How Somatic Therapy Influences Attraction and Shifts Unfulfilling Relational Patterns Rooted in Attachment Wounds

Key Points

• Somatic therapy does not teach you how to choose “better people.” It helps heal the relational wounds that taught your body what love was supposed to feel like.

• As your nervous system builds capacity, attraction changes naturally — not because you forced new standards, but because your body no longer needs intensity, distance, or longing to feel regulated, helping end unfulfilling relational patterns, not through control, shame, or mind tricks, but through embodiment.

Attraction Is Not a Choice—It’s a Nervous System Response

Attraction is often treated as a conscious decision. But, it’s not a decision of the mind.

If that were true, most people wouldn’t find themselves repeatedly pulled toward relationship dynamics (what Freud called a repetition compulsion) they’ve already named as painful, confusing, or unsatisfying.

Attraction is a somatic experience, a nervous system response shaped by early relational learning.

Somatically speaking, when we talk about attraction, we are not asking “Is this person good for me?” We are asking “What sensation comes alive in my body when I am with them?”

The body is not scanning for “healthy” or “toxic.” It’s scanning for familiarity. For resonance. For a frequency it already knows how to survive.

This is why insight alone often fails. My sophisticated patients can identify red flags, name attachment styles, understand trauma responses, and still feel the pull.

Because you are not attracted to the person. You are attracted to the sensation that that person stimulated within you.

The charge. The longing. The anticipation. The mix of anxiety and excitement.

The nervous system recognizes this immediately as, “Yes. I know this.”

And that knowing has a personal history. A history that the mind organizes with narratives, often fraught with ambivalences operating outside of conscious awareness.

Relational Wounds and the Body’s Survival Logic

Many unfulfilling relational patterns are not random or luck. They are adaptations shaped by early attachment experiences.

Many of the patterns we carry—being drawn to emotionally unavailable people, married people, people who cannot fully choose us, or staying with low-effort partners—look different on the surface. But, somatically, they often arise from the same imprint.

For some people, attraction pulls toward those who are unavailable, because there is intimacy with distance. Connection without full exposure. Longing without the risk of being fully seen and fully rejected or abandoned. If someone can’t fully choose you, your body never has to risk being completely chosen—and therefore completely hurt. The distance isn’t accidental. It’s protective.

For others, attraction organizes around becoming the emotional refuge. The one they confide in, who understands them, who helps regulate. This can feel intimate and powerful, especially if love was learned early as attunement, caretaking, and emotional availability. You get closeness without having to ask for your own needs to be met as is the case in codependent bonds.

And then there are some, especially women, who stay with low-effort partners who don’t initiate, lead or offer consistency. So they shrink their needs, explain themselves and continue to hope consistency will arrive.

Here, the nervous system is often saying, I will…

• lower my needs so I don’t lose connection.

• accept less so I don’t feel the grief of wanting more.

• stay loyal to what I know.

Different behaviors. Same survival logic.

This isn’t weakness or self-sabotage. It’s adaptation. It’s a nervous system shaped by early relational experiences, doing exactly what it learned to do to preserve attachment.

Why Advice Doesn’t Change Relational Patterns

We’ve all heard words like these from well meaning supporters:
“Raise your standards.”
“Just leave.”
“Love yourself more.”

These suggestions speak to the mind, not the body.

But, the nervous system does not respond to, or reorganize, through logic. It responds to what feels regulating, and it reorganizes through experience.

Somatic therapy focuses on sensation:

• What happens in your chest when someone follows through?

• What arises in your throat when there is nothing to chase?

• What does your body do when love is calm instead of charged?

Often, that is where the real work begins because for many people, safety is unfamiliar, and therefore a highly dysregulating experience.

For some bodies intensity, longing and familiar disappointment feels regulating.

And consistency? Safety? Being fully chosen? Those sensations can feel overwhelming, boring, or even threatening, because the system hasn’t built the capacity to hold them yet.

This is why advice rarely works.

It’s not self-sabotage. It’s about emotional capacity.

You don’t attract unavailable people because you’re broken. You attract them because your nervous system has not yet built the capacity to hold:

• consistency

• emotional availability

• reciprocity

• being fully chosen

• calm, steady love

How Somatic Therapy Heals Relational Wounds

Somatic therapy works because it doesn’t try to override the nervous system. It works with it.

Rather than asking, “why do I keep doing this?” we ask, “what did my body learn about connection, safety, and loss?”

Somatic work builds capacity by helping you stay present with sensation:

• when someone follows through

• when safety shows up

• when there’s nothing to chase

• when love is calm instead of charged

For many people, that is the most dysregulating experience of all:

Learning how to stay in your body when unfamiliar sensations arise—without abandoning yourself or reaching for old adaptations.

Capacity isn’t built through affirmations. It’s built through practiced embodied experience.

Shadow Desires and Shame-Free Awareness

Underneath many attraction patterns are shadow desires rarely spoken without shame:

The desires to be chosen, to feel special and important, to be “the one.”

This doesn’t make someone manipulative or immoral.

It makes them human—especially if they grew up feeling unseen, emotionally competing, or sensing that love was inconsistent or conditional.

Somatic therapy works because it doesn’t pathologize or shame these patterns.

Shame freezes the body. Awareness frees it.

Somatic therapy does not erase desires. It helps integrate them.

Shadow integration means understanding what the desire was protecting, so it doesn’t quietly write the narrative and run the show.

Because what is not integrated remains in the shadow and festers in the unconscious, out of awareness. It’s like toxic mold growing underneath the floor boards.

When we moralize attraction—labeling it “self-sabotage,” “bad choices,” or “lack of self-love”—we miss what is actually happening:

Your nervous system responding to what feels familiar and regulating.

Integrating shadow desires is the path to outgrowing patterns.

Changing Attraction by Building Capacity

As capacity grows, things shift. and attraction changes naturally.

Not because you forced better choices. But because your body no longer needs the old ones.

You can feel the pull without abandoning yourself to it.

Feel longing without acting from it.

Stay present with the sensation instead of outsourcing regulation to fantasy, intensity, or unavailable people.

Self-respect becomes embodied, not performative.

Manufactured confidence doesn’t change patterns. True transformational confidence emerges when your nervous system learns it is safe to be fully here, fully met, fully chosen.

No Bad Parts

There are parts of you that have been mislabeled as “too much,” “self-destructive,” or “dangerous.”

They are not your downfall. They are unintegrated power and desire that learned to survive quietly by contorting instead of claiming. Brilliance that learned to stay quiet in order to belong.

When you reject these parts you become smaller, not safer.

Somatic therapy doesn’t erase or change these. It helps you hold them without letting them write your stories.

And when that happens, what we are attracted to begins to shift.

Because the body no longer reaches for what it needed to survive.

Instead, it attracts what it can now sustain.

Somatic therapy invites you to listen instead of judge. To build capacity instead of control. To return—not to a perfected version of yourself—but to the part of you that no longer needs to chase what can’t stay.

Final Thoughts

• The real question is not who you are attracted to. Instead, inquire: What does your body reach for when it’s afraid—and what might it choose if it felt safe enough to stay?

• This work isn’t fast and it isn’t easy, but there is no way to circumvent it, and what your future self creates depends on your ability to build a tolerance to these sensations. How can you release or let go of what you don’t allow yourself to feel and become fully aware of?