Ken Page, a psychotherapist, discusses what he terms as “attractions of deprivation” and "attractions of inspiration"– the latter did not interest me as much as the former which refers to a condition which I suspect we all experience, at some point, when we are drawn to people who embody the worst emotional characteristics of our parents. Basically, the theory explains that we are attracted to people who can wound us the same way we were wounded in our childhood, as our psyche tries to recreate the past void and save us by changing its ending.
Is it possible to change that ending or are we destined to just repeat that cycle over and over? What can we do to break that cycle?
Page explains that "Many of us believe that attractions of deprivation are real love, because they draw us in so powerfully. When these attractions let us down, we believe it's because of a lack in us, not because of a fatal flaw embedded in the attractions themselves....Most of us are wired to want the hard-to-get. People who devalue us make us want to convince them of our worth. These are our circuitries of deprivation. And, as compelling as they are, they rarely lead to happiness or lasting love."
This is very true...for some reason many people, in my experience this tends to be mainly women, prefer to blame their characters for their faults rather than admit to errors of judgement. This kind of self flagellation is extremely counter productive and merely ends in a repetition of mistakes due to the fact that the individual is hoping that 'this time things will be different', rather than acknowledging a simple miscalculation which can be corrected in future.
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