For years, I had the same relationship with different men

For years, I had the same relationship with different men.

They looked different. Their circumstances were different. The details of each relationship were different.

The outcome was remarkably consistent.

I seemed to have an uncanny ability to become involved with men who needed fixing, were incapable of commitment, were emotionally unavailable or were unreliable in some other important way.

In the beginning there was usually connection, chemistry and enough possibility for me to believe that this one might be different. Over time, I would find myself feeling unseen, taken for granted and increasingly depleted. Sometimes the behaviour crossed into emotional abuse. I was always hurt.

The cost was enormous.

My self-esteem dropped a little further each time. Eventually I started to believe that perhaps I was simply not very lovable. My family absorbed the spillover from whatever was happening in my relationship at the time, and the people who loved me watched me repeatedly put enormous amounts of effort into relationships that gave very little back.

Even now, my mother occasionally talks about how terribly unfair it was that all those men treated me so badly.

I do not correct her. It is not necessary, and she does not have the framework that I have now for understanding what was happening.

None of this means that their behaviour was my fault. People remain responsible for how they treat others.

What I can see now, though, is that there was another part of the story.

I was selecting for them.

That is uncomfortable to acknowledge, and it is also one of the most useful things I have ever understood about myself.

There were clues.

I remember meeting one man at a social function at a country venue. We left at around the same time in separate cars and had to drive a long, dark farm road before reaching the main road.

He drove ahead of me.

I remember feeling distinctly irritated that it had apparently not occurred to him to stay behind my car and make sure that I reached the main road safely.

That moment told me something.

I noticed it.

Then I dismissed it and continued into what became another fairly fruitless relationship.

Years earlier, in another relationship, I distinctly remember hearing the words in my own head:

“If I just love him enough, he will get better.”

That sentence should have told me everything I needed to know.

Instead, it felt completely reasonable.

That is the interesting part.

It felt right because it fitted who I understood myself to be.

I was the person who loved deeply. I was the person who invested. I was the person who stayed, helped, supported and saw the potential in somebody that perhaps nobody else could see.

Then, when the relationship inevitably became painful, I also got to be right about something else.

I gave everything to relationships, and nobody ever met me there.

That was the identity profit.

The cost was heartbreak, depleted self-esteem and years spent in relationships that were not good for me. The profit was that the outcome continually confirmed an identity I already knew very well.

I was the one who tried.

I was the one who cared more.

I was the one who had been unlucky enough to love people who could not love me properly in return.

The sympathy of friends and family reinforced it too. They could see how much I had given and how badly things had turned out for me.

The identity kept getting more evidence.

Looking back through the lens of the work I do now, I can see something else as well.

My role was to fix.

If somebody did not need fixing, I did not really know what I was there to do.

In fact, during that same period of my life, I did date one or two men who were considerably healthier and more available.

Those relationships did not last.

I remember feeling stifled and irritated.

At the time, I interpreted that as evidence that they were simply not right for me. Now I am much more curious about what my nervous system was responding to.

If love had become associated with effort, rescuing, proving, waiting, helping and trying to make something work, then a relationship in which I did not have to do those things was always going to feel unfamiliar.

Unfamiliar does not automatically mean healthy, of course. Equally, familiar does not automatically mean right.

This distinction matters because our brains are prediction machines.

We are constantly using previous experience to anticipate what happens next, and those predictions influence what we notice, what feels significant and even what attracts our attention.

In the shorthand I use in my work, my brain had become very good at selecting FOR unreliable men.

I was not consciously walking into a room looking for somebody emotionally unavailable.

My existing identity agreement was helping to determine which cues felt interesting, which people generated chemistry and which warning signs I was prepared to explain away.

The man driving ahead of me on that farm road was not a clue I failed to see.

I saw it perfectly well.

The more useful question is what made me override what I had seen.

That distinction came up in a coaching conversation again this week, this time in a completely different context.

Someone was exploring a repeated difficulty in creating the level of wealth and stability she wants through her business. As we looked more closely, unreliability appeared in several areas of her life. There were unreliable people in personal relationships, and there was also a tendency to become involved with prospects, clients or business opportunities where follow-through was uncertain.

Different environments. Similar experience.

Again, the useful question was not simply, “How do I find better people?”

The deeper question was, “What identity do unreliable people allow me to keep confirming?”

This is where the work becomes powerful because the answer is rarely as simple as deciding that you deserve better and choosing differently next time.

Your conscious intention may already be to choose differently.

The identity agreement is operating earlier than that.

One way I teach people to interrupt this is to go one moment earlier.

Instead of beginning with the point at which you decided, “I like this person,” “This prospect looks promising,” or “I think this could work,” become curious about what happened immediately before that thought.

What did you notice?

What did your body register?

Was there a small inconsistency, an uneasy feeling, something they said that did not quite match their behaviour, a moment of unreliability, or a fleeting thought that you immediately explained away?

The work is not to become suspicious of everybody or to treat every moment of discomfort as a warning.

The work is to stop automatically overriding information simply because the person or opportunity fits the role your identity already knows how to play.

That is where you can begin creating a prediction error.

If my old prediction is that love requires me to fix, I generate new evidence by allowing someone else to take responsibility for themselves.

If my old prediction says I need to work hard for somebody's attention, I notice what happens when I do not chase.

If my old role requires unreliable people, I pay much closer attention to reliability and I resist the urge to make excuses when it is absent.

Importantly, I also have to learn to tolerate the unfamiliarity of a different experience.

When I eventually made the identity shifts that changed my own relationship choices, I was not simply learning to identify unhealthy men more quickly.

I was changing my understanding of what I had to do in order to be loved.

That is a much bigger shift.

If I no longer have to fix somebody, who am I in a relationship?

If I do not have to earn love through effort, what does receiving it feel like?

If I am no longer the one carrying everything, can I allow another person to meet me?

Those questions take us underneath the visible behaviour and into the identity agreement that has been organising it.

So, if you keep attracting some version of the same unreliable person, prospect, client, partner or opportunity, I would invite you to look at the moment before you become invested.

Notice what you noticed before you explained it away.

Then ask yourself what this particular kind of person allows you to be.

That question may tell you far more than another attempt to work out what is wrong with them.

The shift begins when you recognise that your brain may be selecting for an outcome that keeps an existing identity intact, and you start giving it different evidence.

That is how the prediction begins to change.

And when the prediction changes, different people, opportunities and choices can start to feel possible.

If this has made you recognise an outcome that keeps repeating in your own life, even though you consciously want something different, this is exactly the work we will be doing inside The Identity Agreement Reset™ in September.

We will be identifying the identity agreement underneath the behaviour, understanding what it has been protecting, and then using deliberate experiments to create new evidence so that your brain has something different to predict from.

The programme opens on 7 September, and enrolment closes on 5 September.

If you are ready to stop trying to change the outcome without understanding what keeps recreating it, you can learn more here:

Learn More: Invisible Identity Reset 

Much love,