moving in a new direction which is exciting.

Think deeply about what it is you want from your partner. If you find it difficult to think of this for yourself, imagine choosing a partner for your closest friend; how would you want him/her to behave, treat your friend, what qualities would he/she have, what would their values be and how would you want them to respond to your friend's needs? The qualities might be that your future partner is reliable, respectful, compassionate, warm, funny, whatever is important to you. Get this all down in your journal and start mapping out what it is you’re looking for and wanting to attract into your life.

Now let’s get a bit woo-woo (stay with me). You may have heard of the law of attraction or manifestation (this would require a whole separate blog post to explain), the basic premise is that everything in the world, including us, is energy and what we think of and focus our attention on wanting to receive, we can positively attract into our lives (a bit like a magnetic force). So, start hanging out with your new dream partner in your mind, imagine what the relationship would look like, what sort of things you would do together and how the relationship would make you feel. Doing this should make you feel really good and excited and the more you think about it and sit in this energy, the more you are going to send out signals that are ready to receive this into your life.

Go easy on yourself and take your time with this process of letting go, building your confidence up and attracting someone new. You are breaking repeated patterns of behaviour which may have been around for a long time. Patterns can take time to destroy but your growth and excitement sits in the fact that they can be rebuilt. So repeat after me, ​‘I have changed, this time will be different and I am attracting the partner that I want and deserve into my life’.