You have asked yourself this question more than once.
Why him again. Why the same arguments. Why the same feeling of walking on eggshells. Why, no matter how many times you start over with someone new, it ends up feeling exactly like the last time.
You blame your choices. You blame your luck. You blame the men. But here is the thing nobody says out loud. The reason toxic people feel familiar to you is because you are, to some extent, toxic to yourself.
Sit with that for a moment before you close this page.
This is not about blame. It is about patterns.
I have a friend. Brilliant woman. Warm, funny, perceptive about everyone around her. But she spends a significant amount of her energy complaining. The weather is wrong. She is tired for no reason. The neighbours are too loud. Her pet is too clingy.
On the surface it looks like she is difficult to please. But that is not what is happening.
What is actually happening is she is frustrated. Not with the weather or the neighbours. With herself. With who she is, how she feels, the parts of her identity she has never sat quietly with long enough to understand. She is pouring that frustration onto everything around her because looking inward is uncomfortable.
And then she wonders why she keeps finding people who frustrate her. And she is not unlucky; She is just unfamiliar with herself.
You attract what feels like home. Not what is good for you.
This is the part that is hard to hear.
When you grow up being criticised, criticism feels like attention. When you grow up being controlled, control feels like love. When you grow up shrinking yourself to keep everyone around you comfortable, someone who makes you small feels normal.
Read more: Attracted To Narcissists? Here Are 8 Revealing Reasons Why
Not because you are weak. Because the nervous system does not know the difference between familiar and safe. It only knows what it recognises.
So when a toxic person walks into your life, something in you relaxes. Not because they are good for you. Because they feel like something you already know. And we are all, on some level, drawn to what we already know.
Indian women know this cycle intimately.
We grow up being judged. By family. By in-laws. By society. We are told who to be, how to behave, how much space we are allowed to take up. And if we ask for more, if we need rest or time or simply to be heard, we become too much.
So we learn to internalise that voice. The critical one. The one that says you are too sensitive, too demanding, not enough, too much. We make it our own internal narrator.
And then we go looking for love. And we find someone whose voice sounds just like that narrator. And it feels like home.
Decades later some of us realise we became the very person we once quietly resented. Not because we wanted to. Because the cycle was never interrupted.
The pattern is never really about them.
Every toxic relationship you have been in had one thing in common. You.
That is not an insult. That is the most important information you have ever been given.
Because it means the pattern is yours to break. It means you are not a victim of bad luck or bad choices. It means something in you is calling these people in. And something in you has the power to stop.
Read more: 5 Reasons You Might Be Holding On To A Toxic Relationship
But first you have to be willing to be honest about the ways you are unkind to yourself. The ways you dismiss your own feelings. Criticise your own reflection. Talk yourself out of your own needs. Apologise for existing in spaces where you have every right to be.
When you are that hard on yourself, you do not notice when someone else is hard on you. It just feels like more of the same.
This is where it changes.
Not by finding a better person. By becoming more honest with yourself first.
Start small. Notice when you are complaining about something external and ask what is actually bothering you underneath it. Notice when you dismiss your own feelings before anyone else gets the chance to. Notice when you call yourself too sensitive, too emotional, too much.
Those are not truths. Those are old instructions you absorbed from people who did not know how to handle a woman who took up space.
You are allowed to unlearn them.
When you stop being toxic to yourself, when you stop the internal criticism, the shrinking, the apologising for your own needs, you change what feels familiar. And what you attract changes with it.
Not because you fixed yourself. Because you finally met yourself.
And a woman who knows herself does not stay in rooms where she is made to feel like a stranger.
Simran K. Saini is the author of ‘Because I Never Give Up’, a self-help book on emotional intelligence. She is currently completing her second book on manipulation and emotional awareness.
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