Why Do I Keep Attracting Narcissists? The Attachment Answer
If you’ve found yourself in a pattern of relationships with narcissistically organized partners, the question isn’t what’s wrong with you. It’s what your nervous system learned to call love. This article walks through the attachment science behind repeated narcissistic attraction, the six relational patterns that sustain the cycle, the cultural forces that romanticize it, and what it actually looks like to rewire your relational grammar so that security stops feeling like settling.
Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT
- Yuki Has a Spreadsheet With Three Columns and Has Not Decided Whether It Is Evidence or a Wound
- Why the Question “Why Do I Keep Attracting Narcissists?” Is the Right Question and the Wrong Frame at the Same Time
- The Attachment Root: What Your Nervous System Learned to Call Love
- The Six Relational Patterns That Create Repeated Narcissistic Partnerships
- The Role of Empathy: Why High Empathy Is a Gift AND a Target
- Both/And: You Are Not Broken for Choosing Who You Chose AND the Pattern Is Worth Understanding Before You Choose Again
- The Systemic Lens: A Culture That Romanticizes Intensity and Calls Certainty “Boring” Teaches Women to Mistake Anxiety for Love
- What It Looks Like to Rewire the Relational Grammar
- Frequently Asked Questions
Repeatedly attracting narcissistic partners isn’t a character flaw; it’s most often explained by attachment patterning from early childhood, where the emotional climate of a dysregulated caregiver became the nervous system’s template for what love feels like. The anxiety and unpredictability of a narcissistic partner can register as familiarity rather than warning signs. Understanding the attachment root transforms the question from self-blame to self-knowledge. In my work with driven women in this pattern, the hardest part is usually accepting that the attraction made perfect nervous-system sense given what they learned.
In short: Repeatedly attracting narcissists is most often explained by early attachment patterning in which a dysregulated caregiver’s emotional climate became the nervous system’s template for what love and chemistry feel like.
If nothing was ever obviously wrong but you still came out doubting your own perception, my self-paced course Clarity After the Covert is the map for what you experienced.
Annie Wright, LMFT, brings more than 15,000 clinical hours supporting driven women in understanding the attachment roots of their relational patterns, including the pull toward partners whose emotional unavailability mirrors early caregiving. Amir Levine, MD, and Rachel Heller, in ‘Attached,’ document how anxious attachment styles, often developed in response to inconsistent early caregiving, predict adult attraction to partners who activate the familiar anxious-attachment dynamic (Levine and Heller 2010).
Yuki Has a Spreadsheet With Three Columns and Has Not Decided Whether It Is Evidence or a Wound
It’s 9:03 on a Tuesday night. Yuki, a 33-year-old UX designer in San Francisco, is sitting on her bed with her laptop open and a spreadsheet on the screen she has named “Research” inside a folder where her roommate won’t find it. Three columns. Color-coded. Column three is mostly red.
She’s been looking at it for twenty minutes without adding anything. The spreadsheet covers three men: different names, different faces, different jobs, different cities when they met. She built it methodically, the way she’d build any good product audit: behaviors logged, dates noted, patterns flagged. She has not decided whether this makes her smart or sad. Maybe it’s both. The succulent on her windowsill has been alive for two years; she tends it every Sunday and it doesn’t ask anything of her, and tonight she finds herself looking at it the way you look at a thing when you’re trying not to cry.
From the other room, her roommate is on the phone, easy and laughing. The normalness of it lands as a kind of contrast Yuki can’t quite name. She closes the laptop. She doesn’t close the tab.
She thinks: Three columns. Three men. Different names, different faces, same spreadsheet.
If you’re reading this, you may have a version of Yuki’s spreadsheet. It might not be an actual spreadsheet: it might be a running tally in your head, a conversation with a best friend you’ve had three times now with different names in the starring role, a note in your journal that starts with “I’m doing it again.” You’ve recognized a pattern. You’re asking what it means. And you’re asking about yourself. Not just about him.
That self-inquiry is the right instinct. Let’s honor it carefully.
Why the Question “Why Do I Keep Attracting Narcissists?” Is the Right Question and the Wrong Frame at the Same Time
Here’s what the question assumes: that something about you functions like a magnet. That you emit a frequency narcissists can detect, and they come toward it. There’s something true in that framing, but it’s incomplete in a way that matters. Because the clinical picture isn’t just about who shows up. It’s about who you stay with, and why the staying feels so familiar, and what it means that it does.
The word “attract” puts all the weight on selection. On who walks through the door. But what I see consistently in my work with clients is that what is a narcissist matters far less than what happens after the door opens. The more clinically interesting question isn’t why they find you. It’s why, when the emotional turbulence starts, some part of you reads that turbulence as intimacy.
This is not a failure of intelligence. Yuki is clearly brilliant (she built a spreadsheet that would hold up in a research study). driven women who end up in repeated the empath and the narcissist dynamics are not naive. They’re operating on a different set of data: relational data written very early, in experiences that predate their adult judgment entirely.
A pattern of relational functioning (whether or not it meets full DSM criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder) characterized by an unstable sense of self propped up by external admiration, limited capacity for genuine empathy, and a tendency to oscillate between idealization and devaluation of intimate partners. The degree to which these features are fixed versus situational, and the degree to which the person has insight into them, varies considerably. As clinicians we often speak of a “narcissistic spectrum” rather than a binary diagnosis.
In plain terms: You may never get a diagnosis from him. You don’t need one. What matters clinically is the pattern you experience: the love-bombing, the intermittent withdrawal, the way you keep working to get back to the early version of things. That pattern is real regardless of what any label says. And it’s that pattern, not a diagnosis, that we’re trying to understand.
The article’s actual argument, and I want to name it directly, is this: the pull toward narcissistically organized partners isn’t random, and it isn’t a character flaw. It’s a learned relational grammar. One written in your nervous system before you had the words for any of this. The work ahead isn’t about becoming “less attractive” to narcissists. It’s about expanding your definition of what love can feel like.
The Attachment Root: What Your Nervous System Learned to Call Love
Sue Johnson, PhD, developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy and Professor at the University of Ottawa and author of Hold Me Tight (2008), which remains one of the most important books on adult attachment in the clinical literature, has a line that lands hard when you first encounter it:
“The brain is a social organ. It is literally built by our early attachment experiences. When those experiences teach us that love comes with anxiety, the brain learns to read anxiety as closeness.”
Sue Johnson, PhD, Developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy, Professor at the University of Ottawa, Hold Me Tight (2008)
This is the neuroscience beneath the spreadsheet. Johnson’s decades of research on adult attachment (the foundation of EFT, now one of the most well-validated therapeutic approaches for couples) demonstrates that our nervous systems develop a specific relational template in early childhood. That template encodes what “love” feels like at the level of the body: what signals safety, what signals danger, and critically, what emotional states feel like connection.
Daniel J. Siegel, MD, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and author of The Developing Mind (2001), would call this the formation of internal working models. Neural maps of relationship that become the default lens through which all subsequent relationships are filtered. Siegel’s research demonstrates that these models are built during the earliest years of life, when the brain’s relational circuitry is forming, and that they operate largely beneath conscious awareness. You don’t decide to read emotional turbulence as intimacy. Your nervous system does it for you, automatically, based on what it was trained to recognize as love.
An attachment orientation, developed in early relationships with primary caregivers, characterized by hyperactivation of the attachment system in the face of perceived threat to the relationship. Individuals with anxious attachment show heightened vigilance to signs of withdrawal or rejection, tend to escalate bids for connection under stress, and experience intermittent reassurance from an unpredictable partner as deeply reinforcing. Sue Johnson, PhD’s research identifies anxious attachment as one of the primary relational substrates that makes narcissistic partnership dynamics feel, at the neurobiological level, like love.
In plain terms: If you grew up with a caregiver who was sometimes warm and sometimes distant, sometimes present and sometimes checked out, your nervous system learned to stay on high alert. It learned that love is something you earn back. A partner whose attention comes and goes, whose approval feels like a prize you have to keep winning, can feel, at the body level, like the most important relationship you’ve ever had. Not because it’s healthy. Because it’s familiar.
For many of the driven women I work with, the childhood attachment experience that created this wiring wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t necessarily abuse. It was subtler: a parent who was emotionally brilliant on good days and emotionally unavailable on others. A mother whose approval felt enormous but also contingent. A father who was physically present but emotionally elsewhere. These early experiences teach the developing nervous system that love is a variable (something you pursue, earn, and can lose) rather than a constant.
And then, twenty or thirty years later, a man walks into your life who lights up every cell of that old wiring. His attention, when it’s on you, is the most alive you’ve felt. His withdrawal sends you into a mobilization state that your nervous system calls “caring deeply.” The anxiety of not knowing where you stand with him feels, neurologically, like the electric charge of real connection.
This is not weakness. It’s learning. It’s the brain doing exactly what it was built to do. And that’s also why it can be changed.
The Six Relational Patterns That Create Repeated Narcissistic Partnerships
In my work with clients, I’ve come to see six distinct relational patterns that, in combination, tend to produce the kind of repeated narcissistic attraction Yuki is documenting in her spreadsheet. None of these is a diagnosis. Each one is a description of something that made sense at some point. And is now worth updating.
1. The over-responsibility pattern. You learned early that other people’s emotional states were, in some sense, your job. A parent’s moods were data you had to read and respond to. You became very good at it. A narcissistically organized partner (one who tends toward emotional dysregulation, unpredictability, and implicit demands for emotional management) activates this pattern instantly. You’re doing what you’ve always done: trying to understand him well enough to keep things stable.
2. The intermittent reinforcement groove. Attachment research is unambiguous: intermittent reinforcement (reward delivered inconsistently and unpredictably) creates the strongest, most resistant-to-extinction behavioral patterns of any reinforcement schedule. A partner who is warm and loving sometimes, cold and withdrawn other times, teaches your nervous system to work for the warmth. The inconsistency itself becomes the engine of attachment.
3. The self-worth-through-relationship wiring. For some women who grew up in families where love felt conditional, a core belief was formed: I am lovable if I perform correctly. This creates a particular vulnerability to partners who offer love as a prize. Who make you feel extraordinarily seen when they approve of you and withdrawn or contemptuous when they don’t. The relationship becomes the evidence for your worth. And leaving it feels like losing the case.
4. The misread of intensity as depth. Early experiences that taught you love is anxious also taught you something about what “real” connection feels like: it should be intense. It should feel like something is at stake. When a partner doesn’t produce that intensity, when he’s just reliably kind, something in your nervous system labels that “not serious.” This is one of the clearest ways the childhood wiring leads you back to the same pattern.
5. The pity-play susceptibility. Many narcissistically organized partners, particularly those on the covert end of the spectrum, lead with vulnerability. They present their wounds early. For a woman with a strong empathic drive and a history of over-responsibility, this is activating in a very specific way: I can be the person who finally sees him. Who doesn’t abandon him like the others did. The rescue impulse and the what is a narcissist dynamic are not separate phenomena; they’re interlocking.
6. The normalized confusion. If your early relational environment involved significant emotional confusion (adults who said one thing and did another, who rewrote history, who punished you for noticing what you noticed), you may have learned to tolerate a higher baseline of relational uncertainty than is actually healthy. What another person would experience as a red flag, you experience as “normal relationship ambiguity.” The bar for acceptable was set differently.
Mira, a 37-year-old physician in my practice, recognized herself in pattern six before she recognized herself in any of the others. “I thought I was just calm,” she told me. “I thought I was good at not overreacting.” What she was actually doing was applying a tolerance for confusion that she’d learned in her family of origin. Where her mother’s emotional reality shifted without warning and Mira had learned to absorb that as weather. The confusion in her adult partnerships hadn’t registered as a problem because, for her whole life, it had just been air.
The Role of Empathy: Why High Empathy Is a Gift AND a Target
Sandra Brown, MA, researcher and author of Women Who Love Psychopaths, spent years studying what distinguishes women who form trauma bonds with partners presenting with ASPD and NPD features from those who don’t. What she found was not naivety, low intelligence, or low self-worth as the defining variable. It was a specific constellation of neurobiological features, and high empathy was consistently near the top of the list.
Brown’s research identifies what she calls a “super-trait” profile in women who form these bonds: above-average empathy, high agreeableness, strong attachment investment, and marked cognitive complexity. These are, in almost every other context of a woman’s life, genuine assets. They make her an extraordinary friend, a gifted clinician or leader, a person others seek out for help. They are the same features that, in the context of a relationship with a narcissistically organized partner, create particular vulnerability.
Here’s the clinical mechanism: high empathy means you can feel into his pain. You can feel when he’s wounded beneath the arrogance. You can sense the frightened young person inside the entitled adult. And that felt sense of his inner life becomes an anchor. A reason to stay, a story about what’s really true about him, a source of hope that if you can just reach that part of him, the relationship can be what you know it could be.
The problem isn’t the empathy. The empathy is real, and it isn’t wrong. What’s worth examining is the way empathy, in the absence of reciprocity, in the absence of repair, in the absence of equal investment, becomes a mechanism for tolerating what shouldn’t be tolerated. As I’ve written about in the context of the empath and the narcissist dynamic, the gift and the vulnerability are often the exact same trait, operating in different contexts.
It’s also worth naming something Brown identifies but that rarely gets said plainly: covert narcissists (those who present through victimhood and wounded sensitivity rather than overt grandiosity) specifically activate empathy as a point of entry. The love-bombing, in the covert pattern, often looks like confiding: I’ve never felt safe enough to tell anyone this before. You’re different. For a woman with strong empathy and a history of feeling like the responsible one, this lands as an invitation to something real. It often isn’t.
This is not a reason to stop being empathic. It’s a reason to develop what I’d call discriminating empathy. The capacity to feel without fusing, to extend care without losing your own relational needs in the process. That capacity can be built. It’s part of what attachment-focused therapy actually does.
Both/And: You Are Not Broken for Choosing Who You Chose AND the Pattern Is Worth Understanding Before You Choose Again
Here is the Both/And that I find myself returning to again and again with clients who are sitting with exactly the kind of recognition Yuki is sitting with, spreadsheet open, tab unclosed:
Nothing was obviously wrong. Everything felt off.
A focused self-paced course on covert narcissism, gaslighting, and the subtle manipulation patterns that leave no obvious bruises and no clear villain. For when you need to name what happened before you can recover from it.
You are not broken for the pattern you’ve been in. The choices you made were not stupid. They were coherent given the relational grammar you’d internalized. The grammar that said love involves uncertainty, that closeness is something you work for, that intensity signals depth. Your nervous system was doing what nervous systems do: pattern-matching to what it already knew. There is no moral failure in that. There is nothing to be ashamed of.
AND. Recognizing the pattern is not the end of the work. It’s the beginning of the work. Specifically the work of expanding your nervous system’s definition of what safety in love actually feels like.
Because here’s what I see: for many driven women, the recognition lands first as self-criticism. I should have known. I should have seen it. Three times. How did I miss it three times? That self-critical frame, while understandable, is actually a detour from the real work. The real work isn’t about having seen it sooner. It’s about developing a new felt sense of what good love feels like: so that security, when it shows up, doesn’t register as boredom, and reliability doesn’t feel like settling. So that the absence of anxiety doesn’t read as the absence of connection.
Yuki’s spreadsheet is, in its own way, the beginning of that work. She’s doing what driven women do: she’s collecting data, looking for patterns, trying to understand. What the spreadsheet can’t yet tell her, what no amount of column-coding can reveal, is what it would feel like, in her body, to be with someone who doesn’t require a spreadsheet. That’s not a data problem. That’s an experience problem. And experience is something that changes in relationship, including the therapeutic one.
You can hold both: the compassion for the choices you made, and the commitment to making them differently. Neither one negates the other. The recognition that you’ve been in a pattern isn’t an indictment. It’s information. It’s the beginning of something new.
The Systemic Lens: A Culture That Romanticizes Intensity and Calls Certainty “Boring” Teaches Women to Mistake Anxiety for Love
We have to talk about the water we’re swimming in. Because Yuki’s nervous system didn’t develop its relational grammar in a vacuum. It developed inside a culture that has, for decades and across virtually every entertainment medium, told women a very specific story about what love is supposed to feel like.
The story goes like this: real love is electric. It’s intense. It involves longing and pursuit and uncertainty and the unbearable, irresistible pull toward someone you’re not sure you can have. The man who keeps you guessing, who has a wall you can spend a movie or a book or a relationship trying to climb, is the romantic one. The man who just shows up, reliably and warmly, from the beginning? He’s the friend. The fallback. The safe choice that she shouldn’t settle for.
A culture that calls emotional intensity “chemistry,” romanticizes the push-pull of uncertain love, and frames secure partnership as “settling” is one that conditions women’s nervous systems to mistake the anxiety of narcissistic dynamics for the electricity of real desire. This is not a niche cultural critique. This is everywhere. In the architecture of romantic comedies, in the grammar of dating advice, in the way women describe their most compelling relationships to each other. But the connection was so intense. I’ve never felt anything like it. Yes. Because intensity and anxiety can feel identical from the inside.
The the narcissist discard cycle (the love-bombing, the devaluation, the withdrawal, the return) maps almost perfectly onto the narrative arc that our culture tells us defines real love: the pursuit, the losing, the winning back. We’ve been trained to find that arc compelling. The problem isn’t that the training worked on you specifically. The problem is that the training is everywhere, and it’s wrong about what love is.
This matters for healing because the work of rewiring your relational grammar isn’t just intrapsychic. It requires a parallel deconstruction of cultural narrative, specifically the narrative that equates certainty with boredom and anxiety with passion. That deconstruction isn’t easy; these stories are old and they’re reinforced constantly. But naming them, seeing them as constructed rather than inevitable, creates room for a different story: one in which a man who calls when he says he’ll call, who is the same person in private as he is in public, who doesn’t keep you guessing about whether he’s actually in. Is not boring. He’s what a safe attachment figure feels like. And safe is not a consolation prize. Safe is the whole point.
What It Looks Like to Rewire the Relational Grammar
Rewiring a nervous system’s relational grammar is not a cognitive project. You can’t think your way into a new felt sense of what love is. The change happens through new relational experiences that register at the body level. And the most reliable container for that kind of change is a well-matched therapeutic relationship.
Here’s what the rewiring process actually involves, in my experience working with clients who are where Yuki is:
Making the implicit explicit. The first step is articulating the relational beliefs that are currently running below the surface. Not just “I know I have attachment issues” but the actual granular beliefs: Love is something I earn. If he’s certain about me, he’s not a challenge. Anxiety means I care. Security means I don’t care enough. Making these visible, naming them as beliefs rather than truths, is the beginning of having a choice about them.
Learning to tolerate the “flatness.” Most women who’ve been in repeated narcissistic dynamics go through a period in early recovery where secure connection feels genuinely flat. Not bad. Just oddly unstimulating. This is the nervous system registering the absence of its accustomed activation state. It’s temporary. But it requires a willingness to stay in what feels boring long enough to learn that the flatness is actually calm, and calm is actually what you’ve been missing.
Building what Johnson calls “secure base” experiences. EFT research, which represents Sue Johnson’s life’s work, consistently demonstrates that what changes attachment patterns in adults is the experience of a secure, responsive relationship: one where your bids for connection are met, where ruptures are repaired, where you are allowed to need without being punished for it. That experience can happen in a therapeutic relationship. It can happen in a friendship. Eventually, it can happen in a romantic partnership, though usually the therapeutic work comes first.
Developing somatic fluency. Your nervous system communicates in body signals before it communicates in thoughts. Learning to notice the specific physiological signature of the anxious-excitement state (the one your nervous system mistakes for love) and distinguishing it from the physiological signature of genuine safety is slow, careful work. Somatic therapies, including somatic experiencing and body-based EMDR approaches, are particularly effective here.
Grieving what was actually being sought. Underneath every pattern of narcissistic attraction, in my clinical experience, is a very old grief: the grief for the attuned, consistent, truly-seeing-you love that wasn’t reliably available early on. The partners weren’t just partners. They were proxy attempts to get something that felt close to what was missing. Grieving that directly, rather than through the constant proxy pursuit, is some of the most important work of recovery from the narcissist discard cycle.
If you’re working through this pattern, I’d invite you to consider trauma-informed individual therapy as the primary container. Not because you’re broken, but because this kind of relational rewiring happens fastest in a consistent relational context with someone trained to hold it. If you want to understand what that process might look like, connecting for a consultation is the first step.
And if right now you’re not ready for that, if you’re still just closing and not-closing the laptop tab, making sense of what the spreadsheet is telling you, that’s fine too. The fact that you’re asking is already something. Recognition always comes before change. It came before everything.
Yuki’s succulent has been alive for two years. She tends it every Sunday. She knows how to care for something over time, steadily, without drama. What she’s learning now, slowly, through the hard data of her own experience, is that she deserves the same kind of tending. Not the kind that requires her to perform for it. Just the kind that shows up, reliably, because she’s there. That’s not settling. That’s what love actually is.
If this resonates with something you’re sitting with, you don’t have to figure it out alone. Therapy with Annie is available for driven women ready to understand the relational grammar beneath the pattern. Fixing the Foundations™ is Annie’s self-paced course for relational trauma recovery, built for women who want to begin this work on their own timeline. And the Strong & Stable newsletter is a weekly conversation about exactly this kind of terrain. The internal life beneath the impressive external one. Whatever step is the right one for you right now, it’s a step worth taking.
Q: Does being an empath make me more likely to attract narcissists?
A: High empathy is genuinely one of the identified features in Sandra Brown’s research on women who form trauma bonds with narcissistically and antisocially organized partners, alongside strong attachment anxiety and what Brown calls high cognitive complexity. But empathy itself isn’t the problem, and framing it that way would lead you in the wrong direction. What’s clinically useful is understanding how empathy interacts with the specific relational moves of covert narcissists: the early vulnerability confiding, the pity-play, the presentation as a wounded person who just needs the right woman to finally see him. Your empathy doesn’t need to be dismantled. It needs to be paired with discernment. Specifically, the ability to distinguish between genuine vulnerability in a partner and performed vulnerability designed to activate your care-giving response. That’s a distinction that develops over time, often in therapy, and it doesn’t require you to become less empathic. It requires you to become more boundaried.
Q: How do I break the pattern without becoming suspicious of everyone I date?
A: The goal isn’t suspicion. That’s a trauma response, not a healing strategy. What you’re actually building is clarity about the specific relational signatures that tend to precede these dynamics, so you can notice them without having to be on guard against everyone. Those signatures include: accelerating intimacy that moves faster than the actual relationship warrants, love-bombing that has a performance quality to it, inconsistency that generates anxiety and then gets resolved just enough to keep you in, and the feeling that you’re working hard to understand someone who doesn’t seem equally curious about understanding you. None of these are guaranteed indicators. But they’re worth noticing. The parallel skill (and this one is harder) is learning to tolerate the quality that secure relationships often have at the beginning: a certain steadiness that your nervous system might initially read as low stakes. The capacity to stay curious about that steadiness, rather than dismissing it, is trainable. It’s part of what therapy for this pattern actually builds.
Q: What if the problem is me, not the people I attract?
A: The “it’s me” frame is partially true and actually clinically useful, as long as we’re careful about what we mean by it. Yes: the pattern has something to do with your relational wiring. The way your nervous system reads love, what emotional signals it registers as closeness, what it’s been trained to pursue: those are yours, and they’re worth understanding. And your relational wiring isn’t a character flaw. It’s a developmental history. The nervous system learned what it learned in the context of the earliest relationships available to it, doing the best possible job with the information available. The useful question isn’t “what’s wrong with me”. That frame keeps you stuck in self-criticism, which is itself a deflection from the actual work. The useful question is: “What did I learn about love, and where did I learn it?” That question is investigative rather than indicting. It points toward the developmental history rather than toward an essential deficiency. And it opens a door that the self-critical frame keeps closed.
Q: Can therapy actually change this pattern, or is it just how I’m wired?
A: Yes. And the neuroplasticity research is unambiguous on this point. Attachment patterns formed in early childhood are not hardwired in the sense of being immutable; they’re encoded in neural networks that remain plastic into adulthood, and adult relational experiences can update them. The therapeutic approaches with the strongest evidence base for this kind of change include Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which Sue Johnson’s decades of research have validated as particularly effective for attachment pattern repair; somatic approaches that address the body-level encoding of relational expectation; and longer-term attachment-focused individual therapy, which provides the secure base experience that the nervous system never had a chance to internalize. This is not quick work. Relational rewiring happens in relationship, over time, through the accumulation of new experiences that don’t match the old expectation. But “takes time” is very different from “can’t change.” The pattern you’re in right now is a learned pattern. Learned patterns can be unlearned and, more precisely, updated with the right relational context to do it in.
Q: My new partner doesn’t feel as “exciting” as my past relationships. Does that mean I’m settling?
A: This is one of the most important questions to sit with carefully, because the feeling you’re describing (the flatness, the lower voltage) is almost always the absence of anxiety, which your nervous system has learned to read as boredom. It isn’t boredom. It’s calm. And if your nervous system has spent years reading anxiety as the signal for “this is real and important,” calm is going to feel like the absence of something significant. It’s not. The clinical work here is to retrain what “good” actually feels like in the body: to stay with the reliable, warm, consistent partner long enough for the nervous system to learn that this is safety, not settling. Security will start to feel like chemistry eventually. It rarely does right away. This is one of the places where attachment-focused therapy is genuinely useful: it helps you distinguish between “this relationship lacks something real” and “this relationship lacks the anxiety I’ve mistaken for something real.” Those are very different situations, and your nervous system, right now, doesn’t have the tools to tell them apart on its own. That’s not a failing. It’s where the work begins.
Related Reading
Brown, Sandra. Women Who Love Psychopaths: Inside the Relationships of Inevitable Harm with Psychopaths, Sociopaths & Narcissists. 3rd ed. Health and Well-Being Publications, 2018.
Johnson, Susan M. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown Spark, 2008.
Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. Guilford Press, 2001.
Siegel, Daniel J., and Mary Main. “Internal Working Models of Attachment Relationships as Related to Resilient Coping.” In Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, vol. 26, edited by Dante Cicchetti and Sheree Toth. Erlbaum, 1993.
Johnson, Susan M., and Leslie Greenberg. “Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy: An Outcome Study.” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 11, no. 3 (1985): 313, 317.
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Annie Wright, LMFT
LMFT · Relational Trauma Specialist · W.W. Norton Author
Helping driven women finally feel as good as their résumé looks.
Annie Wright is a licensed psychotherapist (LMFT #95719) and trauma-informed executive coach with over 15,000 clinical hours. She works with driven women. Including Silicon Valley leaders, physicians, and entrepreneurs. In repairing the psychological foundations beneath their impressive lives. Annie is the founder and former CEO of Evergreen Counseling, a multimillion-dollar trauma-informed therapy center she built, scaled, and successfully exited. A regular contributor to Psychology Today, her expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information. She is currently writing her first book with W.W. Norton.
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Regular contributor to Psychology Today. Expert commentary has appeared in USA Today, Forbes, Business Insider, Inc., NBC, and The Information.
