California Psychics (0:00)

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Discover (0:28)

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Jay Shetty (1:00)

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Discover (2:35)

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Jay Shetty (2:42)

Hey everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose. My name's Jay Shetty and I'm so grateful to welcome you back. This is the place you come to listen, learn, and grow. Thank you for your commitment. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your energy. I appreciate it so, so deeply. Now, today's episode is all about how past relationships shape your dating future. How many of you have ever found yourself saying, why do I keep attracting the same kind of people? Why do I keep attracting the same kind of person? Or why am I so guarded when things start to go well? Or why am I always the one who's chasing someone? If you've ever asked any of those questions, this episode is for you. We're diving deep into the psychology of how your past relationships, loves and losses are, are still influencing who you choose, how you love, and what you fear. And most importantly, we're talking about how to break the cycle. I think so many of us feel like we're always repeating patterns. We keep making the same mistakes, we keep bumping into the same types of people, and we don't realize what's going on. And sometimes we may pause and think, well, maybe something's wrong with me. But that doesn't solve the problem either, right? We keep repeating patterns. We keep finding the same people. We keep being attracted to the same types of people. We keep having our heart broken in the exact same way. What is going on? Let's get into it. The first thing I want to do is talk to you about the truth about your relationship history. Here's a really interesting thing to think about. According to the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, people tend to recreate familiar emotional patterns in new relationships, even if those patterns were painful. Why? Because familiar equals safe, even if it's unhealthy. Think about that moment. Familiar equals safe, even if it's unhealthy. If the mind feels something feels familiar, something feels like home, something feels consistent. We see it as safe, even though it's not healthy. And the fascinating thing about this is sometimes it's repeating the patterns of our parents. If your home was always a place of anxiety, you now feel at home. In places of anxiety, if at home you had to constantly try to get your parents attention, you now feel it's familiar. In dating, when you're trying to get someone's attention, if you were always over loved at home, you now feel familiar. When you're over loved, even if that person's love bombing you. It's really fascinating how our first loves, our parents, are the first people to truly love us, the first person we ever dated, the first person we had a crush on. All of this becomes our relationship history. And whatever that relationship history looks like becomes what we yearn for. I describe this in my book eight Rules of Love as the gifts and gaps. We try to repeat the gifts that our parents gave us and we try to fill the gaps that our parents left by the people we choose. Everything is wired from the past. And therefore, if you really want to move forward, if you really want to make progress, we have to start by looking back. Now, this idea is called repetition compulsion, a term coined by Freud. It means we unconsciously repeat relationship dynamics from our past, hoping to fix them this time round. This is the part that I find so interesting. Not only do we pick things that feel familiar, we feel this time's the exception. This time we're going to solve it. This time we're going to figure it out. I'm going to date someone who's emotionally unavailable, but this time I'm going to be able to change them. I'm going to date someone who's emotionally immature, but this time they're going to become more immature. I'm going to date someone who disrespects me, but they're going to learn to respect me. This is how we unconsciously repeat relationship dynamics from our past, hoping to fix them this time round. So if your ex was emotionally unavailable and you now find yourself drawn to someone who gives mixed signals, that's not a coincidence. That's your brain saying, this feels like home. This feels like home. So I want to clarify something here. It's not because we enjoy the pain. It's because our brain feels safe and is still trying to solve it. Maybe if I live it again this time I can get it right. And here are some more real life examples. You had an emotionally unavailable parent and now you keep falling for partners who who are hot and cold, distant or avoidant. You were constantly criticized growing up and now you seek validation from people who hold back their approval. Your first love cheated or betrayed you, and now you feel hypervigilant or drawn to people who trigger that insecurity. It's not just bad luck. It's your nervous system saying, this feels familiar. I know how to survive this. This literally is blowing my mind as I'm saying it. Think about that for a second. We often say, oh, it's just bad luck. I just have bad luck in dating. It just keeps going wrong for me. And what ends up happening is not only are we stuck in a cycle, we now start saying harsh, critical things to ourself. But the reality is, it's not just bad luck. It's your nervous system saying bad this feels familiar. I know how to survive this. We keep moving in the direction of things we think we can survive rather than the discomfort of something we're not used to, even if it's better for us. It's almost like saying when you're trying to change what you're eating or you're trying to go to the gym. We all know going to the gym is better for us, but it's uncomfortable to choose it. We'd rather stay in bed because it feels safe. Even though it's not healthy. Your brain does this because it's wired to seek what's familiar. Unresolved trauma doesn't just sit quietly in your memory. It repeats itself in your choices, relationships, and emotional reactions. Repetition compulsion is your subconscious trying to rewrite the story to finally win the love, approval or safety you didn't get the first time. But here's the twist. You can't heal by reliving the wound. You heal by choosing differently. The moment you recognize your patterns, you interrupt the cycle. It might look like, wow, I'm actually not in love. I'm just trying to earn the love I never got. You might hear it as, this isn't chemistry. This is a wound dressed up as attraction. This person reminds me of someone who hurt me, not someone who can love me. That awareness is where the healing begins, right? That's where it really begins. I hope this is hitting you as hard as it's hitting for me right now. And get this, a University of Denver study found that emotional baggage from previous relationships is one of the top predictors of dissatisfaction in new ones. So, yeah, your past is in the room even when your ex isn't. So what do we do about this? So the five signs your past relationship might still be in the driving seat. Number one, you're hyper independent or emotionally walled off. Now, independence is great. It's when we're emotionally walled off that our independence is no longer independence. It's actually isolation. Right? It's not that you feel comfortable on your own, it's that you only feel good on your own. Right? There's a difference between liking your company and enjoying your company and only wanting to be alone because you're scared of connection. The second sign that your past relationship might still be holding the wheel is you panic when someone gets too close or too distant. Have you noticed how when someone gets close, we start to go, oh, yeah, I'm not sure this is working out. I'm not really sure about this. Oh, maybe they weren't right. You now start to see all the red flags. All of a sudden you're convinced that this person's not great for you. We also get panicky when someone gets too distant. If someone says, hey, I'm going away for the week, all of a sudden we're wondering why they haven't messaged us immediately, right? If someone says, hey, I'm going away for three days, we're like, oh, do you have to go? Right? And that's just triggering something from the past. You may not even like this person that much. You may not even have that depth of connection with them. And they may be thinking, wait a minute, why are you going to miss me so much? We've only been dating for a month, and all of a sudden you start to recognize. And I'm sure you can see how it all comes from previous abandonment, previous isolation, previous disconnection. Number three, we've talked about this. You're drawn to the same kind of emotionally unavailable partners. Number four, you sabotage healthy connections because they feel too easy. This is what self sabotage really is. Self sabotage is, is you ending something before someone else ends it. You'd rather be the one to claim the failure than live with someone else rejecting you. You'd rather be the one to say, hey, this is too simple, it's too easy. There must be something wrong with it. This is too good to be true. And number five, you confuse intensity with intimacy. So many of us, things, if things are intense up and down drama, you know, all of the chaos, that that's intimacy, that that means that we're in love, that that means that we have connection. But the truth is just. That's just the connection you saw being mirrored for such a long time. This is why it's so important for us to understand the attachment styles. First of all, I want to introduce you to the idea or reintroduce you to the idea of, of attachment styles, something you may or may not have come across. An attachment style is basically your relationship blueprint. It's how you connect how you handle closeness and how you react to emotional stress. In love, I always say to people, you will know the strength of a relationship not by how you deal with the good times, but how you deal with the stressful times. How your partner or potential partner deals with a fight, disagreement, or argument is more telling than how they deal with a date or an anniversary. How they deal with things going wrong is more important than how they deal with everything going right. It's one of the reasons why we all go through the honeymoon phase. And so how you react to emotional stress in love is so important, and it's usually shaped by childhood based on how safe or secure your early relationships were. So there are three main types of attachment style. But this is so important because it basically shows how you latch on to people, how you connect with people, how you feel when they're not giving you attention, not giving you presence when you're not feeling any affection. And you can clearly spot how you make those mistakes and how you don't want to make them again. That's my goal with this episode. My genuine goal with this episode is I don't want you to keep making the same mistakes. I don't want you to keep dating the same person, just with a different name and a different face and a different hairstyle. I want you to outgrow your trauma. I want you to outgrow your your weaker attachment styles. I want you to outgrow the effects of your previous relationships that are holding you back from finding real love. You're not being held back from finding real love because of who you're going out with. You're being held back by people you already went out with. And how crazy is it to think that your ex is still in control of your life? Your ex is still impacting your life. I know none of us want to be in that situation. I couldn't be more excited to share something truly special with all you tea lovers out there. 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So visit drinkjuni.com today to elevate your wellness journey and use Code Omni purpose to receive 15% off your first order, that's drinkjuni.com and make sure you use the code on purpose. So the first attachment style is secure attachment. You're comfortable with closeness and independence. You communicate well, trust easily, and bounce back from conflict. Love feels safe, not scary. You might be secure if you don't play games, don't fear being abandoned, and you're okay being alone or in love. Now, this, of course, is rare, challenging, but we all want to be there. Second is anxious attachment, something a lot of us experience. You crave closeness, but often fear it's going to be taken away. So you want to be close. You actually want to be connected. But there's always this insecurity, this hidden fear, this feeling that's niggling away at you, making you feel like it's going to be taken away at any moment. It could all be taken away. You might overthink texts, read between the lines, or need lots of reassurance. How many times have you met someone who keeps checking in with you to say, hey, does everything feel good? Hey, does this make sense? Hey, is this okay? Hey, are we on the right path? And you might be wondering, what is going on here? I just told them I love them. I just told them that I was okay. Or maybe you've seen in yourself. Maybe you were that person who keeps wanting to be reassured that you're doing the right thing, you're doing a good job, that they're happy, and you keep checking, are you happy? Is everything okay? And they're like, wait a minute. I just literally took a breath, like, what changed? Right? And this is something we can all relate to. We overthink texts. We make things mean what they don't mean, right? Don't give meaning to something that doesn't have a meaning. Don't make up a story about something that is just information. We're really good at taking information and turning it into a story. Don't take a fact and turn it into a feeling. The fact is, they haven't messaged back for 30 minutes. Now your feeling is they didn't message me back because they didn't like my message. I must have said something wrong. I must have come on too strong. I might be pushing them away. Oh, my gosh, I did this before. You're now attaching a feeling to a fact. The fact is just, they haven't messaged back for 30 minutes. There's no reason. There's no information, there's no data, there's no insight. But you're now creating a story around that event. Don't make every event into a story. Don't make every text into a story. Don't make every fact become a feeling without knowing what it is. You might have an anxious attachment. If you feel like you're always too much or always waiting for the other shoe to drop, those are two good signs that you know you have an anxious attachment style. And by the way, none of these make you weak. None of these make you wrong. None of these make you bad. We all have one of these. But we can all try to work towards having more secure attachment. That's the goal. That's what we want to do. We want to work towards having more secure attachment and move away from anxious attachment. Now, the third one is the avoidant attachment. You value independence a lot, sometimes too much. You might push people away, get overwhelmed by emotional needs, or shut down when things get real. Now, you might be avoidant if you've said things like, I'm just not good at relationships, or I don't want to rely on anyone. I actually got like this. When I left the monastery. There was a big part of me that felt, I don't need a relationship to be happy. I'm happy by myself. And I'd say things like that. And I realized it was really just me having developed an avoidant attachment. And that wasn't healthy either. Because you can lose out on something that's beautiful for you. You can push someone away who wants to be close. And what's really interesting here is what ends up happening is that anxious attachment people end up meeting avoidant attachment people. Now, if you've got an anxious attachment with an avoidant attachment, that can be a recipe for disaster, because the anxious person's constantly checking in, saying, hey, is everything okay? Are you happy? Are we going in the right direction? And the avoidant person's like, you're getting too close, you're too much, you're being too clingy. Right? You can notice, and you can probably relate to how that's happened in your life, which is why there's an even greater need for us all to move into secure. Now, if a secure person is with someone with an anxious attachment, they can remind them, they can be reassuring, they can help them feel safe. If the anxious person is aware and wants to upgrade and move forward. If a secure attachment is with an avoidant, they can potentially get that person to be more open, to be more communicative. If the avoidant person is aware of their attachment style, we have to pay attention to our patterns, not just our past partners patterns. Your attachment style isn't about them. It's about your emotional reflexes.