Unhealthy relationships
We attract what we vibrate.
Your unconscious abandonment pattern ultimately leads you to sabotage yourself and your relationships.
But you’re not meant to stay stuck in this cycle forever.
Healthy relationships starts within you.
Activity 1 - Understanding Your Relationship Patterns
Objective: Identify the types of relationships you tend to attract and the recurring patterns from one relationship to another.
Journal Prompt :
Take a moment to reflect on the relationships you've had so far and answer the following questions as honestly as possible, dedicating at least 3 minutes to each:
Do you feel like you attract the same kind of relationship over and over?Develop
What patterns repeat between your relationships?
a. Being mistreated by your partner (physically and/or emotionally)
b. Attracting emotionally unavailable partners
c. Attracting people/relationships that take advantage of you
d. Attracting possessive, jealous, and oppressive partners
e. Sabotaging relationships through jealousy or excessive control
f. Other (please specify)
In what ways are you not fulfilled in your relationships?
Life is a journey of learning, growth, and expansion. We come into the world with baggage inherited from our past lives and ancestors, which fills up with our own experiences. To lighten this burden, the universe places people and experiences on our path that are here to teach us lessons and bring to light parts of ourselves that need healing. However, if we ignore the lessons being delivered to us, the universe will continue to make us go through the same types of experiences, intensifying over time, until we become aware of its messages and choose to break the cycle.
This is why many of us find ourselves attracting the same type of relationship in a loop. We repeat the same patterns from one relationship to the next because we lack awareness of the meaning of each experience.
We attract what we vibrate
Every person we meet is a mirror of ourselves, reflecting parts of us that need to be healed. So when we suffer from the abandonment wound we often attract people who trigger our fear of abandonment. This combined with the lack of self-love we feel lead us to prioritize the needs of others and maintain dependent relationships. We lose ourselves by adapting to please others. We give everything until we forget ourselves, trying to avoid a new abandonment. However, by acting this way, we recreate what we fear the most: being abandoned through our own abandonment. In this situation, it is impossible to nurture healthy relationships.
In abandonment scenarios, it is also very common to attract toxic and abusive partners who reinforce our beliefs that we are not worthy of love and not enough. They often make us feel that their presence is indispensable while diminishing our true value. These people take advantage of our vulnerability, mirroring back our lack of self-esteem and self-love.
This is why it is so important to reconnect to your heart and your inner love, so you can recognize your true value and no longer allow others to treat you as less than you deserve. And believe me, you are so worthy of love, and you deserve to be treated with respect. It starts with you, by reconnecting to your roots and by taking care of your inner child. Their needs were not met, which is why you feel empty today.
By understanding and meeting those needs—which are often simply to be loved, heard, and validated—you will be able to come closer to yourself and realize that everything you believed about yourself until now was just your abandonment wound disguised as self-sabotage. It never reflected the truth.
Activity 2 - Becoming aware of your role in toxic relationships
Objective: Identify your share of responsibility in maintaining unhealthy relationships and understand the mechanisms that drive you to act this way in order to break free from toxic patterns.
Writing Prompt:
Take some time to reflect on the toxic relationships you have experienced. Without judgment, describe how you may have contributed to maintaining these relationships. What aspects of yourself did you neglect that led you to stay in this pattern? What was holding you back from leaving? What were you afraid of? To what extent did your fear of abandonment play a role in this process? Looking back, what would you do differently today?
We accept the love and respect we think we are worthy of.
We always have a part of responsibility in the relationships we maintain, and this point is important to understand. I am not saying this as a judgment or to make you feel guilty, but rather to make you realize that you are responsible for your life and your own happiness. You no longer need to mistreat yourself or let others mistreat you. It is by taking responsibility that we regain control of our lives and can change things.
Every healthy relationship starts within us.
We cannot earn respect from others if we do not respect ourselves. We cannot be truthful and authentic with others if we are not with ourselves. Learning to love ourselves, to know ourselves, to respect ourselves by setting boundaries, and to appreciate ourselves at our true value is the foundation for nurturing healthy and authentic relationships. Why? Because this is how we become the actors of our own lives, rather than continuing to endure it. We become capable of recognizing what is good for us and what is not, what we deserve, and we no longer accept anything less than that. When we maintain a healthy relationship with ourselves, we never accept being treated with disrespect.
This allows us to get closer to our true needs, to be able to name them and own them. We are then able to fulfill ourselves without waiting for someone else to fill the void within us. It is only in this way that a healthy relationship can be born between two individuals: when both people know each other well, in their shadows and light, allowing them to be honest and authentic with each other.
Living in authenticity and setting healthy boundaries naturally filters the people in your life. Choosing to live for yourself also means accepting that some people will leave. This simply means these individuals were not aligned with your true self—and that’s perfectly okay, because in return, you will attract people who resonate with your values and authenticity. These are the ones with whom you can build deep, meaningful connections.
Easier said than done, I know. But deep inside, do you truly want to stay in a relationship with someone who does not respect you or appreciate your worth? Do you honestly believe that such relationships contribute to your well-being?
I know how difficult and frightening it can be to leave a toxic relationship. They are actually the hardest to leave because they remind us of what we’ve always known and grown up with: fear, anger, shame, guilt, sadness, anxiety and the list goes on. Even though they harm us, they represent what feels most familiar and confirm what we’ve always believed about ourselves. They awaken memories from our childhood, which paradoxically makes them feel comforting. And you know what ? Your nervous system will always crave what is familiar, not what is healthy. That’s why it’s so important to teach it a new way to feel safe.
All of this explains why you stay stuck in relationships that don’t serve your well-being. But you are not meant to stay in that place for your entire life. At any moment, you can choose to break the cycle by choosing yourself and your healing.
Activity 3 - Exploring the mechanisms of avoidance in healthy relationships
Objective: Understand what makes you avoid healthy relationships.
Writing prompt: I invite you to answer the following questions with authenticity and take at least 3 minutes to respond to each one before moving on to the next.
Have you ever run away from a partner with whom you could have had a healthy relationship?
How did you feel around this person?
What were your thoughts about this relationship?
What were your fears?
What were you looking for that they could not evoke in you?
Did you think you deserved this relationship?
What made you flee this relationship?
A healthy relationship will not make you experience such intense emotions but will instead bring you a sense of peace and stability. Deep down, this is what many of us dream of, but it can also feel extremely uncomfortable when we haven’t grown up with it. This is why some people ultimately don’t know what to do or how to behave in such relationships and end up sabotaging them. Furthermore, unconsciously, the part of us that remains wounded cannot settle for calm and feels the need to revive its memories through the search for intense sensations.
So, often we label these types of relationships as boring and lacking passion. And nothing feels more vibrant than feeling alive and filled with powerful, deep emotions, right? So we prefer a partner who plays with our emotional strings rather than a partner who brings us calm and lightness.
In addition to being uncomfortable, being in a healthy relationship with a partner who truly cares about us may seem inconceivable to some people, and they may even develop resentment towards that person. It is very common to feel true rejection in these types of relationships. We grew up with the ingrained belief that we didn’t deserve to be loved, and the very idea that we could be is sometimes impossible to accept because it challenges everything we have built ourselves upon. When we’re not aware of this, we tend to do everything we can to push our partner to their limit to confirm our belief that we are not worthy of love and that we will eventually be abandoned.
Unconscious abandonment patterns destroy the person and their relationships.
This is once again, what we call self-sabotage. We grew up firmly believing that we were abandoned because of something we did wrong. So, we’ve punished ourselves throughout our lives, self-sabotaging and choosing relationships that confirm those beliefs.
I am with you on that. I kept looking for deep sensations in every relationship I had with men, and the ones who provided me with the most intense sensations or emotions were the most addictive ones, even though they were not the healthiest ones. I thought I was craving those deep connections, that I was so passionate about love and being loved. But it wasn’t actually me craving all of this — it was my inner child trying to fill the void with the love she never received.
Even though I hated it and it hurt me so much, I was addicted to feeling jealous, abandoned, dismissed — anything that reminded me I wasn’t important.
This made me feel alive, triggering my fear of being abandoned. For example, I needed to feel jealousy in order to define myself as being in love, and if I didn’t feel it anymore, then I believed I wasn’t in love. I hated feeling it as much as I wanted to. The most intense and painful emotions are the most addictive.
Unconsciously, I wanted to feel that suffering because it brought me back home. It made me feel like I could be abandoned and cast aside at any moment if I wasn’t good enough. It reminded me of the way I saw myself: someone who doesn’t matter and can be replaced in the blink of an eye.
It’s strange, isn’t it — to want to feel all of that? It’s self-sabotage that also leads us to sabotage our relationships.
And I mean, it’s absolutely normal to feel that deep call to create and nurture meaningful connections. As human beings, we actually need those connections to heal, grow, and expand. We’re not meant to do all of this alone — and we can’t.
But true connection comes from conscious relationships.
The thing with the abandonment wound is that we often expect complete fusion with our partner. We constantly crave more, and no amount of attention ever seems to be enough. In truth, we’re not really seeking genuine connection — we’re seeking someone who will save and fix us.
It’s our abandonment wound disguised as a quest for love. But in truth, it’s not the quest of the adult you are today — it’s the longing of your inner child.
When we lack awareness and are disconnected from our own needs, we end up letting the wounded part of ourselves take control — and this prevents us from building truly meaningful connections.
In the end, this creates a constant emotional flux, an alternation between a desperate need for proof of love and moments of rejection.
Abandonment made us experience such intense emotions that we now believe we need them. The child and adolescent within us constantly seek to recreate those familiar emotional patterns in an attempt to fill the void left back then.
It’s actually a cry for help.
These parts of you need you.
They need you to finally take care of them.
Breaking toxic patterns is no small feat and can be really challenging, but it is necessary for your well-being and that of your loved ones. I’m still working on detaching from them myself, but I now have more control over them than they have over me. The dynamics of my relationships have changed, and I’m surrounded by healthy people who love me for who I am. I still occasionally feel the weight of my old beliefs, which would push me to flee and whisper that I don’t deserve all this love in my life, but they are now conscious. I know where they come from, I know why they are here, and I also know that they don’t represent reality, so I no longer allow them to sabotage me and my relationships.
Allowing yourself to love and be loved, especially in situations of abandonment wounds or any form of abuse, is a real challenge and a genuine stepping out of your comfort zone. It requires courage, patience, openness, and moving forward through the terror you may feel. However, I can promise you today that, no matter your story, you fully deserve to be loved and happy.
My best advice for opening yourself up to healthy relationships is to first come back to yourself — to your needs — and to reparent your inner child. You need to first understand yourself to be understood by others.
Then, communicate with your partner (or your loved ones) with complete honesty and authenticity. Share your story, name your fears, your emotions, your doubts, your needs, and dare to ask for support. Never try to be perfect, simply learn to show yourself in your vulnerability and authenticity. Healing happens when stories are shared in safe spaces. So dare to open up and speak, you deserve it.
Activity 4 - Reconnection to Your Dreams
Objective: Identify the type of relationship and partner you are looking for and understand that you deserve nothing less than that.
Writing prompt:
Take a moment to disconnect from your current life and imagine a parallel universe where your beliefs have no place. Now, describe the type of relationships (romantic or not) you would be surrounded by. What is your dream relationship? What is your ideal partner like? What would their values be? Describe what you would do together, what you would share, what he or she would say to you, etc. Why do you deserve what you’ve just described? Find at least three pieces of evidence.
There’s a whole other reality where you could live your dream relationship. This person is waiting for you somewhere, but they won’t show up until you’ve learned to love yourself, to put your needs first, and to recognize your own value. I promise you it’s possible, and this work is the greatest gift you can give yourself.
Never forget, you are divine and worthy.