There is a strange and painful sense of déjà vu that many people experience: once again, you find yourself in a relationship where you feel unwanted. At first everything seemed like a fairy tale — attention, passion, promises. Then came indifference, emotional distance, criticism, and devaluation. It all seems to have happened before, with another person and in another story — yet the ending looks remarkably similar.

We often call such relationships “toxic.” And even when your mind understands perfectly well — “this is not right for me,” “I deserve something different” — something inside still pulls you back. It can feel as though this particular person is the one you need to “love enough,” as though this is the relationship in which you must finally “work through” the old pattern and prove something both to them and to yourself. A painful attachment develops that is difficult to explain logically.

Why does this happen? Why, after experiencing pain, do we not instinctively avoid it, but instead seem to move toward it again? This is not weakness of character, stupidity, or masochism. These are traces of deep psychological processes that were laid down long before we began building adult relationships.

To understand why we are so drawn to people beside whom we suffer, we need to look a little deeper — at our early attachment experiences, our inner beliefs about ourselves and about love, and the scripts that form unconsciously yet keep us firmly inside a repeating drama.

We are not born already knowing what relationships are supposed to look like. We learn this from earliest childhood — not from books, but through lived experience: how people treated us when we cried, when we were happy, when we made mistakes. “Love is what we absorbed through the skin, not what we understood with the mind,” as one of the old therapists might have put it.

If, in childhood, there was an adult nearby who was warm and predictable and accepted us with all our different feelings, we learn that love is about safety. Then, in relationships, we can be ourselves, we can trust, and we do not have to constantly fear rejection. This is secure attachment.

But sometimes it is different. Care comes in fragments. Our emotions are too much for the parent — or there is too little emotional response from them. We are compared, pushed away, shamed, not heard. Then love becomes something that must be earned. Attention becomes frightening, while its absence hurts. And anxious or avoidant attachment takes root in us — a constant tension, an expectation that closeness will end in pain.

From these first childhood experiences, imprint scripts are formed, including a kind of inner “matrix” of love. We cannot see it, but it influences our choice of partners, our reactions, and what attracts us. An adult may seem to be looking for happiness — yet ends up in relationships where they are once again waiting, worrying, and suffering. Why? Because the psyche chooses not according to the principle “this will be good for me,” but according to the principle “this is familiar to me.”

“We fall in love not with the person who suits us, but with the person who feels familiar,” writes psychoanalyst F. Perls. And that is frightening, because sometimes “familiar” means “painful.”

That is why calm, caring closeness can trigger anxiety or boredom, while a person who brings emotional swings, criticism, and coldness can feel “real,” “compelling,” “the one.” Because they awaken an early template of love — with its pain, hope, and anxiety. And we fall into it like an old role: automatically, unconsciously, deeply.

One of the most painful questions people bring to a psychologist is: “Why can’t I let go? I know I feel bad with him (or her). Why do I keep holding on?” The answer is often not in logic, but in much deeper processes — bodily, emotional, neurochemical.

Love, especially in its painful forms, can indeed resemble an addiction. In moments of closeness — hugs, declarations of love, shared laughter — the brain releases dopamine, that same “pleasure hormone.” We feel a rush, euphoria, relief. But when a partner suddenly disappears, becomes cold, or causes pain, cortisol, the stress hormone, rises sharply. And we begin to feel as though we are literally falling apart.

An emotional roller coaster develops: alternating sharp highs and lows intensifies the dependence. The more unpredictable a partner’s behavior is, the stronger the pull toward them can become. Paradoxically, stability calms us but does not create the same “adrenaline-fueled” attachment. A person who hugs you today and ignores you tomorrow can keep you emotionally hooked.

“Love is not always peace. Sometimes it is a fever caused by deprivation,” French writer André Maurois once said. And that precisely describes what happens in toxic relationships: we are always on edge, waiting, hoping that this time everything will be different.

Hope is another powerful glue. “He will change,” “this is just a difficult period,” “deep down she is kind” — we find a hundred reasons to stay. And most often, this hope is not really about the present, but about the past. About the childhood attempt to finally get through to someone, earn love, be noticed. And every time “that person” devalues us but then suddenly smiles or apologizes, we feel not merely relief but a sense of victory: I am loved after all.

At this point it is important to remember: inner hunger cannot be satisfied by hope. It requires real care — not rare flashes of it for which we have to pay with pain.

Sometimes it seems that we ourselves are to blame for our painful relationships. But one only has to look around to see that suffering in love is not merely “allowed” by culture — it is often elevated into an ideal.

From youth onward, we are shown that real love is not about calm and mutual respect. It is a storm. It is passion followed by tears. He leaves and she waits. Or she leaves, and he, burning with pain, realizes that only she is his destiny. We grew up on films in which drama and toxicity were disguised as great love.

“You can’t live without me, and I can’t live without you” — how many times have we heard that line in films? Yet in essence, that is not love but emotional dependence. Or: “If he hurts you, it means he cares about you”, as in old novels. In real life, that is violence; on screen, it is presented as a spark of love.

Social media adds fuel to the fire. Couples display “perfect” relationships full of drama, breakups, tears, and reconciliations. And photos captioned “through pain to happiness” receive thousands of likes. The idea takes root: if it is easy, then it is not real. Real love must be a struggle.

“Love that is not cried over, sung about, and suffered for is considered boring,” wrote poet Joseph Brodsky. We begin to look in a partner not for stability but for an inner echo of a script imposed by culture: “love must hurt, otherwise it is not love.”

These scripts powerfully influence our choices. We may push away a warm, caring person simply because they do not provoke “wild” feelings — and end up once again beside someone who does not value us but still “hooks” us. Because we have been taught that suffering is part of love.

Freedom begins with a simple but almost revolutionary realization: love can be easy, stable, and reliable — and still be real. You do not have to burn yourself up in order to burn brightly.

Understanding is not everything, of course, but it is where everything begins. At some point, something clicks inside: “something is wrong here...” It is like waking from a long sleep in which pain had become normal, anxiety looked like a sign of love, and being ignored seemed like a reason to fight even harder.

Becoming aware of your own scripts is the first and perhaps the hardest step. Because it means looking honestly at what we call love. It means admitting that what “hooks” us may be connected not with genuine feelings, but with unhealed wounds. And that we do not exactly choose suffering — rather, it keeps choosing us until we learn to recognize its face.

At this point, working with a psychologist can become not a luxury but a guiding thread. Simply “understanding” is not enough — it is important to live through the experience differently. That same childhood experience — when you were not heard, when love was conditional, when closeness caused pain — can be approached again. Only this time in safety, in a dialogue where you are seen and respected. This is not magic; it is gradual, subtle, deeply embodied work aimed at restoring trust — in yourself, in the world, and in the possibility of being loved without pain.

We cannot erase the past. But we can rewrite its meaning. Instead of the belief “I am unworthy,” there can be: “Something happened to me, but it does not define my worth.” Instead of the script “I must fight for love” — an understanding that love does not require proof.

As we form a new model of relationships, we learn things that once felt unfamiliar:
– that boundaries are not coldness, but self-care;
– that closeness can be calm and still deep;
– that being loved does not mean being perfect.

Sometimes healthy relationships can feel like a foreign language you are learning from scratch. But, as with any learning, first it is confusing, then uncertain, and then one day you suddenly realize that you are gaining genuine freedom, like a bird that has escaped from an iron cage.

Not every love is dependence. And not every closeness is dangerous, as well-known psychotherapist Esther Perel points out. And as another psychotherapist, John Welwood, wrote in Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love, true healing begins when we stop looking for the perfect partner and begin becoming someone capable of genuine intimacy.

And therein lies our hope: even if there was a great deal of pain in the past, we still have a chance to build a different reality. A reality in which love is not a struggle, not anxiety, and not an endless game of chase. It is, above all, a home you want to return to, a place of warmth you long for after work, a refuge where nothing threatens you. A warm, reliable, living world — your own true paradise!