Love Life with Matthew Hussey - (Matt Monday): The Psychology of Why We Chase People Who Are WRONG for Us

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

What if the reason your relationships haven’t worked isn’t about who you’ve been with, but about what’s been missing? In this episode with journalist and author Liz Moody, we explore why finding someone who truly understands you is far more important than a checklist of traits.We also talk about why we’re drawn to the wrong people, and how to break free from those patterns. If you’ve ever felt stuck in love or wondered why you keep ending up in the same painful cycles, this is the episode for you.---►► Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code LOVELIFE and get 60% off annual plans: incogni.com/lovelife►► Limited-time bonus: Get 90 days of free Love Life Coaching when you purchase an in-person or virtual Retreat ticket before midnight Pacific time on September 30: RetreatAccess.com►► Talk to Matthew AI anytime for coaching, strategies, and support. Try it for free at: AskMH.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the things that I love about your work is that you really talk about the dynamics of a couple together. So you're not supposed to be looking for check, check, check, check, this in a person, this in a person, this and a person. So when you're saying, oh, my ex is this or if they were this in five years, really it's about how are you two interacting together in the relationship. And that's a much more tricky dynamic to say what would happen now or what will happen in the future. I don't think people realize when they are obsessing over someone who doesn't want them or doesn't work with them, isn't in the same place, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think people realize just how important it is to have someone who knows how to handle you, who you know how to handle, and how much of a great relationship exists because of that. you can have someone who is you know struggles to trust because of everything they've been through in their life and they may come across someone who hasn't got the patience for someone who is struggling to trust

they just it's not on their radar they don't get it they don't understand it they don't have the empathy for it they don't have the generosity of spirit to make space for the fact that you need a little more sensitivity around certain things, that doesn't make that person a bad person, but it does make them wrong for you. And yet we focus on, well, they have this, they have this, they're my dream person, I'm so physically attracted to them, but we should be looking for compatibility in these things that we really need compatibility in. Yeah, someone who gets us, someone who sees us.

How do we know what those things are? The things that really matter for us in a relationship. A really good question you can ask. There's two of my favorite, favorite chapters in this book are one that's called Never Satisfied and the one straight after it is called How to Rewire Your Brain. And the Never Satisfied chapter is all about why is we have struggled so much to find love and to be happy. Because we can find, you know, a lot of people's crazy kind of like,

painful cycle is going from somewhat exciting people who make them miserable to people who feel safe who make them doubt whether the word the right person and that is they oscillate between those two things over and over again they're either safe and bored or they're excited and miserable and suffering with someone so i talk about that but then i go on to talk about well look in order to find a healthier kind of love, we have to rewire ourselves because a lot of us have been chasing the wrong things our whole life. If you're someone who listens to this podcast, chances are confidence is something that you really want to work on. You're probably also working on your relationship with yourself. You probably also have emotional patterns that you want to improve on, like over-obsessing,

over-analyzing, overthinking, anxiety, self-doubt. These are all things that I work on for two days with people in my retreat, which is happening in October on the 18th and 19th. It's the only time it's happening this year. I don't want you to miss it because if you miss it, you'll have to wait a whole other year to come to this event. And if you're listening to this going, I can't travel to be with you in Miami for this event, Matthew, you don't have to. I have created a virtual ticket that means you can do it from wherever you are in the world

and I'll even give you access to two weeks of the recordings so that if you can't watch it on the actual weekend itself, you still have two. weeks to digest everything we do on that weekend. It is the most powerful thing I do. Not nearly enough of you have experienced it. And I wanted to make it so that every single one of you could experience the best program I have. Tickets are available at retreat access.com. And if you get your virtual ticket or an in-person ticket, either way, before September the 30th, I'm also throwing in 90 days of my love life coaching program completely free. That means after the retreat is done, you'll still have me as your coach every month. It means you'll have my entire

roadmap for finding love and it means you'll have unlimited access to Matthew AI, which is like having me in your pocket to ask a question any time you need over those 90 days. Go to retreat access dot com, grab your ticket and I will see you on October the 18th. The way that our nervous system has gotten wired up, our models for love, the way we react to what we think is attractive and what's not that got wired at a point in our life where we were not making conscious decisions it just happened and then we pay the price for that in our adult lives and we we feel broken and we feel like there's something wrong with us and we feel crazy but we're not crazy we're not broken it's just that we've developed some bad instincts and our bodies are reacting to the wrong things

through no fault of our own now if all of that happens unconsciously The way out is consciousness and intentionality. And in the how to rewire your brain chapter, the first thing I say is you don't have to believe you can change or that you can find something different. You just have to make change necessary because you have to at least know that you can never do that again. That thing that crushed you,

that thing that hurt you so badly, that kind of relationship with that kind of, of person. You just have to know for sure that you can never do that again. And when you come to that conclusion that was a special kind of hell you can never go back to, you don't need confidence. People like, if you were more confident, you would change. Actually, if you're in enough pain, you'll change. It has nothing to do with confidence in that moment. You just think I never can go back to that. So that's the first step is make change necessary. But the second step I talk about is so if change is necessary then we have to ask ourselves to what was the thing i'm going for next

time that's different to what i went for last time and a really good question to ask yourself as you start that process is this what was missing last time that by missing that thing i was utterly miserable it was a kind of hell what was the thing that was missing and by the way that doesn't just mean in a relationship that you couldn't wait to get out of i'm talking about the relationships that you desperately held on to the ones that you were white knuckling where you thought i can't afford to lose this person where you didn't realize how deeply unhappy you were because you were so busy trying to still secure this person and when all of your bandwidth is taken up by trying to hold on to someone you're not even thinking about how unhappy you are

everyone else in your life is they all can see it they can see how miserable you are how you're anxious all the time how you're not yourself anymore they can see that but all we can see is I cannot lose this person well when you look back to that relationship what were you missing was it loyalty was it a true teammate was it someone who considered you in their decisions, someone who paid attention to your feelings, someone who met your needs, someone who gave you empathy, someone who truly accepted you for who you were and made you feel comfortable to truly be the most vulnerable version of yourself versus having to constantly live up to some idea of something you thought would impress them all the time. What were you

missing? And when you realize, it's a very, very powerful realization when you can look back on a certain relationship with someone that you thought you would die if you lost and realize even though I thought I would die if I lost this person, there was something I was missing in it that made it impossible for me to be happy while I had them. Guys, have you ever Googled yourself and been shocked at what you find? Your name, your address, your phone number, even your relatives now? just sitting there on random websites for anyone to see. It's unsettling to say the least,

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And when you know what that crucial ingredient is, that has to be the new price of entry for any relationship you have ever again because you realize that no relationship can have any value for you no matter how shiny someone is no matter how attractive they are no matter how impressive they are no relationship can have any value to you if that quality or trait is not present well it's such an important point that we need to be looking for the person again that can handle those parts of ourselves but we tend to because of the way our brains work look for the person who triggers all of those parts of ourselves because we gravitate towards what is familiar what it you know that doesn't that intuitively that can we can

struggle to make sense of that why would I keep going towards what it is I say hurts me or what I don't want and that whole when I talk about that chapter never satisfied the whole point of that chapter is to be a pressure valve for people in helping them understand why is it that we keep being drawn to these things that hurt us? And I use the analogy of a dolphin in captivity. You know, a dolphin that's grown up in the tank who's been fed fish by humans and taught that in order to get a fish, you have to do backflips and you have to jump through hoops, you have to do all of these fancy things.

if that dolphin was suddenly released into the open ocean and that dolphin now didn't know how to find food thought that jumping through hoops or doing backflips would help and started swimming up to boats with humans on that by the way could be fatal we wouldn't say that that dolphin had a self-worth problem we would say no the dolphin is just doing what it knows it associates humans with food so swims out to humans it thinks that you have to do these tricks in order to get fed so keeps doing those tricks

it's just what we know and i think that that is a real route to compassion for ourselves because we realize that we have we continue to recreate this world for ourselves because A, it's what we know, and B, it's what we've come to believe that we are worth on some level, because if I was worth more than this, surely I would have gotten it already. But this feels like it's my level, because that's, you know, that's what I've always gotten. And it takes curiosity, an interesting mix of kind of curiosity and a little bravery to, start to explore other ways of being, that could get us a different result. Because right now, our brain, you have to think about it like this, our brain doesn't know a different result is

possible. We may even see that a different result is possible for other people, but for ourselves, we go, that's not my life. That's not me. It's not possible for me. And we have to start to teach our brain a different lesson that other things are possible. And then you have to say, How do you teach yourself that something else is possible? I'm not a, I don't, I find advice that just says, just believe, incredibly unhelpful. Because I don't know what special power other people have to just believe things. I don't have it. If I've never done something before, just believing I can does not come naturally to me.

What helps me is having reference points for a new belief. How do I create new reference points? I have to deviate from my normal programming and do something I wouldn't normally do. I had a client of mine who was dating a guy. By all accounts, it was going very well. Even she said, like, I couldn't fault the guy. It was great. And then one day, early in our dating, he had a gathering with his friends on a Saturday and he didn't invite me.

And she said, it really hurt me. and it for her from everything she told me before that it was very clear it like activated a core abandonment wound for her and she almost dismissed him altogether but then she got so like angry and hurt that during the day when he was with his friends she sent him a message and said why didn't you invite me and he said oh my god I'm so sorry I these are some of my close friends I haven't seen in a while. I was just really excited to see them. Can I call you tonight? And she said, don't bother. Now, obviously she was just hurting and scared. And so she pushed him away. And then four days later, when he still hadn't called, it just validated her idea that

everyone would eventually abandon her. She was running the same script she had been running her whole life. One that expected to be abandoned because of what she'd been through in her life. And in expectation of being abandoned, one that pushed someone away before they could do the kind of damage, she was afraid that they were going to do inevitably. And so she just kept recreating that same result in her life. And this was like a nice little example that I was able to point out to her and say, you know, this was you on script. Now, the truth is, we don't know why he didn't invite you. We don't know anything about that. And unfortunately, in that situation, we didn't get to learn because the response was just pushing him away. For her, one of the ways to start shifting is,

well, like I said, first necessity. Once you get to a place of enough pain where you go, this has not worked for me. I have to do something different. Well, then you say, okay, what do I do differently? It doesn't, it almost doesn't matter. Anything different. is better than running the same script over and over again. Because when you do something different and it gets a different result, it sends a message to our brain that, which to me is like inception, it's just to plants a new core belief, which is something different is possible. So that's like I wouldn't text him and ask him what's up now,

but I'm going to try it. Or I wouldn't express how I'm feeling. Or I would get really angry. I'm going to try walking myself back from that. literally any deviation from your typical reaction to the situation. Yeah, let me do something different. What if I just sent him a text and said, you know, I don't know why you didn't invite me, but I just feel hurt that you didn't. Or if instead of just saying, why didn't you invite me, you just said, I feel hurt that you didn't invite me. I guarantee you that would get a slightly

different reaction, maybe a very different reaction. Leave me a comment. Leave me a comment. Leave me a on this video before you go, I love hearing from you. And by the way, if you're watching this and you really want to find love and you see other people around you pairing off and finding what you've been looking for for a long time and you're feeling like, when's it going to be my turn? How might I be getting in my own way? Is there something I'm doing to sabotage my chances in this area? How can I finally find what I'm looking for? I am going to be helping people uncover their deeper patterns, understand their blind spots, and find what they're looking for this October at my retreat. If you haven't got a ticket yet, you can get your tickets at mhretreat

com. And don't worry if you can't make it to be there in person in Miami with us, there is a virtual ticket that means you can participate in this event and get the content from it from wherever you are in the world. Go check it out at mhretreat.com, grab your tickets, and I can't wait to see those of you who are coming.