This one is different, I swear.
Either you have said this, or a friend of yours has told this to you at least once in your life. It feels like a sick, unbreakable cycle. What if I told you that it’s not rotten luck, but rather something that you do which attracts the same kind of toxic partner?
First, I am not saying it’s your fault for the way people treat you. Toxic people should take full accountability for their actions, and how they react towards people. But at the end of the day, there are three key factors that keep you being drawn to them.
And the key method of shutting the door in their faces, is understanding which doors in your life you need to close. Because you do not want to close yourself off from relationships completely, but you certainly want to close off the aspects that keeps drawing the wrong people right to your front porch.
All this information is based and drawn from the novel-in-progress ‘Ego Hackers’ — for more information, and if you want to change your life (become the person you want to be with the help of your friends) be sure to give us a visit at: !
Understanding Toxic Partners
So, what does toxic really mean? People throw that word around pretty much like confetti, and often and any small grievances. That means the wrong people often receive the label and those who are truly toxic often hide in the shadows. It is hard to understand true toxicity until the day you come face to face with it.
But in the simplest of terms, a toxic partner is someone whose behaviour undermines your over all well-being, your sense of self. They don’t have to be diagnosed narcissist or an abusive monster.
As a matter of fact, most toxic partners don’t even think or recognize that they are being toxic at all.
Here are some common traits of a toxic partner:
Emotional Manipulation
· They guilt-trip you to control your decisions.
· Twist situations to make you feel responsible for their feelings.
· Play hot and cold — give you affection the one day and incredibly dismissive the next
· Use the silent treatment as a punishment (even if you are not always sure of what you did wrong)
Erosion of Self-Worth
· Constant criticism disguised as ‘just joking’ or ‘just being honest’.
· Belittling your achievements and dismissing your feelings
· Comparing you unfavourably to others
· Make you always feel that you are not good enough.
Gaslighting
· Denying things they have said or done, making you question your own memory.
· Call your too sensitive or crazy when you are expressing your concerns.
· Rewriting history to make themselves look better.
· Make you doubt your own perception of reality.
These are very common, but other factors you must take into consideration are:
· Control Issues
· Lack of Empathy
· Unpredictability
Important distinction: Remember, just because someone displays on occasion some unhealthy behaviour, it doesn’t mean that someone is ‘toxic’. We all mess up, and we all are going to have bad days. But toxic behaviour comes to light when there are patterns and intention.
Some of the most common toxic behaviours are:
· Consistent, not occasional
· Dismissive of your attempts to address it.
· Getting worse over time, never better
· Making you feel smaller, not stronger.
But this is where it can get confusing. Toxic partners will not be toxic 100% of the time. They will have their good moments, quite a many sometimes too. They can be very charming, loving, and maybe even apologetic. And this is what will eventually keep you stuck. Because you will keep remembering the good version of themselves and hope that they will stay. But this is going to be a never-ending cycle. Toxic behaviour isn’t about isolated incidents but rather a fundamental imbalance on how they see you, treat you and value you.
Reason #1: You Recognize Them as Familiar
So, here is when things do get a little on the dicey side: the “chemistry” you are feeling when you are with toxic partners isn’t chemistry at all. It is simply something called recognition.
Your brain is just doing what it is designed to do — looking for an environment alongside with patterns that it happens to know and happens to recognize. And so, when you meet someone who just feels ‘right’ it more means that it feels familiar. Not safe. Not healthy. Just familiar.
This is one of the hardest truths to accept when it comes to toxic relationship patterns. The spark, the butterflies, and finally meeting someone who just gets you. That is sometimes just your brain recognizing a dysfunction and it is mistaking it for a connection.
And why?
Well, psychologists call this the familiarity principle — we are drawn to what we recognize, even when it happens to be harmful. Perhaps in the past, what was familiar allowed people to survive, so now, our brains can often think “well, if this pattern didn’t kill me before, it’s probably safer than the unknown.”
So, the stickler lies here. Your brain can’t always tell the difference between what is familiar versus what is safe. So, when you meet someone emotionally unavailable, your brain doesn’t think that the person can meet your needs, rather that it’s familiar, so it feels like love.
Reason #2: You Keep Believing Those Are the Only People You Will Attract
Your belief about yourself will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, every time you date someone toxic, and it just so happens to end badly, you are collecting evidence that will both limit your story but also confirm your belief. You believe that you won’t get healthy love.
So, you never do.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Loop
A self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when our beliefs specifically will be influencing our behaviours. If we predict that we will fail at a certain task, then it is very likely that we will — because we act out in the way that we believe.
So here is how it can very easily play out in relationships:
· You believe something negative about yourself.
· Your belief shapes how you act in relationships.
· Your behaviour triggers the exact rejection/reaction that you feared.
· The belief gets stronger and the cycle repeats.
An example would be that in your belief that everyone leaves, or your relationships will never work out (because of toxic behaviour) that makes you cling onto your partner, often times for far longer than you should. Because you cannot walk away early from a toxic relationship based on the very belief that every relationship is toxic and will come to an end.
It is a tragic, self-fulfilling cycle that always tends to come in the way.
How Your Beliefs Shape Your Reality
Think about how this shows up:
If you believe “I’m not worthy of love”:
- You tolerate disrespect because “it’s better than being alone”.
- You don’t speak up when your needs aren’t met.
- You accept breadcrumbs of affection as “good enough”.
- You attract partners who sense you won’t demand better.
If you believe “Everyone leaves eventually”:
- You’re hypervigilant for signs of abandonment.
- You interpret neutral behaviour as rejection.
- You test your partner constantly to “prove” they’ll leave.
- Eventually, they do leave — because you made the relationship exhausting.
If you believe “I always choose wrong”:
- You don’t trust your own judgment.
- You ignore your gut feelings about red flags.
- You let others tell you who you should date.
- You second-guess yourself into staying with the wrong people.
Reason #3 You “Subconsciously” Pattern Match
By now, you understand how toxic partners are feeling familiar, and that your beliefs might even create self-fulfilling prophecies for you. But there is one more mechanism, if not the most important that needs to be addressed. Your brain is actively filtering reality to confirm what you already belief about yourself.
Confirmation bias — and t his is the factor running 24/7 within your relationships.
Your Own Brain is Rigging the Game
Here is how it works. Once your brain has accepted a belief about you, it doesn’t just passively hold on to it. It will search for evidence that this is true.
Confirmation bias is our tendency to notice, focus on and in the end, provide greater credence to the evidence that fits our existing beliefs. People might remember evidence as well in a selective way in order to reinforce their expectations, even if they ret and gather it in a neutral way.
What does that mean?
The kicker: Research shows individuals are up to three times more likely to accept information that aligns with their self-concept than information that challenges it. Nature
How This Shows Up in Dating
Let’s say you believe “I’m not the type of person who gets healthy love.”
When you’re with a toxic partner:
- You notice every time they criticize you.
- You remember every time they let you down.
- You interpret their mixed signals as “proof” they don’t really care.
- You tell yourself: “See? I knew this would happen.”
When you’re with a healthy partner:
- You dismiss their consistent kindness as “too good to be true”.
- You forget the moments they showed up for you.
- You misinterpret their healthy boundaries as rejection.
- You tell yourself: “Something’s wrong. Where’s the catch?”
The negativity bias is in full effect when you meet someone wonderful but focus on one minor flaw and never talk to them again, while ignoring the hundreds of amazing qualities your partner brings to the relationship. Mark Manson
Why You Keep “Choosing” Wrong
You’re not choosing toxic partners because you have bad judgment.
You’re choosing them because your confirmation bias is screening out the healthy ones.
The healthy partner who’s consistent? Your brain labels them “boring.”
The healthy partner who respects your boundaries? Your brain labels them “distant.”
The healthy partner who communicates clearly? Your brain labels them “not exciting enough.”
Meanwhile, the toxic partner whose unpredictable triggers your pattern-matching brain: “Now THIS feels like love.”
In interpersonal relationships, confirmation bias can lead to inaccurate and biased impressions of others. By treating someone as expected, that person may unintentionally change their behaviour to match the expectations, reinforcing the perceiver’s confirmation bias. Encyclopaedia Britannica
You literally shape people into confirming your beliefs about relationships. If you expect rejection, you behave in ways that create it. If you expect betrayal, you become hypervigilant and suspicious — until the relationship breaks.
In Conclusion
Right now, I am only addressing a problem I am seeing and noticing. However, I will be writing another article on breaking the pattern-matching behaviours.
However, if you are interested in deep-diving, and looking to change for the better, consider signing up for early access on our book “Ego Hackers!” written by Casey Fenton, who’s entire goal is to hack our egos — an intrinsic core of who we are — and change it in a way that makes our lives so much better.
You can change your love life. You can change your career. And you can even change how you deal with life at home.
It is all quite literally … hackable.
www.egohackers.com
