Why You Keep Attracting the Same Type of Person (It’s Not Bad Luck)
You’ve done the work. You’ve ended the relationships that weren’t working. You’ve reflected, journaled, talked to your friends, maybe even seen a therapist. You have told yourself, in no uncertain terms, that this time it will be different.
And then you meet someone new. And somewhere around month three, you realize — with a sinking, exhausted familiarity — that it is not different. The face is different. The name is different. The details are different.
The pattern is exactly the same.
If this sounds like your life, I want to offer you something more useful than “you need to love yourself more” or “you’re just attracted to unavailable people.” I want to offer you an actual explanation — because once you understand why patterns repeat, you have real options. Without that understanding, change is mostly luck.
It Has Nothing to Do With Bad Luck or Poor Judgment
The most important thing I can tell you up front is this: repeating relationship patterns are not a character flaw. They are not evidence that you are broken, incapable of healthy love, or fundamentally flawed in your taste in partners.
They are evidence that your nervous system is doing exactly what nervous systems do — seeking out what is familiar, because familiar feels like safety, even when it isn’t.
This is one of the most counterintuitive truths in psychology: we are not drawn to what is good for us. We are drawn to what feels like home. And if home was chaotic, emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or unsafe — that is what registers in the nervous system as normal. As known. As something it knows how to navigate.
A relationship that feels calm, stable, and consistently loving can actually feel wrong to someone whose nervous system was wired in an environment where those things were absent. It can feel boring. Suspicious. Like something must be off.
Not only do I see this in my office every week, but I remember feeling this way in the past (and news flash: it’s not fun to feel like you’re the problem).
Where the Pattern Comes From
Most repeating relationship patterns have their roots in one of two places: early attachment experiences or learned relational roles.
Early attachment. The relationship between a child and their earliest caregivers creates what researchers call an “internal working model” of relationships — a subconscious blueprint for how love works, whether it’s reliable, and what you have to do to earn and keep it. If early caregivers were inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, critical, or absent, the blueprint reflects that. And as adults, we tend to seek out relationships that confirm the blueprint, not ones that challenge it.
Learned relational roles. Many of us learned, growing up, that our value in relationships was tied to a particular role — the caretaker, the peacemaker, the achiever, the invisible one. We became very good at playing that role. And then we keep finding partners who need someone to play it, because that’s where we know how to belong.
Neither of these is a conscious choice. That’s the important part. The pattern is running on autopilot, underneath awareness, directing attraction and behavior in ways that feel like instinct — because in a sense, they are.
Three Signs You’re in a Pattern
You mistake intensity for connection. Relationships that begin with overwhelming chemistry, instant intimacy, and the feeling of finally being understood can feel like the real thing. And sometimes they are. But intensity and connection are not the same thing. Intensity is often the nervous system’s recognition of something familiar. Real connection tends to build more slowly and feels less like fireworks and more like safety.
You keep finding yourself in the same role. The caretaker who finds partners who need taking care of. The person who minimizes their own needs and then resents that they’re never met. The one who is always the more invested, the more committed, the one who tries harder. If your role is consistent across your relationships, that’s information.
You see the red flags but explain them away. This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of the early warning system. When something familiar shows up in a new person, the nervous system often reads it as safe before the mind has time to evaluate it. The explanations come later, after the attachment has already formed.
What Actually Changes Patterns
Knowing about a pattern is not the same as changing it. Awareness is the beginning, not the destination.
What actually changes patterns is slower and more specific work: understanding where the pattern came from, recognizing how it shows up in your body before it shows up in your behavior, and gradually building new experiences that give your nervous system something different to draw on.
This is exactly the work that good relationship therapy does. Not just talking about your patterns — but tracing them back, understanding their origin, and doing the slow, real work of updating the blueprint.
It’s not fast. It’s not linear. And it requires a level of honesty about yourself that is genuinely uncomfortable. But it is the only thing that actually works.
A Note Before You Close This Tab
If you read this and felt a recognition — a familiar, slightly uncomfortable “that’s me” — I want you to know something important.
Recognizing a pattern is not the same as being trapped by it. Patterns are not destiny. They are learned — which means they can be unlearned, or at least understood well enough that they stop running your life without your knowledge.
That work is worth doing. And you don’t have to do it alone.
Melissa LaCour is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Lafayette, Louisiana, specializing in relationships, adoption, life transitions, and sports counseling. She offers in-person sessions in Lafayette and telehealth across Louisiana, Ohio, Minnesota, Georgia, and Indiana.
If you’re ready to do real work on your relationship patterns, schedule a free 10-minute consultation here.
What Adoptive Parents Need to Know About Attachment — And Why It’s Never Too Late
You love your child completely. You have from the beginning.
And yet — sometimes it feels like that love can’t quite break through. Like your child is behind a wall you didn’t build and can’t find the door to. Like the closer you get, the harder they push away. Like you’re doing everything right and still something isn’t landing.
If this sounds familiar, I want to offer you something that isn’t judgment and isn’t a parenting checklist. It’s a framework. One that might finally help some of what you’re experiencing make sense.
It’s called attachment — and understanding it changed how I work with adoptive families. It might change how you parent.
What Is Attachment, Really?
Attachment is the term researchers use to describe the bond between a child and their primary caregivers — and more specifically, the internal working model that bond creates. In other words: the blueprint a child develops for how relationships work, whether love is safe, and whether people can be trusted to stay.
This blueprint is formed early. In the first weeks, months, and years of life, a child’s nervous system is learning from repeated experience: When I cry, does someone come? When I’m scared, am I held? When I need something, is it met?
When the answer to those questions is consistently “yes,” a child develops what researchers call secure attachment. They learn that the world is mostly safe, that relationships are trustworthy, and that they can venture out and explore because there’s a safe base to return to.
When the answer is inconsistent, absent, or frightening — because of early trauma, neglect, loss, or disrupted caregiving — a different kind of blueprint forms. One that says: connection isn’t reliable. People leave. Love has to be earned, or earned back, or isn’t safe to want at all.
For children who have experienced adoption — who have, by definition, experienced a significant early disruption in caregiving, regardless of the love and intention in their adoptive home — insecure attachment patterns are common. Not universal, not inevitable, but common enough that every adoptive parent deserves to understand them.
What Insecure Attachment Actually Looks Like
Attachment patterns don’t always look like what you’d expect. They don’t necessarily look like clinging or crying. Sometimes they look like:
Pushing away the people they love most, especially when things get emotional
Difficulty accepting comfort — stiffening when held, rejecting soothing when distressed
Extreme responses to transitions, goodbyes, or separations that seem disproportionate
Testing behavior — doing things that seem designed to see if you will leave
Controlling behavior — needing to manage everything because losing control feels catastrophic
Charming everyone except you — presenting beautifully to the outside world while the most difficult behavior is reserved for home
Difficulty with cause and effect — not connecting their behavior to consequences in the way their age might suggest they should
None of this means your child doesn’t love you. Often it means exactly the opposite. The people we push hardest are the ones we most want to stay.
Not only is insecure attachment something I struggled with in childhood (but didn’t know until adulthood), but I see this daily with children, teens, and even adults in their own relationships with their loved ones. I see the inability to transition or say goodbye in childhood, adults who can’t relinquish control in relationships, and teens who reject those closest to them when they are emotionally heightened. All of these things are directly related to attachment, but often get labeled simply as “bad behavior.”
The Myth of the Fresh Start
One of the most persistent and well-intentioned myths in adoption is the idea that love is enough. That if you just love your child deeply enough, consistently enough, for long enough — the early disruption won’t matter. The slate will be wiped clean.
I say this gently, because I know it comes from a place of pure love: the research doesn’t support it.
Early attachment experiences live in the body and the nervous system, not just the conscious mind. A child who learned in their first months of life that caregivers are unreliable doesn’t unlearn that through good intentions alone. They need something more specific: consistent, attuned, attachment-informed parenting — and often, for more significantly impacted children, professional support.
This is not a criticism of adoptive parents. It’s an acknowledgment that the work of building secure attachment with a child who has experienced early disruption is genuinely harder than parenting a child without that history — and that harder means you might need more tools, more support, and more grace for yourself.
The Good News: Attachment Is Not Fixed
Here is what the research also tells us, and this matters enormously: attachment patterns are not permanent.
The brain is more plastic than we once believed, particularly in childhood. Children who have experienced early attachment disruption can and do develop more secure attachment patterns — when they have consistently attuned, responsive, safe caregivers over time. It takes longer. It looks different. It requires patience measured in years, not weeks.
But it is possible.
The work of researchers like Dr. Daniel Siegel on interpersonal neurobiology, and the Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) framework developed at TCU, has given adoptive parents and therapists specific, evidence-based tools for this work. It’s not guesswork. It’s not just waiting and hoping. There are approaches that work.
I’ve done training in TBRI — and while it isn’t a therapeutic model, it gives so much context to adults and caregivers on working with children who come from “hard places” such as foster care and adoption.
What Helps: Practical Principles for Adoptive Parents
Every child is different, and what works for one family may not work for another. That said, here are principles that consistently show up in the research and in my clinical work with adoptive families:
Stay regulated yourself. Your nervous system is the most powerful co-regulator your child has. When you can stay calm, warm, and present — especially when they are at their most dysregulated — you are literally teaching their nervous system to calm down. This is harder than it sounds and requires your own support.
Understand the behavior, not just address it. Most difficult behavior in children with attachment histories is communication, not defiance. When you can ask “what is this behavior telling me about what my child needs?” instead of “why is my child doing this to me?” — everything shifts.
Build in connection rituals. Small, consistent moments of connection — a specific greeting, a special routine at bedtime, a predictable pattern of physical closeness — build felt safety over time. The accumulation of thousands of small moments is what changes attachment.
Reduce shame-based discipline. Children with attachment trauma are often already carrying enormous amounts of shame. Discipline approaches that increase shame — isolation, public criticism, withdrawal of love as a consequence — typically make attachment-related behavior worse, not better.
Seek support for yourself. Parenting a child with significant attachment needs is emotionally demanding in ways that most of your friends and family will not fully understand. Adoptive parent support groups, adoption-competent therapists, and communities of parents walking the same road are not a luxury. They are a necessity.
When to Seek Professional Help
If your child’s behavior is significantly disrupting family life, if you find yourself consistently at the end of your rope, if you notice that your relationship with your child feels more like a battle than a bond — please don’t wait.
Adoption-informed therapy can be genuinely transformative — both for your child and for your family system. Look for a therapist who has specific training in attachment and trauma, who is familiar with the adoption experience, and who works with the whole family rather than just treating your child as the identified patient.
I work with adoptive parents both individually and alongside their children. If any of this is resonating, I’d love to talk.
A Final Word to the Parent Who Is Tired
If you are in the thick of it right now — if you are questioning yourself, if you are more exhausted than you knew was possible, if you sometimes lie awake wondering if you are doing this right — I want you to hear this:
The fact that you are reading articles like this one tells me something important about you. You are trying. You are curious about your child’s inner world. You are committed to understanding them, not just managing them.
That is not nothing. That is everything.
Secure attachment is built in exactly the moments you stay when the easier thing would be to pull away. It is built in the rupture and the repair. It is built in the ten thousand small moments of being chosen, again and again, even when it’s hard.
You’re building it. Even on the hard days.
Melissa LaCour is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Lafayette, Louisiana, specializing in adoption, relationships, life transitions, and sports counseling. She is also an adoptee. If you’re an adoptive parent looking for support, learn more at melissalacour.com.
If you’re working through your own adoption story, the Belonging workbook was written for you (coming August 2026).
Adoption Trauma in Adulthood — What It Is and Why It Still Shows Up
There's a particular kind of confusion that a lot of adult adoptees carry — and it goes something like this:
I had a good life. I was loved. So why does it still feel like something is wrong?
If that question has lived in you — quietly, persistently, sometimes surfacing at the most inconvenient moments — I want to offer you something: not a diagnosis, not a label, but a framework that might finally make some sense of it.
It's called adoption trauma. And it doesn't always look the way we expect trauma to look.
What Is Adoption Trauma?
When most people think of trauma, they think of a single, dramatic event — an accident, an assault, a disaster. Something with a clear before and after.
Adoption trauma rarely works that way.
Adoption trauma refers to the psychological and emotional impact of early separation from a birth parent — and the ripple effects of that separation across a lifetime. It can begin before a child has any conscious memory, before they have language, before they can form a narrative about what happened. And yet the body remembers. The nervous system remembers.
Researchers describe early separation from a caregiver as one of the most significant stressors an infant can experience. Even in cases where the adoptive home is warm, stable, and loving — the separation itself carries weight. It doesn't mean the adoption was wrong or that your adoptive family failed you. It means that loss, even early and pre-verbal loss, leaves a mark.
This is sometimes called developmental trauma or early relational trauma — trauma that is less about a single event and more about a disruption to the foundational experience of safety, connection, and continuity.
Why It Shows Up in Adulthood
Here's what's true about trauma that happened very early in life: it doesn't necessarily show up as a memory. It shows up as a pattern.
You may not remember being placed. You may not have a clear narrative around your earliest separation. But if your nervous system learned, in those first days or months or years, that connection is precarious — that the people you love might disappear — that lesson gets encoded somewhere deep. And it tends to drive behavior from that place, long after the conscious mind has moved on.
For many adult adoptees, adoption trauma surfaces not as flashbacks or nightmares but as:
A persistent, low-level anxiety about being left — in relationships, in friendships, even in professional settings
Difficulty trusting that love is stable, even when there's evidence it is
Patterns of pushing people away before they can leave first
An exquisite sensitivity to criticism, rejection, or feeling unwanted
A sense of not quite belonging — anywhere, to anyone, including yourself
Emotional responses that feel disproportionate to the situation, as if the reaction is older than the moment
A body that is often tense, vigilant, or difficult to settle
None of these are character flaws. They are the logical output of a nervous system that learned early that the world was uncertain.
"But I Had a Happy Childhood"
This is one of the most common things I hear — and one of the most important to address.
Having a loving adoptive family and experiencing adoption trauma are not mutually exclusive. In fact, many adoptees who had genuinely wonderful childhoods still carry this — because the trauma didn't happen in the adoptive family. It happened before it. It happened in the original separation.
Gratitude and grief are not opposites. You can be deeply grateful for the family that raised you and still carry a wound from the one you were separated from. Those two things do not cancel each other out. They simply coexist — and that coexistence is one of the most disorienting parts of the adoptee experience.
The pressure to choose — to be either grateful or wounded, either fine or struggling — is one of the cruelest things the adoption narrative imposes on adoptees. You don't have to choose. Both are true. Both are allowed.
How Adoption Trauma Lives in the Body
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's landmark work established something that trauma-informed therapists know well: the body keeps the score. Trauma that isn't processed cognitively doesn't disappear — it relocates. It lives in the nervous system, in patterns of tension and activation, in the ways the body responds to perceived threat long after the actual threat is gone.
For adoptees, this can look like:
Hypervigilance — a baseline alertness, always scanning for signs that connection is about to be withdrawn. Feeling exhausted by relationships in a way others don't seem to understand.
Emotional dysregulation — big responses to things that others find minor, because underneath the current moment is the original one. The body doesn't distinguish clearly between then and now.
Shutdown or numbing — the opposite of hyperarousal, but coming from the same place. Some nervous systems respond to chronic stress by going quiet, flat, unreachable. This can look like depression, disconnection, or what one of my clients once described as "watching my life from behind glass."
Somatic symptoms — chronic tension, digestive issues, fatigue, headaches — the body's way of holding what the mind hasn't processed.
None of this makes you broken. It makes you human — and it makes you someone whose early experience was more complex than the simple story you may have been given.
Adoption Trauma Looks Different for Different Adoptees
It's worth saying clearly: adoption trauma is not universal or uniform. Every adoptee's experience is shaped by a complex combination of factors — the circumstances of their placement, the quality of their adoptive home, their temperament, whether they experienced additional adverse experiences before or after adoption, whether their adoption was domestic or international, same-race or transracial.
Some adoptees carry significant, identifiable trauma. Others carry something quieter and more diffuse. Some don't identify with the word "trauma" at all — and that's valid too.
What matters is not whether your experience fits a particular label. What matters is whether naming it — in whatever form it takes — helps you understand yourself more clearly and move through the world with more freedom.
The Particular Complexity of Transracial Adoption
For adoptees raised in families that didn't share their racial or cultural background, adoption trauma can carry additional layers.
When your physical appearance, cultural heritage, or racial identity differs from your adoptive family's, you may have navigated questions of identity without anyone who could mirror that experience back to you. You may have received messages — overt or subtle — about which parts of yourself were acceptable and which were awkward or inconvenient. You may have felt caught between communities, belonging fully to neither.
This isn't a criticism of transracial adoptive families. It's an acknowledgment that the work of navigating racial and cultural identity is real, it matters, and it deserves space in any honest conversation about adoption and healing.
What Healing Actually Looks Like
Healing from adoption trauma is not a linear process, and it is rarely a destination you arrive at once and stay. It is more like a relationship you develop — with your own history, with the parts of yourself that adapted to survive, with the grief that may not have had anywhere to land until now.
A few things that genuinely help:
Adoption-competent therapy. Not every therapist is equipped to work with adoption trauma. Look for someone who is adoption-informed, has training in attachment and trauma, and doesn't minimize the complexity of your experience. Approaches like internal family systems (IFS) can be particularly effective for early developmental trauma.
Language. One of the most consistently healing things I see in my work is the moment a client finds language for something they've been living wordlessly. Frameworks like the 7 Core Issues of Adoption don't diagnose you — they name what's already there. And naming it changes your relationship to it.
Community. There is something irreplaceable about being witnessed by people who understand from the inside. The adoptee community — through podcasts, support groups, online spaces — offers a kind of belonging that even the best therapy can't fully replicate.
Structured self-reflection. For adoptees who are ready to do deeper work but aren't yet in therapy — or who want to supplement the work they're already doing — guided reflection can be a powerful tool. My workbook, Belonging: A Guided Journey Through Adoption Wounds & Wisdom, was written specifically for adult adoptees and covers these themes chapter by chapter, with space to write, reflect, and integrate.
Somatic practices. Because adoption trauma often lives in the body, healing often has to happen there too. Breathwork, yoga, movement, body-based therapy — these aren't luxuries. For many adoptees, they're essential.
A Word About Resilience
I want to be careful here, because resilience is a word that gets weaponized against adoptees.
You're so resilient. It's often meant as a compliment — but it can function as a way of closing the conversation. Of saying: you survived, so you're fine, so let's move on.
Resilience is real. Many adoptees have developed extraordinary capacity for adaptation, empathy, insight, and strength — in part because of what they've navigated. That is worth honoring.
But resilience and healing are not the same thing. You can be highly functional and still be carrying something unresolved. You can be strong and still be hurting. You can have survived beautifully and still deserve more than just survival.
The goal isn't to be resilient in spite of your adoption story. The goal is to understand it, integrate it, and build a life that is genuinely yours — not just one that looks okay from the outside.
You Don't Have to Have It All Figured Out
If this post has surfaced things that feel tender or confusing — that's not a sign that something is wrong with you. That's a sign that something in you is ready to be looked at.
You don't have to resolve it today. You don't have to have the right words for it yet. You don't have to decide whether "trauma" is the right word for your experience before you're allowed to take it seriously.
You're allowed to start wherever you are.
And wherever you are — with whatever you're carrying — there is a path forward. It isn't always easy, and it isn't linear, and it doesn't end with a ceremony or a certificate. But it is real. And you are not alone on it.
Melissa LaCour is a Licensed Professional Counselor based in Louisiana, specializing in adoption, relationships, and life transitions. She is also an adoptee. Learn more at melissalacour.com.
If you're ready to go deeper into your adoption story, the Belonging workbook was written for exactly this moment.
Further reading: Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. Viking. Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss. Harvard University Press. Verrier, N. N. (1993). The primal wound. Gateway Press. Brodzinsky, D., Schechter, M., & Henig, R. M. (1992). Being adopted: The lifelong search for self. Doubleday.