If you find yourself sabotaging all of your personal relationships, you may not understand the driving force behind your own actions. In your mind, you just are the way you are, and somehow you always end up repeating patterns like dating the same type of person, or having the same arguments over and over again.
But the reality is, no behavior develops in a vacuum. Depending on the type of relationship sabotage you usually engage in, the cause could be any number of the following attachment wounds. These are often formed by traumatic experiences in childhood, but can also happen at any point in your adult life. And as with all things in life, awareness is the first step towards making a change.
1. Abandonment.
Few things are as devastating as experiencing abandonment by someone who’s supposed to love and care for you unconditionally. If one or both of your parents abandoned you when you were young, or if you were in a relationship with a person who ghosted you horribly, then you may have developed some intense wounds relating to abandonment.
As a result, you may break up with people before they have a chance to dump you, with the perspective that the parting will hurt much less if you’re the one initiating it. Alternatively, you may remain in unhealthy relationships significantly longer than you should because you feel more secure when you’re partnered. However, this clingy neediness may have the opposite effect as intended, pushing away the person you’ve grown attached to and forcing them to break up with you. Unfortunately, this type of self-sabotage only creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that intensifies this particular wound.
2. Betrayal.
A person who has been betrayed by a partner may find it almost impossible to trust again. This is particularly true if the betrayal revolved around infidelity. No matter how loyal and devoted the people they date are towards them, they’ll always worry that betrayal is inevitable. I knew a woman who found out that her husband had cheated on her over a dozen times over the course of a few years, which absolutely devastated her.
After they split up and she started dating again, she became completely paranoid about loyalty. She insisted upon being given access to her new partner’s phone and social media accounts, and demanded that he end friendships with anyone who made her feel insecure. As you might imagine, this inevitably resulted in a breakup because her paranoia and insecurity were simply too off-putting to the guy she was dating.
If you’ve experienced something similar, by trying to protect yourself from potential betrayal, you may inadvertently alienate the people you care about the most.
3. Broken promises.
An animal that gets kicked every time their owner puts on rubber boots will soon learn that boots = pain. Similarly, a person who constantly experiences broken promises from those close to them learns that the words “I promise” will invariably lead to disappointment. This leads to an immense amount of mistrust in relationships.
If you’ve experienced several broken promises in the past, you might take on more than your share of responsibility because you don’t trust your partner to honor their agreements. You might find yourself unable to delegate even simple tasks, hovering and micromanaging until your partner feels suffocated and incompetent. And the result is usually conflict. They’ll accuse you of not having any faith in them, you’ll counter by talking about broken promises, and nothing will ever be resolved.
Alternatively, you may find yourself keeping a meticulous mental score of every commitment your partner makes, waiting for the inevitable letdown. When they do forget something or fall short, you might react with a “see, I knew it” attitude that feels validating in the moment but poisons the relationship over time.
4. Neglect.
There may be dozens of reasons why you’ve experienced neglect in the past. For example, when you were a child, your parents may have struggled with underemployment, illness, or addiction, and had to prioritize survival over nurturing you.
Alternatively, you may have grown up with a sibling who needed more attention due to health issues, or dated people who consistently prioritized work, personal pursuits, or socializing over spending time and energy on you. The result of not having your physical or emotional needs met previously may mean that you may become dominating or needy in your romantic relationships.
You may even create little tests to see how much your partner cares for you by feigning illness when they have an important social gathering to see whether they’ll choose their friends over you.
Or you may be so fiercely independent as a result of having been neglected that you won’t tell your partner when and if you’re seriously ill. Since you’ve never been able to count on anyone to take care of you before, you learned that you could only ever depend on yourself. Your partner may take this as you not needing them or wanting them around, which sours and sabotages the relationship.
5. Rejection.
Although it isn’t spoken of often, a startling number of people experience rejection from their parents or intimate partners in various ways. For example, far too many neurodivergent people or those with complex health issues are treated with contempt by parents who resent their existence.
Similarly, a lot of people experience rejection from spouses who lose interest in them, are cheating on them, or feel obligated to be with them for one reason or another.
As a result, if you’ve been scarred by rejection, you may panic if your partner says that they need some time to themselves and take that as a sign that they’re going to leave you. This may cause you to demand a great deal of reassurance that they still love you and aren’t going anywhere.
Of course, you may jump the gun and dump them before they can dump you, even if that wasn’t on the table at all. Alternatively, you may become an intense people-pleaser and avoid conflict at all costs as a means of ensuring that they don’t break up with you, but you’ll eventually feel resentful about never being able to be yourself.
6. Abuse.
Abuse can take several different forms, including physical, mental, emotional, and sexual. If you experienced abuse in your formative years, you may be hypervigilant about anything that could potentially harm you. As a result, you have a hair-trigger response to any behavior that might be interpreted as dangerous, even if that isn’t the reality of the situation. Essentially, your nervous system is stuck in a threat response.
For example, if the person you’re dating uses a turn of phrase that one of your abusers used on a regular basis, that could trigger your fight-or-flight response and send you running. Similarly, if you experienced abuse when you were vulnerable — such as when you were asleep, showering, and so on — you may not be able to lower your guard enough to be physically intimate, or sleep next to your partner. As such, you may initiate breakups to spare yourself the discomfort of being confronted about this behavior.
7. Loss.
This usually revolves around unintentional loss, such as the death of a parent or other close caregiver. It can also encompass loss of other loved ones like friends, other relatives, and pets. When deep despair associated with loss occurs early in life, many people choose to remain distant from others, refusing to create any attachments that may result in that same type of pain again.
In the same way that someone who lost a beloved pet may refuse to ever adopt another one, an individual who lost their parent to illness or injury may keep distance from others so they never run the risk of experiencing similar hurt or despair. If this happened to you, then you may end relationships whenever you start to “catch feelings” for them. In fact, you may eschew relationships entirely in favor of casual hookups, or simply choose solitude as a self-defense mechanism.
Others go in the opposite direction entirely. If you lost a parent or primary caregiver when you were young, you may desperately try to recreate what was taken from you. Here, the sabotage often comes from rushing into serious commitments before you’ve properly evaluated whether the relationship is actually healthy or right for you. It becomes less about finding the right partner and more about finding any partner to try to fill the hole that the loss caused.
Final thoughts…
Once you recognize the motivating factors behind your sabotaging behaviors, you can make a conscious effort to stop doing them. If you feel that you’re stuck in repeated cycles and you can’t trust yourself to break free on your own, you may benefit from working with a therapist whom you can really trust and open up to.
While we can’t go back in time and change the things we experienced to undo the damage they caused, we can do our best to heal those wounds properly so they don’t keep opening up and hurting us. Or our future relationships.
