The fear that your next relationship will be the same as the abusive one you just left? Understanding the patterns in your life helps you make the changes you need. – 10 Minute Read
I did an unconscious analysis when I left my abusive relationship. My past followed a theme.
So, then that brought up the questions… Was I expecting too much from partners? Was this just the way it was when you’re in a relationship? Was it me?
I was too much of a mess at the time to delve deep into these thoughts, but I know I had quietly accepted that my choices were horrible and that if this was what life was like in relationships with people, then I needed to stop having them.
It’s not that I was surrounded by horrible people, but there seemed to be a large quantity of not-so-great ones around me and in my past. Family friends, friendships, relationships… I had accepted this was just how people were. Right? I mean no one can be perfect…
This big heavy fear sat on my chest. If I tried another relationship in the future, what if I did it again? What if I chose another abuser?
This obviously was not a conscious want I had! I could see this was a pattern I had, and now I couldn’t unsee it.
Every relationship I had involved some version of control, neglect, or psychological manipulation. Not all at the same level I had last suffered, or all with the same features. But the pattern was glaringly there. Running through friendships, my workplaces, my family dynamics, and ultimately landing me in the most damaging relationship of my life.
I hadn’t chosen so badly by accident. My choices had been primed over the years, as I accepted certain patterns in my life as normal. I called them love, loyalty and family.
The thing is, my fear of living a repeat of my toxic relationship was a rational one.
Patterns develop in our lives, and most are primed when we are young. I want to talk about what they look like, and what it takes to make changes to them. It takes some tinkering and patience, but it is possible to rewire your patterns.
Why We Repeat Patterns in Abusive Relationships
An honest look at my personal history showed me that I had always surrounded myself with what I had been taught to recognise as love.
Self-sacrifice above all other things. Managing other people’s emotions before they even surfaced. Making myself indispensable so I wouldn’t be abandoned. This wasn’t dysfunction that popped up out of nowhere. I had learned this early, and it had been reinforced constantly.
I had been taught to ignore red flags. My discomfort did not matter, but being agreeable did. Don’t make a scene; what would people think? Don’t expect more from people. Remember that those I cared about had automatic priority over my own needs.
Wanting anything different was just selfish. There were no boundaries with people you love; that’s how you showed them you loved them. So I showed love by doing, in the belief that if I did enough, if I gave enough, they would see my value and treat me accordingly. My self-worth was securely connected to being needed. The idea of just being wanted, just for who I was, was completely foreign.
This is what made my repeated behaviour so difficult to see from inside my life.
I wasn’t inviting toxic and abusive people into my life on purpose. I was choosing them because they felt familiar. They felt like home because that’s what they were. Then when my abuser arrived and began to confirm every fear I had about my own worth, that I was useless, worthless, unlovable for who I was, I believed him. Plainly, because deep down, I’d been told versions of that my whole life.
Research on attachment and early relationship trauma helps explain this. When we grow up in environments where love is conditional, inconsistent, or tied to performance, we develop an internal working model that shapes how we understand relationships and what to expect from them. They are unconscious blueprints. They draw us what we recognise as love, even when it’s based on pain.
We are acting out learned behaviour, and learned behaviour can be unlearned.
What the Pattern Actually Looked Like
When I first left my abusive relationship, I thought it was just that. I had a pattern of choosing manipulative and abusive people into intimate relationships. But then, I had a closer look.
It wasn’t just romantic relationships that had followed this pattern. It was friendships where I was always the one giving all the time. Workplaces where I absorbed everyone else’s load without question and allowed a huge lack of respect from my boss. Family dynamics where my job was to manage everyone’s comfort while mine got dismissed.
It all felt normal. I’d never known any different, so of course it was normal. There were just enough small moments of genuine warmth through the years to convince me that this was the way it was supposed to be.
People looking in from the outside would often tell me how lucky I was when I was growing up. Great family. Wonderful friends. A relationship that looked amazing to them.
Everyone else thought I had it great, so then who was I to question it? What right did I have to want more? To expect it better, I was obviously being selfish. Ongoing happiness and contentment were something that didn’t exist outside the movies. To be loved just for being me, not for what I could do or provide. That was not real.
This is one of the most insidious aspects of these patterns in our lives. They are often invisible to us precisely because they are so normalised. When something has been your baseline since childhood, it doesn’t register as a pattern. It registers as your reality. Without a basis for comparison, you don’t question it.
How Do I Make Sure My Next Relationship Isn't Abusive?
There’s no switch you can flip to change your patterns. I wish there was; I would have slammed that thing immediately after I realised what was going on.
But there is work you can start to do in your life which will start to make a difference.
Surprisingly, the first shift is not about vetting other people better. It’s about understanding yourself better.
The patterns in your life are not about the people you choose. It’s about what you have been conditioned to tolerate as normal. What you have been trained to believe you deserve, and what signals your nervous system has learned to interpret as safe.
Here’s what you can start to do:
Learn your specific red flags:
I’m talking about your own personal red flag list, not a generic one.
Red flags look different to everyone because we all have our own patterns.
For me, some behaviours that others registered as warning signs felt completely unremarkable because I had been around them my whole life. The best way to discern them is to take notice of how your body reacts, even if your mind dismisses the action.
I’ll be honest, this is hard in the moment. I still only pick up on flags often in reflection, only after the behaviour has occurred, sometimes even after a couple of hours or days have passed. When you do see them, name them out loud. Weirdly, doing this seems to strip away this behaviour being normal: “this person does this, and it makes me feel that.”
Work on understanding your attachment style:
Knowing if you lean towards anxious, avoidant, or disorganised attachment in relationships can give you a map for your own behaviour. It can help you understand why you get activated in certain situations, what makes you feel insecure, and why some connections feel magnetic in ways that are not healthy. This is one of the best ways to learn your repeat behaviours in relationships. There are several ways you can learn your attachment style, but my recommendation is The Attachment Project. They offer a free quiz along with other resources that can assist you. DISCLAIMER: their full report is behind a paywall, and you do need to give them an email to get to your results, but their free basic will still give you enough information to get you started.
If you want a more in-depth understanding of attachment style, recommended reading would be Attached by Dr Amir Levine and Rachel S.F. Heller. This book details how our patterns are formed in early childhood.
Build your tolerance for being wanted, not just needed:
Yes, that sounds weird when you read it. It is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, and it’s still really hard for me to believe at times. I was actually very comfortable being indispensable. It gave me a purpose, and I felt protected. It is very uncomfortable being simply loved. Being needed gave security to my abandonment issues. If I was needed, they were less likely to disappear on me. Learning to sit with relationships that had no urgency, that were less transactional, and less intense was hard. I interpreted that calmness as disinterest at first, sometimes even boredom. It’s a muscle you need to work to build, and it happens slowly.
Start enforcing your needs:
You don’t need to begin with the hardest conversations. This is another muscle that grows over time. Practise saying what you want. Little things to a friend, in a restaurant, at work. This builds the neural pathway for your self-advocacy. Little actions build over time. They compound. This is the same process as building a happiness baseline. Small daily acts of self-respect that will accumulate.
How Do I Trust Myself to Pick the Right People?
The ultimate question.
The baseline question, which is even before “what if the next person is abusive?” or “what if I can’t tell?”
The self-trust was almost non-existent.
But self-trust is built in the middle of trying. There’s no sideline prep for this one. We learn to trust ourselves by giving ourselves evidence. By experiencing things ourselves, by noticing and naming them and acting on them. It’s all uncomfortable and kind of gross, mainly because the old parts of you want to run away from the change, but this is how we learn a new way.
Our brains can be rewired; they’re cool that way. It’s called neuroplasticity, and it’s the science behind how we heal. The patterns that were built through years of conditioning can be disrupted and rewritten through repeated experiences. Every time you notice a behaviour that doesn’t sit well with you, you take a closer look at it, you name it, or act on it, instead of dismissing it. That is essentially the art of rewiring.
The other cool thing that tends to happen when you start doing this work for yourself is that the people who are drawn to you start to change. This is because you start to change. Not massive things, but perhaps the way you carry yourself, the way you tolerate different things now. The kind of people who relied on you being available for them start to find you less appealing. Instead, those that find a connection in you turn up instead. This is when you start to find your people.
Spend Time Learning About Yourself
The fear that your next relationship could be abusive is not paranoia; it’s a reasonable response to recognising the patterns in your life. Those patterns are real, and they were built early and reinforced over time. They don’t disappear simply because you left the relationship.
But they are not permanent. Understanding how your attachment style works, learning your specific red flags, building on your self-trust one action at a time, and slowly accepting that you are entitled to love without conditions is what will change your patterns.
You may have been primed for what happened in your life, but you are not doomed to repeat it.
You were primed for what happened to you. You are not doomed to repeat it.
If you found this article helpful and want to learn more about why you feel the way you do and follow the patterns you do, you might be interested in learning how to uncover your limiting beliefs. These are the false beliefs we often adopt as truths which govern our patterns in life. You can download the free guide here.
FAQs
Q: How do I make sure my next relationship isn’t abusive?
Start with yourself rather than trying to screen other people more carefully. Understanding your attachment style, learning your own specific red flags, and building your capacity to voice your needs are the foundations. The goal isn’t to find a perfect person; it’s to become someone who recognises and responds to warning signs, and who believes they deserve a relationship where you are loved for who you are, not what you offer.
Q: Why do I keep ending up in abusive relationships?
Because we are drawn to what we’ve learned to recognise as love. If your early relationships taught you that love means self-sacrifice, that your needs come last, or that you must earn your place through usefulness, those templates operate unconsciously in adulthood. This pulls you towards dynamics that feel familiar, even when they’re toxic. It’s an attachment pattern built through experience, and it can be changed through consistent, deliberate new experiences.
Q: How do I change the patterns in my life, so this doesn’t happen again?
Tiny inner steps, alongside the external changes. Name your red flags out loud; it strips them of feeling “normal”. Practise voicing your needs in low-stakes situations first. Build your tolerance for being wanted rather than just needed. Be patient; neuroplasticity is real, but rewiring your brain takes repetition. Every time you notice a pattern and choose differently, you are doing the work.
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Nadine Brown
As a survivor of emotional and physical abuse, I know firsthand how difficult the healing journey can be. I created The Resilient Blueprint as a passion project—an accessible resource hub designed to empower others on their path to recovery. My goal is to provide survivors with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to reclaim their lives.
