Why Do You Pick the Wrong Partner?

From the Show: HER
Summary: You want a great relationship. So why do you keep picking the wrong partner?
Air Date: 6/9/16
Duration: 10
Host: Michelle King Robson and Pam Peeke, MD
Guest Bio: Jane Mintz, MA, LPC
Jane MintzJane Eigner Mintz, MA, LPC, Chief Clinical Strategist and Crisis Intervention Specialist at Realife Intervention Solutions, LLC, is a thought leader and veteran crisis specialist that works with acute, reactive individuals and their family systems that suffer from a variety of addiction and behavioral health challenges. Jane is a licensed clinician with thousands of intervention cases under her belt.  

Her international, clinically-driven private practice, Realife Intervention Solutions, LLC, provides ethically based, intensive assessment, intervention, consulting and case management services for her clients and their families. In 2009 and revised in 2013, Jane wrote the first clinical model of intervention, The Field Model of Intervention, and has trained over 450 interventionists around the world.  

Additionally, Jane has been a leading industry consultant and provides training to residential treatment providers in ethically based relationships, high-risk client de-escalation and ATA reduction as well as inter- and intra-agency clinical communications.
Why Do You Pick the Wrong Partner?
You make a neat little list of all the qualities you want in a partner and post it on your dating profile. Despite what you say you want, you go for the wrong person again.

It's become a bad habit.

Why do you keep dating losers?

There are four major concepts that could contain your sticking point.

  1. Repetition compulsion comes from early childhood. Our neurotic defense mechanisms try to rewrite history. Childhood wounds are trying to be rectified in adulthood.
  2. Trauma bonding stems from cycles of abuse where there are intermittent reinforcements of punishment and reward, creating powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change. The victim is worn down over time and becomes used to the cycle as "normal." You share similar trauma with your abuser.
  3. Co-dependency is the result of pain in adulthood that comes from being harmed in childhood. You attach yourself to external things for safety. You try to fix people in order to fix yourself.
  4. Attachment style has a spectrum of secured attachment through disorganized attachment. Only 65% of people are securely attached. There is disharmony when you have a clingy personality attached to a detached personality.
You need to love yourself. Look at what's behind your terrible choices and work on YOU. Figure out why you're dating losers. You can't fix anyone else; your right partner is yourself. When you're happy and healthy, you'll attract the right kind of partner.

Interventionist Jane Mintz shares why you go for the wrong partner, time and time again.