At a Glance
Repeatedly entering toxic relationships is often driven by subconscious attraction patterns formed in early life, not poor judgement. These patterns normalise chaos, emotional unavailability, or conditional love and override conscious choice. Lasting change requires addressing the subconscious directly, retraining stress responses and relational expectations, rather than relying on insight or willpower alone.
Breaking the Cycle of Bad Relationships
Have you ever met someone new and thought this time it’s different, only to find that three months later you’re having the same arguments you had with your ex?
Maybe you’ve sworn off a certain type of person, but somehow end up attracted to their carbon copy. If you keep ending up in relationships that drain you or undermine you, subconscious attractions may be driving your choices.
Understanding these unconscious patterns can help you break free from toxic relationship recovery cycles.
Toxic relationships can take a toll on your mental health, leading to stress, depression, low confidence and reliance on drugs, cigarettes, or alcohol as a coping mechanism. Many victims of toxic partners are often made to believe they “deserve” it. If you want to break these negative relationship patterns, it is important to reframe your own self-belief and subconscious.
Give hypnotherapy, NLP and emotional coaching a chance to help develop self-love and leave a toxic relationship. Susannah has over two decades of experience helping people achieve their full potential through solution-focused hypnotherapy, overcoming past traumas and triggers, and moving towards a calmer, more confident self. Get in touch to learn more.
What is a Toxic Relationship?
A toxic relationship isn’t just one where you argue sometimes or have different opinions. That’s just two people being human.
Toxic relationships consistently damage your well-being. You might be walking on eggshells, constantly managing someone else’s emotions, or finding yourself smaller and quieter than you used to be. There could be manipulation, gaslighting, or a constant shift between awful and amazing.
Common features include power imbalance, emotional unavailability, constant criticism disguised as honesty, and being made to feel that you’re always the problem. You might be anxious all the time, second-guessing yourself, or losing touch with friends and activities you once loved.
Recognising you’re in one of these relationships is the first step. Most people who come to see me for toxic relationship recovery have already done the hardest part, which is admitting something needs to change. Sometimes it isn’t just about breaking relationship patterns, but considering whether to leave a toxic relationship altogether.
The Role of the Subconscious in Attraction
Why does this keep happening? Why do smart, self-aware people keep choosing partners who hurt them? The answer may be subconscious attractions.
Your conscious mind might be screening for green flags and running background checks, but subconscious attractions are older and more powerful. With your subconscious mind potentially prioritising familiarity, logic and dating checklists may be disregarded.
Your subconscious learnt how relationships work when you were very young. If love came with conditions, unpredictability, or emotional distance, that’s what your brain considered normal.
When you meet someone who feels exciting or magnetic, you’re likely experiencing subconscious attractions, recognising something familiar. That chemistry you feel may actually be your nervous system saying, “I know this.”
This is why you may feel attracted to people who are wrong for you, and overlook someone who would treat you right.
Your subconscious believes that if you can just make this person love you properly, you’ll finally heal that original wound. However, that’s not how it works.
Understanding relationship patterns and the role of the subconscious mind is essential for toxic relationship recovery.
Common Subconscious Patterns That Lead To Attracting Wrong Partners
Breaking out of a bad relationship starts with recognising the problem points. Some relationship patterns I see often in my practice:
The Fixer
You’re drawn to people with potential – they’ve had a rough time and you’re convinced your love can help them change. Meanwhile, you’re doing all the emotional heavy lifting while they stay comfortably stuck.
This relationship pattern often comes from growing up with a parent who was inconsistent, struggling, or emotionally unavailable. You learned that love means working hard to earn approval and your value comes from being useful. Breaking relationship patterns like this requires understanding of where they started.
The Validation Seeker
You need your partner to make you feel worthy, attractive, or good enough. When they’re attentive, you feel amazing. When they’re distant, you spiral. You might find yourself with people who are hot and cold because that keeps you hooked.
This relationship pattern usually comes from conditional love in childhood. You learned that approval had to be earned and could be withdrawn at any moment. Emotional coaching, along with hypnotherapy, can help address these relationship patterns.
The Chaos Comfort Zone
Calm, stable relationships can feel boring or too easy. Perhaps you interpret drama as passion and mistake intensity for intimacy. You might leave relationships when they get too peaceful because something feels off.
If your early environment was unpredictable or high-stress, your nervous system may have become used to chaos, so peace can feel uncomfortable or even dangerous because your system is waiting for something to happen. Breaking relationship patterns like this takes time and support.
The Abandonment Avoider
You choose people who are emotionally unavailable, already attached, or clearly not looking for commitment. This way, you never risk real vulnerability or rejection. You’re protected from abandonment by never fully connecting in the first place.
This is one of the relationship patterns that keeps people stuck, even when they know, intellectually, that they deserve better.
The Repetition Compulsion
You keep recreating a specific dynamic from your past, usually trying to get a different outcome. If your father was critical, you might choose critical partners, unconsciously hoping this time you’ll be good enough to earn unconditional approval.
These aren’t character flaws. They’re survival strategies your younger self developed to cope with difficult situations. The problem is that these relationship patterns are still running the show years after they stopped being useful.
Overcoming unhealthy patterns requires accessing where they live in the subconscious mind, through solution-focused hypnotherapy.
How Hypnotherapy Can Help in Breaking Relationship Patterns
You can’t think your way out of unhealthy patterns driven by subconscious attractions. I’ve worked with incredibly intelligent, self-aware people who can analyse their relationship patterns in detail but still can’t change them. Insight alone doesn’t help with breaking these negative patterns.
Hypnotherapy works for toxic relationship recovery because it accesses the part of your mind where subconscious attractions live. This is what you can expect during a solution-focused hypnosis session with me:
Working Directly With Your Subconscious Mind
In my sessions, we use your brain’s natural ability to enter a relaxed, focused state, making your subconscious more accessible. This isn’t about making you lose control, you’re fully aware and in charge the entire time. What changes is that your critical, analytical mind takes a step back, so we can work directly with the subconscious attractions driving your choices.
Identifying the Origin of the Issue
We identify the original template behind your relationship patterns. Often, there’s a specific relationship or period in your childhood that taught you what love looks like. We don’t do years of analysis, but we do try to understand what your subconscious thinks it’s protecting you from or trying to fix.
Then we update the programming. Through guided visualisation and suggestion, we help your subconscious recognise that old relationship patterns no longer serve you. We create new neural pathways that associate healthy relationships with safety rather than boredom, and recognise red flags as warnings rather than subconscious attractions.
Calming Your Stress Response
We also work on your stress response during toxic relationship recovery. People who’ve been in toxic relationships often have hyperactive stress systems. Your primitive brain has learned to expect threats, which affects everything from how you interpret your partner’s behaviour to how you react to situations. We calm that system down so you can make choices from a place of clarity rather than anxiety.
Learning New Responses
The practical side of breaking relationship patterns matters too. We rehearse different responses, so when you encounter familiar situations, you have new options available. Your subconscious learns what it feels like to set boundaries, walk away, and choose differently.
Most people working on toxic relationship recovery notice shifts quite quickly. That person who would normally have you obsessing suddenly just seems exhausting. That gut feeling that something’s wrong? You actually listen to it instead of talking yourself out of it. The urge to fix or prove yourself quiets down.
This approach to breaking relationship patterns isn’t about becoming cynical or closing yourself off. It’s about freeing yourself to experience genuine intimacy instead of recreating past pain. Whether you’re wondering how to stop repeating patterns or if you should leave a toxic relationship, hypnotherapy can help you figure out the right solution.
Contact Susannah for Toxic Relationship Recovery
Recognising your relationship patterns and the role your subconscious plays in choosing a partner is powerful.
Breaking relationship patterns isn’t about finding the perfect partner or never making mistakes. It’s about changing what feels normal to you so that subconscious attractions no longer pull you towards situations that hurt you.
Toxic relationship recovery is about retraining your nervous system and your mind.
Susannah works with people both in person at her London practice and online via Zoom. Sessions start from £198, and most people see significant shifts within 4 to 6 sessions. Some people just need a couple of sessions to address specific issues, while others prefer ongoing emotional coaching support as they navigate new relationship territory.
If you’re still in a toxic relationship right now and wondering whether to leave or stay and work on it, that’s something we can explore together. Many people find that once they start breaking negative patterns through hypnotherapy and emotional coaching, the decision about whether to leave a toxic relationship becomes clearer. You deserve relationships that feel good, not just familiar.
Feel free to book an appointment online, or reach out if you’d like to speak first. I offer a free initial phone consultation.
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