Are you attracted to him or his potential?

Are you attracted to him, or is it his potential that has your heart beating faster?

You are attached to his potential, not who he is because to distract yourself from a belief of being unworthy of them, you disconnected from your wants , needs and desires. So you ignore not having your needs met and as your inner child holds on to the fantasy of who he could be, you accept breadcrumbs as love.

I often coach how we live mostly in an imaginal world, a concept that couldn't be truer than when we attach to somebody's potential instead of who they are in reality.

When we find ourselves fantasising about someone's potential we are usually re-living a childhood healing fantasy about how if we were only good enough, our parents would love us the way we needed to be loved.

We are subconsciously choosing partners to correct those early relationship patterns. That childhood fantasy is very much alive in our adult relationships until we heal it because not having your needs met is traumatic.

As a child, you had a host of needs that could only be met through your parents. Those needs may have been too much for the resources your caregivers had at the time. However, at your young age, you did not have the cognitive resources to understand this, and perceived it as being unworthy of having them met.

This is a painful belief to have, so you learned to distract yourself from it and your needs and through fantasies of what could be, escaping into your head away from the pain in your heart.

In our adult relationships, we project those fantasies onto the partners we meet. We are so disconnected from our desires and needs, that we don't recognise when they're not being met. After all, that's our normal so we accept breadcrumbs for love and are blind to red flags.

To avoid feeling the pain of not having our needs met (again!), we distract ourselves with the fantasy of our partner's potential. Instead of healing, we invest our energy into trying to change them so that this time around, the fantasy is fulfilled. The relationship keeps scraping the scab of an old wound we don't want to feel, so we focus our vision on who we want them to be, ignoring who they are.

Falling in love with potential makes you vulnerable to abusive relationships because lost in your healing fantasy, you won't notice the abuse.

When you feel attached at light speed, check if it's your heart that's catching feelings and not your head.