Why We Keep Choosing the Same Kind of Person, or Someone Like a Parent

Saturday night. Pan is scrolling back through old messages from her most recent partner, a relationship that ended a month ago, when her closest friend, sitting beside her, says something that makes her put the phone down.

“Have you noticed your last three partners were all the same person?”

Pan wants to argue and cannot. The first was an artist, the second worked in finance, the most recent was a doctor. On paper, three different worlds. But thinking it through, they ran along exactly the same line. All three were hard to read. None of them gave her everything. Pan was always the one who had to try harder. And each ended with the same question: what is wrong with me? That night it suddenly occurs to her that the feeling of trying to make someone turn toward me goes all the way back to the house she grew up in.

Choosing the same kind of partner repeatedly, or finding that the people we choose share something with our parents, is a phenomenon psychology has discussed for a long time. It can be explained with a single word: familiarity. Human beings tend to be drawn to the relational pattern they know best, even when that pattern has hurt them. This article looks at the mechanism behind it through the joint work of three brain systems — the amygdala, the insula, and the dopamine system — and at how to begin stepping out of the loop.

Do we really choose partners like our parents, or are we imagining it?

The observation that human beings circle back to the same relational pattern is an old one in psychology. A classic idea from the psychoanalytic tradition calls it repetition compulsion: some people find themselves returning, for no apparent reason, to situations or roles structurally similar to earlier experience. More recent relationship research finds that attachment patterns from early life are statistically associated with relationship patterns in adulthood.

Many people have noticed choosing partners who resemble a parent physically, but research goes considerably deeper than that. A number of studies indicate that we tend to choose partners who are similar in relational pattern and in expression: how they love us, how they move away from us, how they treat us, and how we have to behave when we are with them.

Why should that be? Think of our habits around food. Someone raised on strongly seasoned cooking, eating mild food for the first time, will register immediately that it is “bland, not good.” Nutritionally, the mild version may be better for the body. The tongue does not judge flavor by nutritional value. The tongue judges by familiarity. And the heart works the same way. The flavor of the relationships we grew up with becomes our definition of “right,” regardless of whether that flavor was good for us.

How familiarity works through the brain and the body

When we meet someone new, the brain is working hard from the first second of eye contact to assess whether this person is right for us. All of it emerges from the joint work of three important systems: the amygdala, the insula, and the dopamine system.

The amygdala. The amygdala has a role in learning emotional meaning and in detecting cues related to significance, safety, or threat. Earlier experience may therefore contribute to our responding rapidly to a certain tone of voice, a certain silence, or a certain kind of distance — before we can account for it with reason. It works rather like a security scanner, searching past data for whether the person in front of us resembles anyone in our lives. If they carry something of a parent, or of someone who cared for us before — for better or worse — the amygdala emits a signal of familiarity that leaves the brain feeling reassured, even where reason might say this person is not safe.

The insula. The insula is involved in perceiving and integrating signals from inside the body (interoception): a racing heart, a lurch in the stomach, tension. If the insula reads those signals as feeling good, the sense of attraction is reinforced further.

The dopamine system. A common misconception is that dopamine equals pleasure. Basic research indicates that the dopamine system’s prominent functions are motivation, learning from reward, and predicting reward, rather than pleasure itself. Inconsistency in a response may lead some people to wait for, and attend more closely to, “next time” — particularly where periods of closeness alternate with periods of withdrawal. Put more simply: each time the brain meets something familiar and feels good, dopamine is released, and the brain registers this is the good one, reinforcing the attraction further still.

Emotional learning from earlier experience, physical sensations interpreted as chemistry, and the anticipation of an uncertain reward: these three together make up what we casually call our type. But it is worth knowing, before going further, that our type may not be a map of what suits us. It may be a map of the familiar. A heart saying “yes” may only be saying “I know this taste.”

If we know it hurts, why do we still choose it — and why is it not stupidity?

Once the mechanism is visible, the answer changes entirely. Our system does not primarily choose on the basis of what makes us happy. It tends to choose on the basis of what it knows and finds familiar, because to the brain’s older systems, what can be predicted is safer — even when it hurts. Put another way, a hurt that is known and predictable may feel safer than a happiness never encountered and impossible to predict.

Another idea from the psychotherapeutic tradition adds that circling back to an old pattern may come with a hope tucked away in a small corner: the hope that this time the ending can be rewritten. That if we could get someone who gives us only part of themselves to give everything, just once, something from the past might finally be proven not to have been our fault.

Can we learn to enjoy a new flavor?

We can — but not by forcing the tongue to like a new flavor in a single meal. The adjustment begins with three simpler things.

First, get to know your own usual menu. Look back over past relationships — not to find who was at fault, but to ask what features recur, and where you stood inside those relationships.

Second, observe the feeling alongside the actual behavior. That sense of this is exactly right does not mean you should reject someone the moment you feel drawn to them. It means giving yourself time to watch how they actually behave alongside that feeling: is this person consistent, do they respect the boundaries of the relationship and your sense of self, do they take responsibility for what they say, do they leave room for you to be yourself? The intensity of a feeling alone tells you nothing about the quality of a relationship.

Third, give yourself time to learn an unfamiliar flavor. A level feeling with someone steady may not be a sign that they are not right. It may be a sign that your system does not yet know this flavor. Allowing a little more time before concluding is not overriding your own feelings; it is letting the tongue genuinely become acquainted with something new before judging. Allowing time does not mean forcing a relationship with someone you have no interest in. It means not deciding on the basis of a first-meeting certainty alone.

If an old pattern is clearly affecting your life, if relationships keep ending at the same point until the accumulated hurt becomes heavy, or if fear is keeping you from beginning again, a mental-health professional — particularly one who works with psychological wounds (trauma-informed care) — belongs near the top of the list. And if at any point what is inside becomes more than you can carry alone, Thailand’s mental health hotline, 1323, is staffed by people who will listen.

How hypnotherapy approaches a familiar flavor at NBRH

At NBRH we use hypnotherapy as our principal approach to emotion, physical sensation, the meaning a person holds about themselves, and the automatic responses still connected to earlier experience.

In our approach this work may run through thought, emotion, and physical sensation alike, because the feeling of “yes” usually arrives faster than any reasoned account of it. What we attend to is the pattern running in the present: a heart racing for someone hard to read, a flatness with someone steady, the habit of being the one who tries harder. Hypnotherapy is not aimed at recovering or confirming memories of the past, and there is no need to analyze a parent from every angle. We work with these patterns gradually, in a focused, relaxed state — one in which a person may remain aware of their surroundings or drift deeper at intervals, and which is never a state where the therapist takes control of anyone’s mind. The person’s emotional safety is what we hold first, always. Alongside this we help develop additional ways of responding that fit present life more closely, such as widening the space between the feeling of this is exactly right and a decision — so that there is room to ask whether that voice is speaking of suitability or of familiarity, before familiarity becomes a decision made without any consideration of how the other person actually behaves.

At NBRH (Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning & Hypnotherapy) we hold that our behavior and responses are not a permanent identity but patterns shaped by experience, which can gradually change given care and the right conditions. We use hypnotherapy as our principal way of working with these automatic circuits, in a space that is safe, private, and always respectful of each person’s own pace.

Patterns that repeat usually have roots we have written about elsewhere. How our way of attaching was formed is set out in “Attachment Styles: The Four Patterns”. Roots in the household we grew up in are covered in “Toxic Parents and Helicopter Parents” and “Childhood Trauma”. If the pattern you return to is a relationship that harms you, “Trauma Bonding” has an answer specific to that. And for those who would like to understand the basics before deciding anything, we have set out what hypnotherapy is and how it works.