Why Do I Push Away the People Who Treat Me Well?

Self-Sabotaging Relationships

Written by the Clinical Team at Empowered Therapy Experienced therapists with a wealth of knowledge and skills to help you address your concerns and achieve your therapy goals. Meet our team →

Updated: 08/18/26

Pushing away people who treat you well often comes from an attachment style shaped early in life, one that learned to associate closeness with unpredictability or loss. When someone offers consistent, healthy love, it can feel unfamiliar or even suspicious, prompting behaviors that create distance. Recognizing this pattern is the first step toward learning to tolerate and eventually welcome the kind of relationship you actually want.

Key Takeaways

  • Self-sabotage in relationships is almost always rooted in attachment patterns learned early in life, not in a lack of desire for connection.
  • Healthy love can feel threatening or uncomfortable when the nervous system’s model of closeness was built around unpredictability, criticism, or loss.
  • The specific behaviors that create distance, picking fights, withdrawing, finding flaws, are the nervous system’s attempt to regulate the anxiety that closeness produces.
  • Attachment patterns are not fixed. They update through sustained relational experience and therapeutic work, which means this pattern can change.

Table of Contents

Is pushing people away a sign of an attachment disorder? 

It is more likely a sign of an insecure attachment style than a disorder, and the distinction matters.

Attachment theory describes the relational templates formed in early caregiving relationships that shape how people approach closeness, dependence, and emotional vulnerability in adult relationships. Secure attachment allows for closeness without excessive anxiety. Anxious attachment involves hypervigilance about relational threat. Avoidant attachment involves discomfort with closeness and a strong preference for self-sufficiency. Fearful-avoidant attachment, sometimes called disorganized, involves both a desire for closeness and a deep fear of it.

Pushing away people who are good to you is most commonly associated with avoidant or fearful-avoidant attachment. Neither is a disorder in the clinical sense. They are patterns, often formed for very understandable reasons in response to early relational environments, that produce characteristic behaviors in adult relationships.

Breeze Wellbeing’s overview of why people push others away describes how attachment patterns from childhood continue to shape adult relational behavior, often beneath the level of conscious awareness, producing a cycle where the person wants connection and behaves in ways that undermine it.

Why does healthy love sometimes feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar? 

Because the nervous system compares current experience to the template of what love felt like when it was being formed, and when the current experience does not match that template, it registers as unfamiliar or suspicious rather than welcome.

If love in early life felt inconsistent, someone who was warm sometimes and critical or unavailable at others, then consistent warmth does not feel like love. It feels like something different, possibly something threatening, because the nervous system does not know what to do with it. The absence of the familiar tension or unpredictability may register not as safety but as something being wrong, like the other shoe is about to drop.

If love feels like a burden, something you had to earn through performance or compliance, then being loved without having to earn it may produce confusion, guilt, or the urgent sense that it cannot be real or cannot last. The impulse to test it, to push until the other person proves that yes, they will eventually leave or criticize or withdraw, is the nervous system seeking confirmation of what it already believes to be true.

This is not irrational. It is a nervous system working with the map it was given. The map is inaccurate for the current territory, but that inaccuracy is not visible from inside it.

How is self-sabotage in relationships connected to childhood experiences? 

Very directly, and understanding that connection tends to reduce the shame that accompanies the pattern.

The relational behaviors that look like self-sabotage in adult relationships, picking fights when things are going well, withdrawing when closeness increases, finding reasons why the partner is not the right person, are almost always adaptive responses that were learned in an earlier relational context. They were not random. They served a function.

In a childhood environment where emotional closeness reliably preceded hurt, the child’s nervous system learned to create distance before the hurt could happen. In an environment where expressing needs or vulnerability led to rejection or dismissal, the child learned to preempt rejection by withdrawing before being pushed away. In an environment where love was inconsistent, testing the partner’s reliability was a reasonable way to assess whether they would stay.

These responses are now running in an adult relationship where the conditions are different. The partner is not the parent. The current relationship does not have the same dynamics. But the nervous system does not update the map automatically. It continues to apply the old template until it has enough sustained evidence, over time, in the actual relationship, that a different response is warranted.

Can someone with an avoidant attachment style learn to accept love? 

Yes, and this is one of the most well-supported findings in attachment research.

Attachment patterns are not fixed for life. They are the output of relational experience, which means they update through relational experience. The person who has spent decades operating from an avoidant attachment style, managing closeness by maintaining distance, can develop a more secure attachment through sustained relationships that provide evidence against the original template.

This does not happen quickly or automatically. It requires the experience of closeness that does not lead to the expected outcome, repeated enough times and with enough safety that the nervous system begins to update its predictions. A partner who stays through the testing, who responds with consistency and warmth when the avoidant partner creates distance, is providing exactly the kind of data that the nervous system needs.

Therapy accelerates this process by making the pattern visible, examining its origins, and developing tools for tolerating the anxiety that closeness produces without acting on it. Empowered Therapy’s couples counseling services work with both partners in this dynamic, helping the avoidant partner develop tolerance for closeness and the other partner understand the pattern well enough to respond in ways that support rather than worsen it.

What are common self-sabotaging behaviors in relationships? 

The behaviors vary but tend to share the function of creating distance or testing the relationship in ways that risk its stability.

Picking fights over small things when the relationship is going well, or when a moment of particular closeness has just occurred. Withdrawing emotionally or physically after a vulnerable or intimate experience. Finding reasons to criticize or devalue the partner, particularly when the partner has just demonstrated care or commitment. Testing the partner’s interest by becoming less available or less engaged and waiting to see how they respond. Avoiding conversations that would deepen the relationship, about the future, about feelings, about commitment.

There is also a subtler version: the general sense of being more comfortable in the anxious early stages of a relationship, when the outcome is uncertain, than in the settled stage, when things are good. If pursuit feels more natural than security, that is worth paying attention to.

Empowered Therapy’s resource on emotional labor in relationships explores the relational dynamics that often accompany these patterns, including how each partner’s attachment style shapes the distribution of emotional work in the relationship.

If you notice yourself pulling away from people who are good to you, Empowered Therapy can help you understand the pattern and change it. Schedule a free consultation to get started.

Contact Empowered Therapy →

Frequently Asked Questions

What causes someone to self-sabotage a good relationship?

Almost always an attachment pattern formed in early relational experiences where closeness was associated with unpredictability, hurt, or loss. The self-sabotaging behaviors are the nervous system’s attempt to manage the anxiety that genuine closeness produces, to create distance before closeness can lead to the expected pain. The cause is not a desire to ruin the relationship. It is a protective response that is running from an outdated map.

Is this connected to a specific attachment style like avoidant or fearful-avoidant?

 Yes. Pushing away people who are good to you is most closely associated with avoidant and fearful-avoidant attachment. Avoidant attachment involves a general discomfort with closeness and a strong preference for self-sufficiency. Fearful-avoidant attachment involves both a desire for closeness and a significant fear of it, which produces the push-pull pattern where the person simultaneously wants and creates distance from connection.

How do I stop myself from pushing my partner away when things are going well?

Start by noticing the pattern in real time rather than only in retrospect: when does the impulse to create distance arise, and what just happened right before it? This awareness creates a window between the trigger and the automatic response. In that window, the task is to tolerate the anxiety that closeness is producing without acting on it. This is difficult and gets easier with practice. A therapist can help you identify the specific triggers and build the capacity to respond differently.

Can attachment patterns really change in adulthood?

 Yes. Attachment patterns update through relational experience, which means sustained relationships that provide consistent evidence against the original template produce genuine change in the attachment system. Therapy supports this by making the pattern visible, addressing the underlying beliefs, and developing tools for tolerating closeness anxiety. The change is gradual and real.

About Empowered Therapy

Empowered Therapy helps individuals and couples in Chicago and throughout Illinois understand the attachment patterns behind self-sabotage, so healthy relationships stop feeling like a threat. Our therapists work with clients to build the security needed to accept and sustain the love they want.