Why Do I Keep Attracting Toxic People? The Answer Might Surprise You

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • April 9, 2026

The Tuesday You Start Counting

It’s 4:40 on a Tuesday afternoon, and you’re at your kitchen table with a mug of tea that went cold an hour ago. Rain is coming down in that steady, unhurried way that makes the window look smudged. Your phone is face-up next to the mug, screen dark, and you’re staring at it like it might explain something. You’ve just gotten off a call with a friend who, again, made you feel like the difficult one for asking her to follow through on something she said she’d do. Your shoulders are up near your ears. You didn’t notice until just now.

In my work with driven women over the past 15-plus years, specifically those who keep landing in relationships that drain rather than nourish them, I’ve observed a pattern so consistent I now ask about it directly in intake: the woman sitting across from me has usually cycled through several versions of the same relational dynamic, with different names attached, and she’s started to wonder what’s wrong with her that keeps making this happen.

You start doing the math almost against your will. The coworker who took credit for your idea in the meeting last spring. The boyfriend who could turn any disagreement into evidence that you were too sensitive. The friend from the call twenty minutes ago. You’re not being dramatic. You’re pattern-matching, which is a different thing entirely, and pattern-matching is what a nervous system does when it’s trying to protect you from something it has seen before.

This post exists to answer the question underneath the question. Not “why do these people keep showing up,” but “why do I keep being available to them, and what would it take to become less available.” Those are different questions. The second one is the one that actually changes something. We’re going to look at what’s happening in your nervous system, in your history, and in the wider systems you’re operating inside, and we’re going to do it without turning this into one more way to blame yourself for being tired on a Tuesday.

What Does “Toxic” Actually Mean in a Relationship?

I want to name something before we go further, because the word “toxic” has a way of getting slippery. It’s become shorthand for almost any relationship that’s hard, and that’s not quite right. Difficulty isn’t the same thing as harm. A good relationship includes disagreement, disappointment, and stretches where you’re both tired and short with each other. That’s ordinary. What separates an ordinary hard patch from a genuinely harmful pattern isn’t the presence of conflict. It’s the direction the conflict moves in over time.

Here’s what I mean by direction. In a relationship that’s fundamentally sound, conflict tends toward repair. You have the hard conversation, someone apologizes and means it, something shifts, and the relationship is a little more solid afterward. In a chronically one-sided or exploitative relationship, conflict tends toward more of the same. You have the hard conversation, you get an apology that doesn’t change anything, and six weeks later you’re having the identical conversation with new details.

The features I watch for clinically include a consistent power imbalance, where one person holds more control over decisions, money, or the emotional temperature of the relationship. A lack of reciprocity, where your effort and care are rarely matched. A slow erosion of self-trust, where you start doubting things you used to know clearly about yourself. And a specific kind of persistent confusion, where you regularly wonder if you’re overreacting or being “too much.” That last one is worth sitting with for a second, because in my clinical experience, chronic self-doubt inside a relationship is one of the more reliable signals that something relational, not personal, is off.

These patterns often intersect with what clinicians describe as narcissistic relational dynamics, codependent patterning, attachment dysregulation, and trauma bonding, where the emotional highs of reconciliation after conflict create a chemical and psychological attachment that’s genuinely hard to walk away from. Naming these mechanisms isn’t about assigning yourself a diagnosis. It’s about giving language to something that’s been operating, until now, mostly in the dark.

I want to say something here about prolonged, repeated relational harm specifically, because it’s a slightly different animal than a single hard relationship. Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist, author of Trauma and Recovery, and senior lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has argued in her clinical writing that survivors of prolonged, repeated trauma often develop a more complex symptom picture than survivors of a single traumatic event. Sometimes described as complex post-traumatic stress, that picture can include disruptions in identity, self-perception, and the capacity to trust (PMID: 22729977). That distinction matters clinically, because a woman who’s spent years inside one or more chronically harmful relationships isn’t dealing with the same thing as someone recovering from a single bad breakup, even if both situations get labeled “toxic” casually in conversation.

Why Does Familiarity Feel Like Chemistry?

I want to be precise about something clinical people get wrong constantly, including, sometimes, well-meaning therapists: you do not attract toxicity the way a magnet attracts metal. Nobody is emitting a frequency that summons harmful people. What’s actually happening is a combination of selection, tolerance, pacing, and familiarity, and those are mechanisms you can understand and eventually change. Magnetism would leave you powerless, but selection and tolerance can change.

Here’s how I explain the mechanism to clients. Early in life, your nervous system builds what attachment researchers call an internal working model, essentially a template for what closeness feels like, what to expect from the people who are supposed to care for you, and what you have to do to stay connected to them. If your early caregivers were consistent, warm, and responsive, that template says closeness is generally safe. If they were unpredictable, critical, or emotionally unavailable, the template says something more complicated: closeness is available, but it comes with conditions, and you’d better stay alert.

That second template doesn’t disappear when you grow up and start dating or building a career. It becomes the lens your nervous system uses to evaluate new people, usually below the level of conscious thought. Someone who is warm, consistent, and low-drama can register as boring, or even mildly suspicious, because your body has no reference point for “safe person” that doesn’t also include some tension underneath. Someone who runs hot and cold, who makes you work for their approval, who keeps you slightly off-balance, can register as chemistry. Your pulse picks up. Your attention locks on. That’s not romance necessarily. Sometimes that’s your attachment system recognizing familiar terrain and mistaking recognition for connection.

This is also where selection and pacing matter. Selection is about who you find yourself drawn to in a room full of options. Tolerance is about how much inconsistency or disrespect you’ll absorb before you name it as a problem. Pacing is about how quickly you let someone close, and whether you notice early boundary-testing, small moments where someone checks whether you’ll enforce a limit, before or after they’ve already gotten past several of your limits. None of these are character flaws. They’re learned responses, and learned responses can be updated with the right kind of practice, usually inside a good therapeutic relationship over time.

Jennifer Freyd, PhD, psychologist, professor emerit at the University of Oregon, and founder of the Center for Institutional Courage, coined the term betrayal trauma. Her work describes how betrayal by someone you depend on can create an unconscious motivation not to know what you know, because knowing may threaten a relationship you need. That dynamic doesn’t only show up in catastrophic betrayals. In my clinical experience, a quieter version can appear when a driven woman explains away a friend’s third canceled plan or a partner’s fourth broken promise because naming the pattern out loud would mean confronting how much she’s already invested.

Why Does This Show Up So Often in driven women?

Priya is 44, a director of clinical operations at a healthcare technology company, and she’s telling me about her direct report for the third time this quarter. Priya’s hands are wrapped around a paper coffee cup that’s long gone cold, and she’s still wearing her badge from the office because she came straight from work. “I documented everything,” she says. “I have the email trail. I know exactly what happened and when. I’ve done everything right.” Then she stops, and her voice drops. “This is the third time in ten years I’ve had someone do this exact thing to me. Different job, different person, same exact playbook. What is wrong with me that I keep hiring people like this, or attracting people like this, or whatever the word is?”

Sitting with Priya that afternoon, I felt the particular ache I’ve come to associate with driven women describing this pattern: not confusion about the facts, but exhaustion at having to solve, yet again, a problem she believed she’d already solved. Priya isn’t imagining this. In my clinical work, I often see women who are competent, emotionally attuned, and genuinely skilled at managing relationships stay in exploitative dynamics longer than they want to. The reason isn’t a flaw in them. It’s a mechanism worth naming clearly.

Competence and emotional attunement are real strengths. They’re also qualities that someone operating in a chronically exploitative or one-sided pattern may try to use, because a person who accommodates easily, manages conflict smoothly, and is reluctant to make a scene may take longer to name what’s happening. Competence doesn’t cause exploitation, and no personality trait makes another person’s behavior inevitable. The risk often sits in the delay between the first small boundary test and the moment a consequence finally arrives.

I’ve come to think of this as the capable trap. The more competent you appear on the outside, the fewer people think to ask whether you’re actually okay, and the more your own strength gets used as evidence that you can absorb one more thing. Your reputation for handling it becomes, paradoxically, the reason nobody notices when “it” has become too much. This isn’t a personal failing. It’s what happens when genuine skill meets a culture that rewards women specifically for never seeming to need anything.

Priya went back to work the following Monday. She didn’t quit. She didn’t have the confrontation she’d rehearsed in the car. What she did do, six weeks later, was decline to take on a fifth direct report from a different department, the first time in her career she’d said no to additional headcount without a fully justified business reason attached. “I just said I didn’t have capacity,” she told me. “I didn’t even over-explain it.” The change was small and didn’t resolve the larger problem, but something had moved.

The Fawn Response: The Piece Nobody Talks About

There’s a survival strategy that gets far less airtime than fight, flight, or freeze, and in my clinical work with driven women, it’s often the most operative one. Pete Walker, MFT, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, named this the fawn response: a survival adaptation in which a person learns, usually early and usually in an unpredictable household, to accommodate, appease, and manage other people’s emotional states as a way of securing safety and avoiding conflict.

Think of the fawn response like a smoke detector that got wired, decades ago, to a single setting: comply, soothe, smooth it over, whatever it takes. The alarm doesn’t distinguish between a genuinely dangerous person and a mildly irritated coworker. It just fires the same protective sequence every time, because that sequence worked, once, in a home where staying safe meant staying agreeable.

What this looks like on a Tuesday afternoon is specific. It’s the reflexive apology you offer before you’ve even finished explaining why you’re upset. It’s rewriting a text message four times so it sounds less “confrontational.” It’s agreeing to cover a colleague’s shift you didn’t have room for, then lying awake resentful at 1am rather than having said no at 2pm. None of that is weakness. It’s a strategy that once kept a much younger version of you safe, and one that your body hasn’t fully updated to reflect that you’re no longer in that house, that job, or that relationship.

Fawning creates a specific vulnerability inside relationships with someone operating in a coercive or one-sided pattern, because a person who instinctively smooths things over is, in practice, less likely to create the friction that might otherwise stop harmful behavior early. It’s not that fawning invites harm. It’s that fawning removes some of the natural resistance that would otherwise slow a harmful dynamic down before it becomes entrenched.

I include that quote here deliberately, not because fawning is addiction in the clinical sense, but because Dr. Estés is naming something adjacent: the specific ache of losing contact with your own needs in service of managing everyone else’s. That’s the terrain fawning lives in. It isn’t dramatic from the outside. It’s quiet, and it’s exhausting, and it very often looks, to everyone around you, like being easy to get along with.

Priya recognized the fawn response the moment I described it to her, three sessions in. “That’s every performance review I’ve ever given myself,” she said, half-laughing, not entirely amused. “I edit myself down before anyone else even gets the chance to.” She’d never once, in ten years of managing difficult employees, raised her voice or lost her composure. She’d also never once, in those same ten years, let a concerning pattern surface with HR until it had already cost her months of unpaid emotional labor absorbing someone else’s dysfunction.

Both/And: You’re Not the Problem, and Your Patterns Still Matter

Here’s the truth I want you holding by the end of this post, and I want to say it plainly before we complicate it: a person who behaves in a coercive, dismissive, or exploitative way toward you is fully responsible for that behavior. Their choices belong to them. Nothing about your history, your fawning, your attachment style, or your pattern of selection makes another person’s harmful behavior your doing.

At the same time, understanding what makes you consistently available to these dynamics is the thing that can change your future, because you can’t directly control other people’s choices, but you can change what you tolerate, how quickly you let someone in, and what your nervous system has learned to read as acceptable. These two truths have to sit together, unresolved into a tidier single idea, because collapsing either one costs you something important. Collapse the first, and you’re back to blaming yourself for someone else’s cruelty. Collapse the second, and you lose the one piece of this equation you actually have power over.

Leila is 43, an operations lead at a logistics firm, and she came to see me eighteen months ago holding a decision she’d already half-made. She’d been “best friends” for four years with a woman who consistently canceled plans at the last minute, borrowed money she was slow to repay, and, twice, made comments about Leila’s marriage that Leila’s husband still brought up months later. “My therapist before you called it a toxic friendship six months ago,” Leila told me, sitting very still, “and I still haven’t ended it, and I don’t understand why, because I know exactly what she is.”

What Leila needed wasn’t more clarity about her friend’s behavior. She already had that. What she needed was to understand why ending it felt, to her nervous system, like danger rather than relief. We spent several sessions on her family of origin, where her mother’s approval had always been conditional and where being the one who stayed loyal, no matter what, had been the price of belonging. Leila’s fawn response wasn’t a flaw. It had kept a nine-year-old safe. It just wasn’t built for a 43-year-old with a mortgage and a marriage and a job she loved.

Six weeks after that conversation, Leila sent the text ending the friendship. She told me the anxiety she expected didn’t arrive the way she’d braced for. What arrived instead was a strange, disorienting quiet, “like a room I didn’t know was loud until it stopped being loud.” She still checks her phone sometimes, she told me recently, half-expecting an apology that would make the whole thing simpler than it was. It hasn’t come. She says she’s mostly okay with that now, though the answer changes on harder days.

The Systemic Lens: How Culture Reinforces the Pattern

What Priya and Leila are each navigating isn’t only personal. It’s patterned, and the pattern has a structural mechanism underneath it that’s worth naming precisely, because vague appeals to “society” don’t actually explain anything.

Here’s the mechanism. Women, and particularly driven women, are socialized from early childhood to perform a specific kind of emotional competence: noticing what others need before they ask, smoothing conflict before it escalates, and treating their own needs as a lower priority than the group’s comfort. This isn’t incidental. It’s rewarded, repeatedly, across school, family, and later, the workplace, in ways that teach a girl that her value is partly a function of how little friction she creates. By adulthood, that training doesn’t feel like training. It feels like personality.

The mechanism of harm is specific: a culture that rewards frictionless accommodation in women simultaneously produces a large, structurally available population of people who’ve been trained not to enforce boundaries quickly, and a smaller population of people, inside families, workplaces, and social circles, who’ve learned that accommodating people are easier to extract value from. Put those two patterns in the same room repeatedly, across a working lifetime, and you get exactly the frequency of harmful relational entanglement that shows up in my caseload. It is not evidence that anything is wrong with the women experiencing it.

Class and race can compound this. Women carrying additional marginalization may have less social permission to say no without professional or relational consequences, and may be expected to demonstrate more accommodation, not less, to be seen as reasonable or “not difficult.” That’s not a personal sensitivity issue. It’s an unevenly distributed structural cost.

Here’s how that mechanism lives in an actual Tuesday afternoon. It’s the specific tightness across your shoulders during a video call when your manager, again, frames your reasonable request as you “not being a team player.” It’s the reflexive apology text you send after saying no to a favor, sent before the other person has even responded. It’s the quiet math you do, in the fifteen seconds after someone crosses a line, about whether naming it is worth what naming it might cost you socially or professionally. None of that is weakness. It’s what a nervous system does when it’s been trained, systemically, that frictionlessness is the price of being liked, promoted, or kept close.

You’re not broken, and you’re not uniquely bad at picking people. You were trained inside a system that manufactures exactly this vulnerability at scale, and then, often, blames the individual woman for the outcome. Recognizing that doesn’t erase your responsibility for your own healing. It does mean the healing isn’t a referendum on your worth.

I think about this when a new client opens her first session with some version of the same sentence: “I know this is probably my fault somehow.” It rarely is, in the sense she means it. In my experience, she’s often been operating inside two systems at once: her own family-of-origin wiring and a broader culture that benefits from exactly that wiring. Nobody pointed out that the second system was even there. When a woman grew up with explicit modeling of boundary-setting from a parent or mentor, I can often hear the difference in how she describes conflict, even when the conflict itself is painful.

What Actually Changes This Pattern?

Change here doesn’t come from willpower, and it doesn’t come from reading one more article about red flags, even a thorough one. It comes from slow, repeated recalibration of what your nervous system treats as familiar, which is a different project than simply deciding to have better taste in people.

The first piece is learning to notice the early signal, the specific bodily sensation that shows up when you’re about to slide into managing someone rather than relating to them. For some women, it’s a tightening across the chest. For others, it’s a subtle urge to over-explain, apologize, or make yourself smaller in the middle of an ordinary conversation. That sensation is information. It’s usually arriving well before your conscious mind has caught up to what’s actually happening.

The second piece is practicing tolerance for relationships that are, frankly, a little boring. Not every connection needs a charge running through it to be real. In my clinical experience, women recovering from this pattern often describe early healthy relationships as “flat” or “missing something,” and what’s usually missing is the adrenaline of uncertainty their nervous system had mistaken for intimacy. That flatness is often the actual feeling of safety, which can take months to stop registering as absence.

Working with a therapist who understands attachment, trauma, and the fawn response specifically matters here, because this isn’t primarily an insight problem. Most of the driven women I work with already understand their patterns intellectually before they walk into my office. What they need is a relationship, the therapeutic one, where boundary-testing, pacing, and tolerance can be practiced in real time with someone who won’t exploit the moments they get it wrong. Therapy does that work slowly, which is often frustrating and is also, in my experience, the only pace at which it actually holds.

Tools matter too. Annie’s attachment style quiz is a useful starting place for understanding your own relational blueprint in specific, not abstract, terms. If the fawn response resonates, it’s worth reading further on the fawn response directly, and if you recognize the repetition itself as the core issue, the piece on breaking repeating relationship patterns goes deeper into the mechanics of that specific loop. For women whose pattern intersects with codependent dynamics, a fuller guide to setting boundaries is often the next practical step.

None of this happens quickly, and none of it is supposed to. This is proverbial foundation work, not surface renovation, and foundation work is slow by design because it has to actually hold weight once it’s done. I think of the proverbial House of Life™ as the structure you’re actually renovating here: the visible rooms are your career, your friendships, your calendar, all the parts that look, from the street, like they’re functioning. The foundation is the part nobody sees, the early wiring around what closeness is supposed to feel like. You can repaint the visible rooms as many times as you want. If the foundation underneath is cracked, the same dampness finds its way back up through the floor.

Some of the women I work with ask, reasonably, how long this takes. I don’t give a number I can’t stand behind. What I can tell you, after fifteen-plus years of doing this work, is that the timeline is rarely linear. You may understand the pattern intellectually long before your body can respond differently when a boundary gets tested in real time. That gap between knowing and feeling is normal. Progress often appears first in small changes: noticing sooner, pausing before you answer, or recovering more quickly afterward. Those changes matter, even when the larger pattern hasn’t disappeared yet.

Priya is fourteen months into our work together now. Last week she told me about a new hire on her team, someone whose early behavior had the faint outline of a familiar pattern, the subtle undermining, the charm turned only toward people who could help her. Priya noticed it in week two instead of year two. She hasn’t decided yet what she’s going to do about it. But she said something I keep returning to: “I saw it fast enough to still have options.” The pattern hasn’t disappeared entirely. Her relationship to noticing it has changed. That’s not the same as being finished, and I don’t think it’s supposed to be.

If you recognize yourself in Priya, or in Leila, or in the version of you sitting at your own kitchen table with a cold mug and a list forming in your mind, I want you to hear something clearly before you close this tab. This isn’t a character flaw you’re managing for the rest of your life. It’s a pattern with a mechanism, and mechanisms can shift, slowly, with the right support and enough repetition of something new. You don’t have to have it figured out today. You just have to be willing to notice, the next time, one Tuesday sooner than the last time.

Whatever brought you to this post today, I hope you’re leaving with something more useful than blame, whether that’s toward yourself or toward the people who’ve hurt you. This work is slow, and it’s real, and you don’t have to do it alone. If you’d like support putting these pieces together in your own life, reaching out for a consultation can be a reasonable next step, even when the question feels small.

Warmly,
Annie

Priya, Leila, and all other client stories in this piece are composites. Each one draws on patterns and details from many different clients over many years, reordered and reassembled so that no single real person’s story is being told. Any resemblance to a specific individual is unintentional.

Medical Disclaimer