Well, the short answer is: it’s you. If every person you end up emotionally involved with is a psycho and finds a way to make your life hell, the only thing they all have in common is you. So start by looking at yourself.

It’s a common pattern: quiet, reserved, “nice” people that continually attract emotionally explosive and manipulative people into their love lives. Why does this happen? And why does it seem to happen to the same people over and over again?

It happens when you are uncomfortable with intimacy and expressing your emotions openly and honestly. This inability to express emotionally healthy intimacy will inadvertently narrow down your dating options to those who are equally as screwed up in their ability to maintain a healthy intimacy. Here are a few reasons why.

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1. Their boldness counterbalances your inhibitions.

If you are uncomfortable showing romantic interest, then you are immediately limiting your dating pool to only the boldest and most self-started among us. If you are particularly shy, inhibited, unclear about what you want, or weak in expressing your desires, then you are a prime candidate to get bulldozed by someone who is willing to push their own desires onto you. In a sense, it’s your weakness that invites and attracts these selfish people into your life.

2. Their emotional instability stimulates your suppressed emotions.

People who are uncomfortable with expressing emotions suppress them in a few different ways. They numb themselves completely and feel indifferent towards others, or they rationalize reasons to avoid engaging others emotionally. In some circumstances, people will overcompensate by completely objectifying their relationships and sex life, rationalizing that they don’t need to be emotionally connected to someone to date them.

When you suppress your emotions and shun intimacy, the only people whose emotions are intense enough to break through are those who are emotionally unstable. By suppressing yourself, you unknowingly self-select for others who overexpress themselves. These people tend to get particularly hooked on overly-emotional/unstable people because it allows them to experience their own emotions vicariously through the drama of the person they’re with.

3. Their addiction to drama makes you feel important.

But what really gets emotionally suppressed people hooked is the drama. These “psychos” are always in a state of crisis. They’re always the victim of something. And they always need to be saved from somebody or something. This makes you feel important and needed — two things you’ve rarely felt so acutely before — because you’ve gone through life suppressing intimacy and keeping your relationships as superficial as possible.

Inevitably, the emotionally unstable “psycho” will find a way to turn on you. Any peace and equanimity you work for, they will find a way to sabotage it. Because the sick truth is that always being in a state of emotional crisis makes the other person feel important as well. Their fear is the same as yours: that you’re unimportant. But they achieve it through an equal and opposite strategy: drama. And so the over-emotional/under-emotional duo enter into a toxic unconscious dance of victim and savior, oscillating between giddy euphoria and abject misery.

These “crazy people” almost always end up leaving you, as you may have found out the hard way, like I did. As time goes on, you’re willing to sacrifice more and more of your own identity to fix their emotional problems, to the point where you lose any ability to think or choose for yourself whatsoever. This destroys the other’s attraction for you, as people who have no self-worth are the epitome of unattractive. At this point, the only way to keep the crises flowing is by seeking out another person to complicate things.

These people are naturally drawn to love triangles especially with themselves being the point between two other people. Love triangles provide endless fuel for their need for drama. And it also provides endless fuel for the suppressed person’s need to “rescue” or “win over” the other person.

So, while these “psychos” are responsible for their own behavior, if you are consistently bringing them into your life by your emotional suppression, then it’s your own fault.