Many people pick the same type of individuals for all of their relationships. When you look back over your relationships do you see a common thread or know one is there, but can't pinpoint exactly what it is? Until we recognize what we are doing we have a hard time changing our patterns in mate selection.

If you keep choosing dysfunctional partners, chances are there is a common thread. Individuals that come from abusive backgrounds, and by abusive that could manifest as physical abuse, mental abuse or emotional abuse. There is so much emphasis placed on physical abuse these days that emotional abuse seems to be placed in the background. Yet, this emotional abuse carries the same consequences as physical abuse. The person that has experienced emotional abuse has the same feelings and reactions to life that the person that was physically or even sexually abused carries with them.

This translates into what types of partners we attract into our lives to have relationships with. For example, if one of your parents was an alcoholic, the statistics say that you will pick an alcoholic for a mate. But, what if you don't. You would tend to think that you escaped that stereotype. But, look again, perhaps your selection of a mate is someone who is not emotionally available. Are they there in body only? They talk to you, do things with you, make love to you, but are they there with their emotions to both share with you and receive from you.

Look closely at your family dynamics. Are you still in there fighting the same old battles and experiencing the same old feelings when around them? This is what you are going to carry over to personal relationships. So many people that come to me eventually discover that they have become romantically involved with someone who is like their mother or their father. This isn't always easy to see but it is there in the majority of cases. Are you one of these? Look closely, give it a lot of thought and see what answers you come up with.

What we experience in a family situation is what we then become comfortable with in a mate. If you are comfortable with neglect that is where you feel comfortable in relationships. I'm not saying that's what you want, far from it, but it is where you are comfortable. You know how to react under these circumstances, you how to protect yourself in the situations that come up and you know what to expect.

This is a whole lot easier than getting into a situation that you don't have a clue as to what to expect or how to stay safe. Let's look at it from the other side. If you had supportive parents that treated you with respect and nurturing and you met someone that was involved with drugs or alcohol that didn't know how to be supportive and nurturing how would you know what behaviors kept you safe, or loved, or even in a relationship with someone who didn't have those skills?

The answer is you can't and the point is that like attracts like. Who you are and what you are used to, you attract. Many of us don't like hearing that, but how can we change until we know what it is that we have to change. I can look at any person and the type of relationship they had with their parents and tell you what their current relationships are like, if they haven't done some work to change their patterns.

This is one of the reasons for the expression "If you meet someone's eyes across the room and the heart (or emotions) goes ping, run the other way as fast as you can." What it usually means is that the person we are responding to falls somewhere in our family system and we can recognize that phenomena from across the room and even from thousands of miles away.

Of course, it could be from a previous life, but that doesn't make it a compatible relationship. Maybe it wasn't then but it wasn't finished and it's not today and needs to be recognized as such.

I hear men say all the time that women don't like nice guys. There are a couple of reasons for this statement. One, is that perhaps one of the females parents wasn't nice (I know all parents are suppose to be nice, but sadly, they aren't) and that's what she is used to. Another reason is that "nice" doesn't equate to knowing how to be in a relationship. There are lots of nice people out there in the world, but that doesn't mean anything other than that. So a person is nice, okay, but what do they know about intimacy, communication and compassion. It takes more than being nice to be in a healthy relationship.