Michele writes: “How do you establish healthy relationships and attract healthy people? I find myself always attracting the wrong, unhealthy type and I'm sure self-confidence, fear comes into play.”

Dear Michele,

Let’s begin with the part of your question about how to attract healthy people, because having a healthy partner is a requirement for establishing a healthy relationship. Whether we’re talking about romantic partnerships, friendships, or family, relationships are always the work of both people involved. 

This means that if you’re not attracting healthy people—or, more accurately, if you’re not attracted to healthy people—there’s no possibility of creating a genuinely healthy relationship.

When you’re dating someone who is not a healthy partner, it doesn’t matter how much care, attention, love, work, and time you put into the relationship. It doesn’t matter how much you want it to work. You simply don’t have the power to single-handedly make a relationship healthy. 

Instead what happens when you start dating someone who doesn’t exhibit the ability or desire to have a healthy relationship is the relationship is limited by what they have to offer. More accurately, the relationship is limited by what they don’t have to offer.

I’m going to tell a story. Perhaps it’s one that you’re already be familiar with.

Once upon a time, River and Rowan met and fell in love. In the beginning, River swept Rowan off her feet. Rowan couldn’t believe her good luck. It seemed she’d finally found The One.

And then one day, things started to change. River became more and more dismissive of Rowan, not returning her calls and cancelling plans at the last minute. River made unkind remarks about Rowan, complaining about how she did this instead of that, and telling her 55 ways in which she wasn’t good enough and 73 ways in which she could be better.

As time went on, Rowan tried everything she could think of to get back to the good times she’d had with River in the beginning. She tried changing the 73 things about herself that River criticized, but no matter what she did, there were always more and more ways in which she never seemed to measure up.

Rowan bent over backwards and twisted herself into a pretzel in an attempt to make River happy. She asked for couples counseling. She spent hours talking with friends, trying to get to the root of the problems in her relationship. 

She convinced herself she was the problem. She told herself that she expected too much and her standards were too high. She tried expecting less from River, in case that would relieve the pressure so she could be happy in this relationship again. She told herself, sure this relationship has problems, but what relationship doesn’t? If I leave, who’s to say I won’t start dating someone who’s even worse? 

And in her quietest moments, when she was alone with her thoughts, Rowan wondered if the real reason why River didn’t treat her well was because she didn’t deserve anything better.

Here are a few things I know about unhealthy relationships.

They wear us down. They devour our self-confidence and confuse our sense of reality. We convince ourselves that our standards are too high and our expectations for relationships are unrealistic. 

First, we blame ourselves for how we are treated. Then we blame ourselves for putting up with how we’re treated. We lose our footing and our faith in ourselves. And we start to believe that the solution to all of this is somehow to lower our standards for what we’re looking for in our partner.

The wrong conclusion people commonly draw is this: If we expected less, maybe then we’d be happy with whatever we got.

It’s easy to make this mistake and I’ve seen lots of people do it as a way to cope with an unhealthy relationship (or two … or three). In a way it makes sense to assume that if a partner isn’t treating you well, it’s because you’re failing to meet their standards.

Because, if you were enough, surely they’d appreciate you and treat you better, right? 

This makes a twisted kind of logical sense but it’s actually completely backwards. Looking to an unhealthy partner to reflect back an accurate image of you (in other words, to reflect back your innate value and worth) is like looking into a funhouse mirror—you’re only ever going to see a very distorted version of yourself reflected back. It’s hard to develop a true sense of self, much less self-confidence, when you base it on an inaccurate reflection.

While this experience of dating someone who doesn’t recognize your value can activate an impulse to work twenty times harder to prove to a partner that you’re good enough, from my perspective, dating someone who doesn’t appreciate you and treat you well is a clear indication that you need to raise your standards for what you’re looking for in a partner. 

I know this idea of raising one’s dating standards stirs up a lot of fear for people who’ve had their self-confidence and sense of self-worth eroded by being treated poorly. But, I can also tell you that this one single action is a powerful step toward breaking out of the cycle of unhealthy, unsatisfying relationships. 

In toxic relationships, so much energy gets expended just trying to convince your partner that you deserve to be treated better.

But really, the only person who really needs to be convinced that you deserve better is YOU.

Once you really know what you deserve, you won’t feel the impulse to try to convince anyone else. If they don’t get it, they’re not worth your time or energy.

Another way of saying this is that making the shift from unhealthy relationships to healthy relationships starts with developing a better relationship with yourself.

It means treating yourself with respect. It means appreciating the qualities that make you uniquely you. It means treating yourself with kindness and care, and having the expectation that others in your life treat you with kindness and care. It means forgiving yourself the way you forgive others. And listening to yourself the way you wish someone else would listen to you. 

In other words, the foundation for your relationships with others is your relationship with yourself. Treating yourself as worthy of love and care is the first step toward ditching your attraction to unhealthy partners who reflect your fears about yourself.

Once you’re no longer setting yourself the challenge of convincing someone else that you are good enough, unhealthy partners start losing their appeal remarkably quickly. 

One more thing on the topic of attracting, and being attracted to, healthy partners. As humans, we are pretty much wired to associate familiarity with safety. This means that what’s familiar—even when it’s not desirable or healthy—is typically catalogued as safe. You can see how this goes disastrously wrong when you have a long history of unhealthy relationships. Unhealthy relationships are familiar and therefore they are unconsciously assumed to be safe as well. 

This means that breaking out of your old pattern of dating unhealthy partners is making a commitment to pursue relationships that feel unfamiliar … relationships that feel different and uncomfortable and maybe even a little scary. Finding love takes courage.

When it comes to creating a healthy relationship, the first step is having a partner who has your best interest at heart, who is willing to engage with you in the work of nurturing a mutually fulfilling relationship. Without this, any efforts you make to fix, improve, or change a relationship are doomed to fail because relationships are created by both people together. 

When you have a partner who is equally committed to building something beautiful together, you’re no longer investing all your time and energy into proving to them that you are deserving of care, kindness, and respect. That’s a given.

Instead, you can begin the work of figuring out which healthy relationship skills you may have missed out on learning in the past and what sorts of relationship patterns you may have internalized earlier in life that are creating difficulties in your relationship now. 

Changing these patterns takes a willingness to self-reflect, to dig deeper into ways that you (or your partner) react that may be creating difficulties, and to communicate with your partner about these kinds of topics. With a healthy partner, this work still takes time and effort, but it actually pays off. It moves you in the direction of a shared vision for what kind of relationship you want to have together.

If you’re wondering what the key differences are between a healthy relationship versus an unhealthy relationship, you can read up on the five qualities of a healthy relationship.

And on that note, I’m wishing you the very best in your journey to venture out into new territory, raise your standard for what you deserve in relationships, and create something beautiful in your life.

~Angela

Ask Angela is an advice column dedicated to the topic of having fulfilling relationships after trauma. Click HERE to submit a question for Angela.

DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.

about angela Amias, LCSW

Angela Amias, LCSW is a relationship therapist and nationally-recognized expert on trauma and relationships. She’s the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs and resources. She’s  also the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, which provides training and education to therapists and coaches who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships. 

As an expert on trauma and relationships, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, Salon, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun. 

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