If you find yourself repeatedly attracted to the same type of person despite previous heartbreaks, you’re not alone. According to Dr. Orion Taraban, a clinical psychologist featured on the Psychacks YouTube channel, we all carry unconscious relationship templates formed during childhood that powerfully shape our adult romantic choices. Understanding these templates and their connection to attachment styles can transform your dating life and help you break painful relationship patterns.
The Unconscious Relationship Template
Every person develops an internal blueprint for what relationships should look and feel like. Dr. Taraban explains in his Psychacks presentation that this relationship template forms through observing your primary caregivers during childhood. This observation process operates as a kind of instinct—it’s both unconscious and inevitable, meaning you couldn’t avoid creating this template even if you tried.
The template encompasses far more than conscious preferences. It includes expectations about emotional expression, conflict resolution, intimacy, communication patterns, and even the overall emotional tone of partnership. When you interact with potential partners, your unconscious mind constantly compares them against this template, generating emotional responses that guide your relationship choices.
The challenging aspect of relationship templates is their unconscious nature. Most people remain unaware of their templates for at least two decades after formation, meaning you spend your teens and twenties making romantic choices based on patterns you can’t even consciously identify. This explains why dating often feels confusing—you’re being guided by an invisible map drawn in childhood.
How Childhood Shapes Adult Attachment Styles
Attachment theory, developed by psychologist John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, provides the framework for understanding how childhood experiences create adult relationship patterns. Your attachment style represents the specific characteristics of your relationship template, particularly how you approach intimacy, handle relationship anxiety, and respond to partner needs.
Secure Attachment: The Foundation of Healthy Relationships
According to recent estimates discussed by Dr. Taraban, roughly half of people develop secure attachment, though this number appears to be declining. Secure attachment develops when children grow up in stable, loving, intact households where caregivers consistently meet their emotional and physical needs.
People with secure attachment observed healthy relationship dynamics throughout their formative years. They saw parents or caregivers who communicated effectively, resolved conflicts constructively, maintained appropriate boundaries, and demonstrated genuine affection. These early observations created relationship templates oriented toward stability, mutual support, and emotional safety.
As adults, securely attached individuals naturally expect relationships to provide comfort, trust, and reliability. They communicate needs directly, handle conflict without excessive drama, and maintain independence while also valuing intimacy. For these fortunate individuals, their unconscious relationship template points toward partners capable of healthy, satisfying long-term relationships.
Dr. Taraban notes on Psychacks that securely attached people can be charmingly naive about relationship dysfunction. They literally cannot conceive of romantic partnerships operating differently than the healthy patterns they internalized. When they encounter dysfunction, they’re often genuinely confused because it contradicts everything their template tells them relationships should be.
Anxious Attachment: The Fear of Abandonment
Anxious attachment typically develops when childhood caregiving was inconsistent. Perhaps parents were sometimes loving and attentive but other times distant or preoccupied. This inconsistency teaches children that love and security are unreliable—available sometimes but withdrawn at other moments without clear reason.
Adults with anxious attachment carry relationship templates centered on uncertainty and fear of abandonment. They often feel intense attraction to partners who are emotionally unavailable or inconsistent because this pattern matches their childhood template. The hot-and-cold dynamic, while painful, feels familiar and therefore “right” at an unconscious level.
In relationships, anxiously attached individuals frequently seek reassurance, may become preoccupied with their partner’s feelings and behaviors, and often fear that their partner will leave. They might misinterpret normal relationship events as signs of impending abandonment. This attachment style can create self-fulfilling prophecies where excessive need for reassurance actually pushes partners away.
Avoidant Attachment: The Flight From Intimacy
Avoidant attachment forms when caregivers were emotionally distant, dismissive, or consistently unavailable. Children in these environments learn that expressing emotional needs leads nowhere or even results in rejection. They adapt by suppressing emotional needs and developing strong self-reliance.
Adults with avoidant attachment carry relationship templates that prioritize independence over intimacy. They’re often uncomfortable with emotional closeness, may dismiss feelings as unimportant, and tend to withdraw when relationships become too intense. They might feel suffocated by normal relationship expectations and prefer keeping partners at arm’s length.
Avoidantly attached people often unconsciously choose partners who want more closeness than they’re comfortable providing. This pattern allows them to maintain the emotional distance that matches their childhood template. They might sabotage relationships as intimacy deepens, or simply ghost partners when things get too serious.
Disorganized Attachment: The Broken Compass
Disorganized attachment, the most challenging pattern, typically results from childhood trauma, abuse, or severely chaotic caregiving environments. Dr. Taraban describes this as having a compass that’s inconsistently wrong—it provides no reliable guidance whatsoever.
People with disorganized attachment experienced caregivers as both sources of comfort and sources of fear. This creates impossible internal conflicts where the desire for closeness exists alongside terror of intimacy. Their relationship template contains contradictory patterns that make consistent relationship behavior nearly impossible.
As adults, these individuals might swing between anxious and avoidant behaviors, display explosive emotional reactions, or engage in relationship patterns that seem inexplicable even to themselves. Dating with disorganized attachment represents an extraordinarily difficult challenge requiring professional therapeutic intervention.
Why You Keep Choosing The Same Dysfunctional Partners
Perhaps the most painful aspect of relationship templates involves people with insecure attachment who consistently choose partners who hurt them. Dr. Taraban explains on his Psychacks channel that these individuals don’t lack relationship templates or pattern recognition systems—they simply have templates based on dysfunction rather than health.
When someone with insecure attachment feels intense chemistry with a potential partner, their unconscious mind isn’t signaling compatibility for healthy relationship. Instead, it’s recognizing patterns that match childhood dysfunction. The person who makes your heart race might unconsciously remind you of a parent’s emotional unavailability, anger issues, or manipulation tactics.
This creates a devastating pattern where the relationships that feel most exciting and “right” lead directly to pain. You might find yourself repeatedly attracted to partners who are emotionally unavailable, narcissistic, addicted, or abusive. Despite conscious determination to choose differently, you feel drawn to these familiar patterns because they match your unconscious template.
Dr. Taraban emphasizes that these relationships don’t fail—they function exactly as unconsciously designed. The relationship successfully recreates childhood dynamics, which from your unconscious mind’s evolutionary perspective, makes perfect sense. You exist as the successful outcome of your parents’ relationship, regardless of how dysfunctional it was. Your unconscious therefore assumes recreating similar patterns offers your best reproductive chances.
The Compass Metaphor: Using Your Template Wisely
Dr. Orion Taraban offers a powerful framework for working with relationship templates through his compass metaphor. Understanding where your compass points can transform how you navigate dating and relationship choices.
When Your Compass Points True
For securely attached individuals, strong attraction often indicates genuine compatibility. Their relationship template reflects healthy dynamics, so following their feelings frequently leads to satisfying partnerships. However, Dr. Taraban cautions that even secure people shouldn’t rely exclusively on chemistry when selecting long-term partners. The spark should be one consideration among many, including shared values, compatible goals, and complementary personalities.
When Your Compass Points Backward
Here’s Dr. Taraban’s crucial insight: a compass that consistently points in the wrong direction remains just as useful as an accurate compass. You simply need to recognize the pattern and move opposite to where it points. If you have anxious or avoidant attachment and consistently feel attracted to partners who hurt you, your intense chemistry isn’t random—it’s reliable in its wrongness.
This means you can use your feelings as a guide to where you shouldn’t go. When you meet someone and feel overwhelming chemistry, that feeling may be a warning sign. Conversely, when someone seems stable and kind but doesn’t trigger fireworks, they might be exactly who you need. By consciously correcting for your template’s inaccuracy, you can begin making healthier relationship choices.
This approach requires acknowledging that what feels “right” might actually be wrong, and what feels boring or “off” might be healthy. It demands conscious effort to override unconscious impulses, which goes against every romantic notion about following your heart. However, if your heart consistently leads you toward pain, following it guarantees more heartbreak.
When Your Compass Spins Randomly
People with disorganized attachment face the most difficult situation. Their compass doesn’t consistently point in any direction, making it useless for navigation. These individuals might need to completely disregard emotional responses to potential partners, at least initially, and instead rely on external criteria, friend recommendations, or professional guidance.
Dr. Taraban acknowledges this represents an incredibly difficult road. Making relationship decisions without access to gut feelings or emotional responses removes one of life’s greatest pleasures. However, for people with disorganized attachment, learning to make conscious, rational relationship choices may be the only path toward eventually developing healthier patterns.
Examining Your Parents’ Relationship: The Key Question
Dr. Taraban provides a simple but profound exercise for understanding your relationship template: critically examine your parents’ relationship and ask yourself, “Do I want the same thing?”
This question requires brutal honesty. Don’t focus on what you wish your parents’ relationship had been or moments of happiness amid general dysfunction. Look at the overall pattern. How did they communicate? How did they handle conflict? What was the emotional atmosphere of your home? Did they show affection? Did they support each other? Was there trust? Respect? Joy?
If your honest answer is “yes, I want what my parents had,” you likely have secure attachment. Your relationship template reflects healthy dynamics, and you can trust your feelings with appropriate caution. Your task involves finding partners who match your template and building on the healthy foundation your childhood provided.
If your answer is “no, I absolutely don’t want what my parents had,” you face a different challenge. Your relationship template was formed around dysfunction, and following your feelings will likely lead you toward recreating that dysfunction. You need to consciously identify the specific patterns you observed and work to recognize when potential partners display similar characteristics.
This examination might reveal painful truths. Perhaps you realized that the intensity you crave in relationships mirrors your parents’ volatile dynamic. Maybe the emotional distance that feels comfortable matches the disconnection you observed growing up. Understanding these patterns represents the first step toward changing them.
Healing Attachment Wounds and Transforming Templates
The empowering message from Dr. Taraban’s discussion on Psychacks is that attachment styles can change. Your relationship template isn’t permanently fixed—with awareness, effort, and often professional help, you can develop healthier patterns.
The Process of Attachment Healing
Healing insecure attachment typically requires several interconnected approaches. First, developing awareness of your specific patterns through therapy, self-reflection, or attachment style assessments. You cannot change patterns you don’t recognize.
Second, consciously choosing different types of partners. This means dating people who don’t trigger your usual intense chemistry. These relationships might feel strange initially—perhaps too calm, too stable, too predictable. Your unconscious mind will insist something is wrong because these partners don’t match your template. However, allowing relationships to develop slowly with inherently stable people can gradually rewire your expectations.
Third, working through childhood wounds with a qualified therapist. Attachment-focused therapy modalities like EMDR, psychodynamic therapy, or attachment-based therapy can help process early experiences and create new internal working models for relationships.
Fourth, practicing new relationship behaviors even when they feel uncomfortable. This might mean asking for needs to be met (if you’re avoidant), giving partners space without panicking (if you’re anxious), or staying present during intimacy (if you’re disorganized). These new behaviors feel wrong initially because they contradict your template, but consistent practice can update your unconscious expectations.
The Timeline for Change
Dr. Taraban notes that template awareness typically begins in a person’s thirties or forties—at least two decades after the template formed. This explains why many people experience better relationship outcomes in their thirties and beyond. They’ve had enough painful experiences to recognize patterns and develop conscious strategies for healthier choices.
However, change doesn’t require waiting for middle age. Younger people who actively engage in therapy, self-reflection, and conscious relationship work can accelerate this process significantly. The key involves willingness to examine uncomfortable truths about your patterns and commitment to choosing differently despite what feels natural.
As you heal, you’ll notice that your emotional responses begin shifting. People who once triggered intense chemistry might lose their appeal. Partners who seemed boring might become attractive. Your definition of exciting might transform from dramatic intensity to consistent reliability. These shifts indicate your template is updating to reflect healthier relationship possibilities.
Building Relationships Beyond The Template
While understanding and healing your attachment patterns is crucial, Dr. Taraban emphasizes that successful long-term relationships require more than just compatible templates. Shared values, complementary life goals, effective communication skills, mutual respect, and genuine friendship all contribute to relationship satisfaction.
Real affection, as Dr. Taraban notes, takes time to cultivate. The intense feelings of early attraction typically fade within months, replaced ideally by something deeper and more sustaining. This transformation from passionate intensity to comfortable intimacy requires patience, commitment, and realistic expectations about relationship development.
The modern dating landscape, with its emphasis on instant chemistry and swipe-based selection, often works against template healing and healthy relationship development. Dating apps encourage quick decisions based primarily on attraction and initial spark. This system particularly disadvantages people with insecure attachment who need time to develop trust before chemistry can emerge.
If you’re working to heal attachment wounds, consider giving relationships more time to develop than modern dating culture suggests. Meet people through shared activities, friend networks, or contexts that allow gradual familiarity. Allow attraction to build slowly rather than demanding immediate fireworks. Some of the best long-term partnerships begin with friendship that gradually deepens into romance.
Conclusion: Wisdom From Dr. Orion Taraban’s Psychacks
Your childhood relationship observations created an unconscious template that powerfully shapes your adult romantic choices. As Dr. Orion Taraban explains in his insightful presentation on the Psychacks YouTube channel, understanding your template through attachment theory provides the key to making better relationship decisions and ultimately finding lasting love.
Whether you have secure attachment with a reliable internal compass or insecure attachment requiring conscious correction, self-awareness represents your most valuable tool. By critically examining your parents’ relationship, tracking your own relationship patterns, and working to heal attachment wounds when necessary, you can transform your romantic life.
Remember that templates can change and attachment isn’t destiny. With awareness, effort, and often professional guidance, you can develop healthier relationship patterns regardless of your childhood experiences. The process requires patience and persistence, but the reward—genuinely satisfying, stable, loving partnership—makes every bit of effort worthwhile.
To explore these concepts further, check out Dr. Orion Taraban’s Psychacks channel on YouTube and his book “The Value of Others,” which provides comprehensive insights into relationship dynamics and practical strategies for navigating modern dating successfully.