Love and belonging are one of our core emotional needs, right along our need for physical safety and security. A child's brain develops in a loving, nurturing relationship with her parents or care-takers. Relationships are key for our survival and for our physical and psychological health.

Relationships are also where we suffer most if we aren't getting the love and affection we long for. In intimate relationships we are the most vulnerable because we open ourselves towards another person and expect them to meet our emotional needs. We expect our partner to make us feel loved, appreciated, valued, respected…

It's fine to expect to be loved and valued by our partner, but if we don't feel loved and valued without a partner, that's when the problem begins. When we see our partner as the sole provider of our emotional needs, we start believing that without him/her, we won't survive, or that life has no meaning, or that we're doomed to misery and loneliness forever…

If we enter the relationship with unmet core emotional needs, we're likely to be disappointed and heart-broken. We then might go on to another relationship, hoping that things would be better with someone else. But often we realize that a similar dynamic is repeating, and we're again experiencing frustration and lack of fulfillment.

For example, if we feel unloved and are craving love, we may seek a partner who will adore us and put us on a pedestal, and dedicate their whole life to us, so that we would finally feel loved and appreciated. When it turns out that our partner has other interests beside us and doesn't want his life to revolve around us all the time, we'll feel abandoned and unloved, and we may seek another partner who would be more "dedicated" to us.

A frequent match is e.g. a woman who is very emotionally insecure and needs a lot of attention and reassurance from the partner that he loves her, and a partner who is actually repelled by her constant need for closeness and intimacy. The woman is clingy and practically begging for love and attention, is jealous of her partner's buddies and wants to spend all the time with him. She is controlling, perhaps even paranoid about where and with whom he spends his time. She might be even going through his texts secretly, looking for signs of potential unfaithfulness.

The man might be the type who very much likes his freedom and often goes out with his buddies for a drink, or for sports. He is annoyed by her clinginess and starts distancing himself from her. He's going for drinks with his buddies even more often, he's ignoring her calls and messages, avoiding spending time with her.

This is a typical dynamic between an anxiously attached woman and an avoidantly attached man. The more she wants closeness, the more he withdraws and escapes. The situation can also be reverse – that the man is clingy and the woman avoidant.

Another frequent dynamic is when we're attracted to problematic people whom we try to "save". We may be attracted to sad, depressed people, or to someone who uses drugs or alcohol. We're hoping that our love will make them change and then "we'll live happily ever after".

The reason we do that is that we had an emotionally unavailable parent, e.g. a parent who was sad and depressed a lot, whose love we very much craved, but we were unable to change them. Our love wasn’t enough to make them happy. We tried everything, we became the "perfect" child, and yet, they still remained sad and depressed. In our adulthood, we'll be attracted to similarly unavailable, difficult partners, with lots of personal problems. We'll try to help them heal, so that eventually they'd give us the love we crave. This never ends well unless the partner is willing to work on healing their own wounds. Otherwise we'll exhaust ourselves in trying to save someone who ultimately doesn't want to be saved.

Until we heal our core emotional wounds, we'll be bound to repeating the same pattern of longing and hoping, then experiencing bliss for a short while when we find a new partner, and then being disappointed again.

Our childhood experience has a profound effect on our relationships. We're often attracted to people who remind us of our parents, because we want to receive from our partner the love and attention we haven't received from our parents.

When someone is repeatedly attracted to people who don't treat them well, while they feel "no chemistry" with kind and caring people – it's almost always because the chemistry-provoking people remind them of their parents. That's where they subconsciously recognize a similar wound and a similar pattern of rejection, and they start hoping that this time it would be different. This time the "parent" (i.e. the partner) would give them the love and attention they deserve. It all happens on the subconscious level, without them being aware of it.

The relationship with our parents can affect all aspects of our lives. It affects our ability to love ourselves, our self-esteem and self-confidence, our ability to express our needs, set healthy boundaries, stand up for ourselves, speak our truth, handle stress etc. It affects not only our romantic but also our professional relationships, as well as our career success.

Let's imagine a situation where a young professional has a dream to work abroad and gain international experience, since it would give a tremendous boost to his career. He's diligently sending job applications, and after months of rejections, he's finally accepted at a well-known company, and offered a nice salary. But in the last moment, he changes his mind and refuses the offer, fearing that he would feel lonely in a foreign country.

What is behind his indecision and self-sabotage? It's conflicting desires. On one hand he would like to work abroad, gain a new experience and break free from his old life in which he wasn't happy. But on the other hand, stepping out of his comfort zone triggers his insecurities and especially his fear of separating from his family.

Namely, he is very attached to his mother. He feels an obligation to be there for her, since she's always been a little sad and depressed, ever since he was a child, and he used to comfort her. He feels responsible for her and cannot leave, regardless of how much he would want to and how good it would do for his career. His sense of obligation and attachment - at the expense of his own happiness - is what keeps him stuck, both in his personal life and his career.

The above is an example of how our past can affect our present. At Power & Purpose Coaching, we go to the root of the problem and explore the childhood dynamic that might have contributed to the client's current problems. That's the only way to transform the existing, unhealthy patterns and free ourselves from the baggage that holds us back – both in our private and our professional lives.