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Bastian Gugger | Relationships, Patterns & Attachment

@bastiangugger

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For women who perform at a high level…
but lose themselves in love by shrinking or pulling away.
Find healthy, real & fulfilling love.
Free guide ↓

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You perform at a high level for a living.
But you were never meant to perform to be loved.

You train your body past what most people ever do.
You hold a stage. A camera. A room full of strangers.
You built something real from nothing.

But what works in those areas doesn’t seem to work in relationships.

In love all of that power and strength disappears just like that.

In fact the harder you try the more lost you become.

You read his mood before he even speaks, and quietly rearrange yourself around it.

You censor your thoughts, words and feelings just to keep the peace.

You shrink yourself to a size he won’t find threatening, and you call it being „easygoing“.

Then you lie awake at 2am, asking yourself how you ended up here. Again.

And bit by bit you abandon yourself, override by override.

And the worst is you are not oblivious to the pattern. You’ve done the work. You’ve tried to intellectualize your way out of it. To do it better next time...

So, what’s the solution to all this?

Well, there’s a part of you that once learned that love means disappearing to keep it.

Who you had to be to get love, or who not to be, to not lose it.

Those moments and the stories you built around them never completed.

So your body keeps running the same stories until you complete them.

The pattern doesn’t live in your mind. It lives in your body.

So all the mindset work, talk therapy and accumulating more insight, focuses on the wrong place.

The work is not more insight. It’s Completion.
The work is to feel what you have been running away from. What you have been suppressing. What you have been numbing.

There is no way around it and you know it.

Because the scrolling, the sex, the substances, understanding it better and all the clever tactics to not deal with the feelings beneath has not worked.

It just postponed the pain.

And it will keep repeating until you complete it.

Nothing about you is broken.
You’re just carrying something unfinished.

So, if this is for you, your body already knows.
You can feel the truth of this.

Don’t look away this time.

Stay close and follow, so when you’re ready to complete your pattern, you’ll know by @bastiangugger

Why you keep choosing the same kind of love.

Different face. Same patterns. Same ending.

You think you’re just with him. But there are three people in your relationship, and you’ve only ever counted two. The third one has been in the room the whole time. A parent. Your mother, or your father, depending on the moment. The first person who ever taught you what love feels like. Who you had to be to keep it. What you had to stop being so you wouldn’t lose it.

That first relationship was the blueprint. And if it never really finished, it doesn’t stay back there in your childhood. It walks into every relationship that comes after.

Here’s the part that’s hard to hear. You’re not choosing the wrong men. You’re choosing the man who feels familiar to what you first learned love was. To your body, familiar and safe are the same signal, even when familiar is the thing that keeps hurting you.

Because somewhere when you were small, something happened, and a younger you made it mean something. About you. About love. About what you have to do to keep someone close. You probably never said it out loud. You might not even know it’s there. But it has been running your relationships ever since.

There are eleven versions of how it plays out. The Good Girl who swallows what she feels to keep the peace. The Fixer who pours into a man who takes and takes. The Cool Girl who leaves first so she’s never the one left. Most women are a blend of two or three.

And you can name yours perfectly and still repeat it every time. Because it doesn’t live in your mind, where all the books and the therapy reach. It lives in your body, deeper than insight can go. That is why understanding it has never been enough to change it.

And when you want to see which version is running yours, comment CORE and I’ll send you the reflection that shows you what’s ru(i)nning your life. by @bastiangugger

My parents separated when I was two, and for a very long time I didn't think that had anything to do with how I love, or with why I let no one get close.

In 2024 I finally went back into all of that. It probably sounds scary, and I didn't do it alone.

And maybe you can't point to anything that big in your own life. It can be one small moment, one nobody else would even remember, and what you made it mean about yourself.

I built a free quiz for that, the Reflection. It's about what you do in love today, and at the end it names the pattern you're running and where you learned it. Comment CORE and I'll send it. by @bastiangugger

Why does the man who ends up hurting you feel like home from the very first day?

The pull you feel, like you've known him forever, is the part to watch.

That "he feels like home" feeling means he feels familiar. Like love felt at home when you were little. Maybe it felt like waiting for someone to notice you, or like never quite being enough. And your body still connects those feelings to love, even when it hurts.

Comment GUIDE and I'll send you my free guide on how to stop shrinking or pulling away in love. by @bastiangugger

You can give him everything, and it still never feels like enough. Maybe that's because the one you're really trying to reach isn't him.

Save it for the next time you're walking on eggshells again. by @bastiangugger

You can explain your pattern and where it comes from. Then something triggers you, and you still do the same thing with him.

Every new insight feels like progress. But if you're an overthinker, it gives you more words for your pattern and one more thing to think about. And the thinking keeps you away from the feeling underneath. Overthinking is underfeeling.

Follow me and let's get you out of it. by @bastiangugger

Anxiety is living in the future. Depression is living in the past.

And neither direction means something is wrong with you. Your mind goes forward to scan for danger, or back to re-solve what already happened, because in the house you grew up in, staying ready was safer than being surprised. It kept you ahead of the hurt, or at least it kept you from being blindsided twice. It just hasn't noticed the danger is over.

I spent years commuting between the two directions myself. It was never a flaw in me, and it isn't one in you.

Here's the part that matters for your love life though: the direction your mind runs under stress is the same direction it runs in a relationship. The late-night rehearsing of where it's going, the replaying of old conversations, that's a pattern, and it has a name. Take the quiz and find out which one is running yours. Comment CORE and I'll send it to you. by @bastiangugger

You make good calls at work all day. So why, with him, does it feel like you're not even the one deciding?

That's because the way you handle work, you picked up as an adult. The way you do love, you picked up much earlier, as a little girl at home. And most of the time that little girl reacts before the grown woman in you even gets a say.

So next time you go quiet with him, stop and ask yourself: is this the grown woman in me deciding right now, or the little girl trying to protect me? by @bastiangugger

You find someone new, and for a few months it really is new. Then you catch yourself scanning his face the way you scanned the last one's.

I know that loop from the inside, because it once followed me into a dream. Living in Bali was my dream for years, and when I finally made it real, it was everything I hoped for. And a few months in, my old patterns were running again, this time in paradise.

You take yourself everywhere you go. External change, even a dream come true, doesn't finish the unfinished pattern, and the place was never the problem.

Completing that pattern is what lets the new life, and the new man, actually stay new.

Comment GUIDE and I'll send you the guide.

#corepattern #relationshippatterns #breakuprecovery #emotionalpatterns by @bastiangugger

When he goes quiet at dinner, you feel it. The reaching. The performing. The trying to bring him back. That reflex is older than every relationship you've ever had. In 1975, mothers sat across from their babies and were asked to do one simple thing. Play normally. Then, on cue, go still. Within seconds, the babies noticed. They smiled harder, they pointed, they reached, they used every trick they had to bring their mother back. And when none of it worked, they fell apart. Now, imagine a childhood where the still face was a regular guest. Your body ran that experiment a thousand times before you could talk. by @bastiangugger

Your head knows you're better off without him, and your heart still hasn't caught up. Missing the texts, the evenings and the life around him is very human. You can feel all of it without going back to him.

If a friend of yours is going through a breakup right now, send this to her. by @bastiangugger

You can get the apology, the explanation, the ending scene with tears in it, and still scan the next person for signs of the same wound. Closure and completion are two different things, and only one of them ends the pattern.

I wrote a guide on why your pattern survives everything you've learned about it, and what actually ends it. Comment GUIDE and I'll send it to you.

#closure #completion #relationshippatterns by @bastiangugger