Self-Sabotage in Relationships: When the Same Pattern Keeps Repeating

Self-sabotage in a relationship is one of the most painful mechanisms there is, because it destroys the very thing you want most.

You want this relationship, and something inside you works against it: you provoke, you pull away, you find the one flaw too many.

In my practice, I regularly see people who watch the same scenario play out again, relationship after relationship, without understanding why.

When it is not self-sabotage

I am putting this section first, because it matters more than everything else.

Not everything that goes wrong in a relationship comes from you. If you are walking on eggshells, if you are afraid of how your partner will react, if you are gradually cutting yourself off from the people close to you, if your phone, your spending or your movements are being monitored, if you are put down, insulted, or made to doubt what you saw and heard, that is not self-sabotage. And it is not your fault.

Magnetic healing is part of a wellbeing approach that complements medicine. It never replaces medical advice, treatment or follow-up, nor psychological or legal support.

Where self-sabotage in relationships comes from

When it really is self-sabotage, the source almost always predates the relationship.

Fear of abandonment pushes you to leave before you are left, or to test the other person until they break. Fear of not being good enough pushes you to make yourself unbearable, so that the rejection comes from you rather than from them. The belief that you do not deserve to be loved turns every sign of affection into a misunderstanding.

Then there is what you saw as a child. A way of relating to others is learned before it is chosen, and we often reproduce what we observed, including what we wanted to avoid at all costs.

That is why willpower is not enough. These mechanisms kick in before you have time to think, often at the precise moment the relationship becomes serious.

The most common behaviours

• Starting an argument just after a moment of closeness or happiness
• Looking for a deal-breaking flaw in the other person, and ending up finding one
• Making yourself unavailable, replying less, pulling away for no clear reason
• Keeping everything to yourself, then blaming the other person for not understanding
• Expecting a perfection that does not exist, as a reason to leave
• Staying in a relationship that is not right for you, out of fear of the void

The most telling sign is none of these behaviours on its own. It is the repetition: the same scenario, with different people.

What I support, and what belongs elsewhere

I do not do couples therapy, and I am neither a psychologist nor a marriage counsellor. If the patterns are old and heavy, psychotherapy is what helps most lastingly, and I say so to everyone I see for this reason.

What I support is what weighs underneath these patterns: fears that have been in place for a long time, the tension that rises as soon as the relationship becomes real, what you carry from your family history without having chosen it.

I do not promise anyone they will regain the ability to commit. What people tell me is rather that they react less violently, with a little distance at the moment when everything usually falls apart.

If you recognise yourself more broadly in the way you block yourself, you can read my article on self-bewitchment, and discover everything I help with.

What you can do starting today

• Write down the story of your last three relationships. How they began, when things tipped over, who did what. The pattern often jumps out on paper.
• Spot the tipping point. For many people, it is always the same one: moving in together, meeting the families, the first I love you.
• Tell the other person. One sentence is enough: when things get serious, I tend to run away, and I know it. Naming it already defuses part of the mechanism.
• Do not decide anything in moments of panic. Wait forty-eight hours before any decision to break up taken in the grip of anxiety.
• Consider psychological support. On this specific subject, it is what gives the most solid results over time.

Coming when you feel ready

I am not going to fix your relationships, and nobody will do it for you. I open a space where you can set down what makes you run, and look at what keeps repeating without being judged.

You will come when you feel ready.

Lionel Roubine · Magnetic Healer · Burn Healer (“coupeur de feu”)

For 27 years, I have been supporting people who are suffering, at my practice in Le Perreux-sur-Marne and remotely in 26 countries.

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