Jacqueline Hart Gibson, Peak to Peak. Does this sound familiar? Having freed yourself from a toxic relationship, you clear your space, take time to heal your heart, and put your life back together again. Feeling some stability, you review the highlights of your most recent trainwreck of a relationship. Shocked by the red flags you ignored and the lies you believed you vow to yourself, “I’ll never put up with anything like that again.” 

Believing you have your best interests at heart, you brush past feelings of shame, refusing to ever put yourself back on the hamster wheel of drama in your mind. No more asking, “Why, why me, or why them?!” you boldly say to yourself. “I’m done with insanity. From now on, I will only date someone worth my time, who treats me with respect.” 

Back into the fray you go, determined to get this love thing right this time. You’ve changed the qualities you’re looking for in a partner. You’re certain you have cracked the code. Bravely, you make yourself available for that crazy thing called love. Walking into a room filled with ninety-nine healthy potential partners, you make a beeline for the one you will soon sing praises about to your friends; the one malignant narcissist in the room. 

When we say we’re done dating abusers, we mean it. We aren’t sadistic. We aren’t consciously choosing crazy, and we really were looking for a healthy relationship. Unfortunately, attraction has nothing to do with conscious decisions. Attraction is unconscious. We are attracted to relationships and situations that feel like home, usually our home from around six years old. These are the years when we form primary pillars for what love means to us. What we believe love feels like is synonymous with what our early childhood home felt like, and how we thought of it. 

If our home felt unstable, we are attracted to people we believe we can build an unstable home with. If we felt abandoned or alone, we are attracted to someone who is emotionally unavailable because we believe abandonment and loneliness is love. The reverse is true of course. If home felt fun loving and supportive to us, we might be the person who easily finds a partner who creates the same vibe we experienced growing up. 

Making what is unconscious, conscious, or shadow work as it is sometimes referred to, doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, the unconscious isn’t some darkness in the brain that only shamans and psychologists can access. Not everything in our heads that we don’t consciously think of daily is bad or painful. We just don’t think about it anymore. If you want to make some of the beliefs about love that create attraction for you conscious, grab a pen and paper. Take a minute to clear your head. Take a few deep breaths. When you feel relatively grounded, continue with the exercise below. 

You’re going to write two lists. Take a minute to picture the relationship you want to be in. We aren’t looking for a list of traits in an ideal partner. What feelings describe the experience of a healthy partnership to you. It could be communicative, or quiet. It could be exuberant or peaceful. It could be passionate or safe. It could be all of the above. This isn’t a list of what you think you are supposed to want. This is a list that has meaning for you. 

When you have completed the first list, take a few breaths and clear your head again. Set the first list aside, in your head and physical space. When you feel centered again, imagine yourself in the first childhood home you can remember, as far back as you can remember. Picture yourself as you were when you lived there, at five, six, or seven years old. Whatever age you can first remember is perfect. Now, bring up how you feel in that home. You can picture your room, the yard you played in, the family that was there at the time, or whatever applies for you. 

When you’re ready, write down how this home feels to you. Allow yourself to freely write feelings you think of as good and feelings you think of as bad. Do you feel safe or insecure? Do you feel you are the center of attention or barely visible? Is the space controlled and rigid or flexible? Write down everything that comes to mind for two or three minutes. 

The first list you wrote is what you are consciously looking for in a partner. It’s likely when you first entered past relationships, you would have described your partner using words on or similar to your first list. 

Your second list is what you are attracted to. For you, the second list describes the pull towards a certain person. You feel at home, you feel loved. Even if the second list does not express what you or people you know would say love is, this is love for you. This is what your brain believes love is. 

If the lists are in direct opposition with each other, you are attracted to what you don’t want. If you have heard the saying “We can’t change what we are attracted to,” delete it from your memory. It’s nonsense. Of course we can. It just takes practice. 

You now know that when you feel “at home” with someone without evidence for why these feelings are coming up for you, you know this person taps into your unconscious list. Knowing this you can now look for whether this person taps into unconscious feelings of home that you want to keep, or ones you want to change. 

For example, if your second list includes words like frightening and confusing, ask yourself if you see small behaviors in this person that could create a scary or chaotic home. If you’re not seeing or feeling any connection to scary or chaotic, but this person makes you laugh and fun or lighthearted, are on the second list, maybe the connection is to what you still want love and attraction to mean to you.  

The more awareness you practice around what is attracting you to the people in your life, the more choice you get to have in the quality of your relationships. It’s your head. It doesn’t control you. You control it. We can’t rewrite the experience that gave us our definition for love.  But we can rewrite the definition we accept in our lives today. As we grow, we become attracted to what we want, instead of what we don’t want. Happy Valentine’s Day! 

A video for this exercise can be found at: https://youtu.be/d7Khd0tfdIY