Why You Keep Going Back to the Person Who Hurts You (And Why It's Not Weakness but Neuroscience)

You told yourself it was the last time.

You blocked their number. You cried on your bathroom floor at 2am, whispering never again into the tiles. You journalled about it. You talked to your friends about it until their sympathy quietly ran dry. And then, three weeks, three months, or three years later there was a message: “Hey, how are you?” A moment that cracked open everything you'd sealed shut. And you went back.

If you've ever found yourself trapped in this maddening loop, desperately craving a connection with someone who keeps you at arm's length, while feeding you occasional breadcrumbs that you gobble up as though they were a delicious feast, if you’re feeling addicted to a relationship that swings between electrical connection and agonising -  you may be living inside one of psychology's most complex and underexplored dynamics: anxious-avoidant attachment fuelled by intermittent reinforcement.

This isn't a character flaw. This isn't stupidity, or weakness, or some failure of willpower. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was wired to do,  and understanding why is the first step to breaking free.

The Drug you can’t Get Enough of

Here's a fact that might reframe everything: studies show that intermittent, unpredictable rewards activate the brain's dopamine system far more powerfully than consistent ones.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy calls this variable ratio reinforcement. It’s the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines devastatingly addictive. You don't win every time. You don't even win most of the time. But the possibility of winning keeps you pulling the lever, heart hammering, hope surging.

Now replace the slot machine with a person. Replace the jackpot with electrical chemistry, deep connection, and intimacy that appears and then inexplicably vanishes. What you have is the neurological blueprint of an anxious-avoidant relationship. And your brain, I'm sorry to tell you, is genuinely hooked.

The Dance: Who's Playing Which Part?

Before we go deeper, do you recognise yourself in either of these patterns?

The Anxious Attacher desperately craves closeness. They over-text, over-give, and over-analyse. They read every message seventeen times. They shrink themselves, walking on eggshells, terrified that one wrong move will shatter the connection entirely. Their inner world is a constant storm: Am I too much? Not enough? Why haven't they replied?

The Avoidant Attacher craves connection too, but the moment real intimacy approaches, something inside them slams shut. They pull back. They get cold. They need space. They convince themselves they don't need or love anyone, even as a quiet loneliness pools beneath the surface.

Put these two people together, and you get the chase. The anxious partner pursues. The avoidant retreats. The pursuit feels threatening to the avoidant, who retreats further. The retreat feels like abandonment to the anxious partner, who chases harder.

It's exhausting. It's painful. And without intervention, it loops endlessly.

Where Did This All Begin?

These attachment patterns weren't chosen. They were learned. Often in childhood, often before you had the language to understand what was happening.

Dr Gabor Maté writes powerfully about how early environments shape our nervous systems: when a child cannot predict whether a caregiver will be warm or cold, present or absent, safe or frightening, they develop a hypervigilant system designed to detect danger and seek connection at all costs.

Think about it. If love, or something resembling it, was unpredictable in your formative years, your brain learned that love is unpredictable. That you must earn it. That it might vanish. That you should never fully relax into it, because it could be ripped away.

So as an adult, when you meet someone who replicates that exact emotional temperature with the highs soaring, the lows devastating, the presence electric and the absence crushing, something deep in your nervous system whispers: This is familiar. This is love.

It isn't. But it feels like it is.

The Hot-Cold Cycle: What's Actually Happening

Let's trace a typical anxious-avoidant interaction, because recognition is powerful.

Stage 1: The Pull-In The avoidant partner opens up with vulnerability, texts with warmth, and makes plans. The anxious partner feels flooded with relief and joy. This is it. This is real. This is what I've been waiting for. Oxytocin and dopamine surge. The world feels bright.

Stage 2: The Retreat Something shifts. Maybe intimacy got too close. Maybe the avoidant felt overwhelmed. They go quiet, become distant, or are suddenly "so busy with work." For the anxious partner, this feels like the floor disappearing. Cortisol and adrenaline spike. Anxiety takes hold.

Stage 3: The Chase The anxious partner reaches out. Tries to fix it. Tries to understand. Tries to earn back the warmth that was there just days ago. The pursuit triggers the avoidant's need to retreat further.

Stage 4: The Reconciliation Eventually, the avoidant returns, sometimes with an explanation, sometimes without. The relief the anxious partner feels at this moment is enormous. Almost euphoric. And this moment right here is the slot machine paying out. The brain files it away: Keep trying. It works eventually. Never give up.

And the cycle restarts.

"The wound of one partner perfectly fits the wound of the other." Esther Perel

"But We Have Such a Deep Unique Connection..."

I hear this often. And I want to be gentle but honest with you: intensity is not the same as intimacy.

The emotional charge of an anxious-avoidant relationship can feel more profound than anything you've experienced. The highs are extraordinary. You feel seen, until you don't. The depth of feeling, the longing, the desperate hunger for resolution can masquerade as a love story for the ages.

Dr Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, reminds us that unresolved trauma creates a gravitational pull toward familiar pain. What feels like a soul connection may, in part, be your nervous system recognising a pattern it knows, and mistaking recognition for resonance.

This doesn't mean your feelings aren't real. They absolutely are. But feelings can mislead us when they're filtered through an unhealed wound.

The Self-Sabotage Nobody Talks About

Here's where it gets uncomfortably honest.

Both the anxious and the avoidant partner are, in different ways, self-sabotaging, often without realising it.

The anxious partner may unconsciously choose avoidant partners because the dynamic confirms a deeply held belief: I am too much. I am not enough. Love is conditional. I have to work for it. A consistently loving, available partner can feel boring. Unattractive. Unsafe. Too easy.

The avoidant partner may unconsciously push away genuine intimacy because closeness triggers an alarm wired deep in their nervous system: If I let someone in fully, I will be engulfed. Controlled. Abandoned. It's safer alone.

Both patterns are self-protective strategies that became self-defeating. And both are healable.

What Healing Actually Looks Like

This is where I want you to take a breath. Because healing from anxious or avoidant attachment is not about forcing yourself to date differently. It's not about willpower or checklists. And it's certainly not about blaming yourself for patterns you didn't choose.

True healing happens at the root level - in the nervous system, in the body, in the inner child who learned that love was dangerous or unpredictable.

Some of that work involves:

• Nervous system regulation: Learning to tolerate the discomfort of stillness, of not chasing, of not retreating; building the capacity to stay present when every old instinct screams run or pursue.

• Inner child work: Identifying the original wound; reparenting the younger part of you who learned that love must be earned or kept at distance

• Attachment mapping: Understanding your specific patterns without shame, and beginning to recognise the moments when old programming is driving new choices

• Building a secure base within yourself: Developing the internal stability that secure attachment would have provided externally; learning, slowly, that you are enough before someone else confirms it.

I have seen plenty of people transform over time to what we call “earned secure” through doing the inner work and actively practicing it.

Are You in an Anxious-Avoidant Dynamic? Ask Yourself...

• Do you feel more drawn to someone when they pull away from you?

• Does consistent affection feel slightly suffocating?

• Are you constantly analysing where you stand with a partner?

• Do you find yourself cycling between feeling desperately close and inexplicably distant?

• Have multiple relationships followed a similar pattern of hot-and-cold?

• Do you feel most alive in relationships that are emotionally charged, even painfully so?

If several of these resonate, you're not broken. You're operating from a deeply embedded programme that was written to protect you, but is now keeping you stuck.

2026 and the Attachment Crisis We're Not Talking About

This conversation has never been more urgent.

In 2026, digital communication has turbocharged the anxious-avoidant dynamic. Read receipts, online statuses, three typing dots that disappear - we have more tools to track the unpredictability than any previous generation. Dating apps create an endless pool of potential connections whilst simultaneously encouraging emotional unavailability and disposability.

Research published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that anxious attachment significantly predicts problematic smartphone use; the compulsive checking, the middle-of-the-night spiralling, the hours lost to surveillance of someone else's digital footprint.

We are living inside a cultural architecture that was almost designed to keep anxious-avoidant patterns in perpetual motion. Which means the work of healing is not just personal. It's radical.

You Don't Have to Keep Playing This Game

I know how tiring it is. The hope, the hurt, the hope again. The version of you that keeps believing this time will be different, even as some quieter, wiser part of you knows the steps of this dance by heart.

The way you love is not a flaw. It is information. It is your inner world, shaped by everything that came before this moment, asking please, finally, look at me.

The most transformative work I do with clients is not teaching them how to attract a different partner. It's helping them become safe enough to themselves so they stop unconsciously seeking out the familiar chaos of relationships that leave them emotionally starved. It's watching someone discover, often for the first time, what it feels like to be in relationship with themselves. 

That kind of change is possible. I've watched it happen, again and again. It's the work I consider a privilege to do.

Ready to Break the Cycle?

If this article has stirred something in you, you don't have to navigate this alone.

I work with high-achieving individuals who are successful in every area of their lives, except the one that matters most to them: feeling truly at home in themselves.

Working with me, we will:

• Identify your attachment style and trace it to its roots

• Heal the early wounds driving your relationship patterns

• Build genuine emotional security from the inside out

• Help you move from anxious or avoidant into something that actually works: earned secure attachment

This work is deep, brave, and genuinely life-changing. It is also, I promise, some of the most worthwhile work you will ever do.

Book your free introductory call with me today

DM BREADCRUMBS on Instagram.com/nicola_mcadam or send via email to nicola@mindvibes.io and I’ll send you my free guide to overcoming insecure attachment. 

Nicola McAdam is a therapist and holistic life coach. She works with high-achieving individuals who are ready to address the root causes of their patterns, not just the symptoms.

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