If you are serious about finding lasting love, it’s a MUST that you learn to rewire your attraction patterns so that you notice and become more attracted to people who are actually good for you. We have the capacity to do this–and in this episode, you’ll learn how.

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Listen For

• 03:30 – What shapes your attraction?
• 06:08 – What are your attractions of inspiration and attractions of deprivation?
• 10:22 – How do you determine your North Star question?
• 11:58 – How do you tell the difference between your attractions of inspiration versus your attractions of deprivation?
• 19:01 – How do you make the commitment and live the shift?

 

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Watch the episode here

 

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How To Rewire Your Attractions To Find Soulmate Love

Are you at a point in your life where you are really serious about finding good, lasting, healthy love? If so, it is a must that you learn to rewire your attraction patterns so that you notice and become more attracted to people who are actually good for you. We have the capacity to do this. In this episode, you will learn how. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast.

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Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I am Ken Page. I am a psychotherapist, I’m the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating, the creator of the Deeper Dating® Intensive, and your host on this podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about how to rewire your attraction patterns, which is one of the most powerful ways to be able to find healthy love.

Before I get into that, I just want to say that in this episode and every episode, I am going to share with you the greatest tools and insights that I know to help you find real love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the same as the skills of intimacy and the skills of intimacy are the greatest skills of all for a meaningful and rich life.

If you would like to learn more about this approach to finding and keeping love, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and there you will find a wealth of resources. If you sign up for my mailing list, you will get a free eBook with five key points about love and intimacy that have gone viral on Psychology Today and elsewhere. Let me jump in.

The way that you feel about yourself determines who you're attracted to and who you attract. Share on X

There is this cultural fixation on becoming more attractive, acting more attractive as the key to finding love. It is a good thing to get more attractive. It is an act of self-love. Knowing ways that you might be doing things that turn people off or sabotage connectedness is absolutely a great thing. There is a fixation, a cultural fixation on this exterior issue, how we present, that is understandable, but profoundly misguided.

The deeper truth for anybody who wants to find real love is this, to recognize your attraction patterns and to rewire them so that you can find and keep healthy love. In this episode, I am going to teach you the steps that I have used in my life, and I have taught to millions of people and led thousands of people in in my courses.

Actually, if you are interested in this work, you could just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and get an entire course, a five-session mini course in how to rewire your attraction patterns. I am going to be talking about each of these steps and giving you the essence of them and the things that you can do to make these ideas come alive for you in your relationship life in this episode. Starting out at the beginning, I think a really key thing, which I think of as the deeper physics of dating, is this. It is the way that you feel about yourself determines who you’re attracted to and who you attract.

The Core Principle: Your Self-Worth Shapes Your Attraction

Just like the atomic structure of every atom determines which other atoms it is going to want to bond with, we are the same. The shape of our being, the contour of our being, determines who we are going to be attracted to and who we are going to attract. What does that mean? I think it means this, that the more you honor who you are, and that does not mean just this stereotypical “I am going to stand up for myself.”

What it means is a treasuring of your own signals inside yourself, the things that tell you, “This does not feel right,” “This feels really right,” “My heart can rest in this interaction. I feel cold in this interaction. I feel like I have to keep proving myself in this interaction.” The recognizing of that and the honoring of what I call our Core Gifts changes everything. This is the formula that is breathtaking and something I truly believe is true after 40 years of doing, teaching, and living this work.

The degree to which you honor, dignify, and champion your most vulnerable, authentic, passionate self, the true you, as imperfect as it may feel, or as different or strange as it may feel, the more you dignify that, the more you will become sexually and romantically attracted to people who can love you for who you are.

Attractions Of Deprivation Vs. Inspiration

The more you think your authentic self is inadequate and you have to replace it with a different self, to that degree you will be sexually and romantically attracted to people who cannot love you for who you are. We can rewire our attraction patterns. I have done that in my life. I have helped so many clients to do that as well. I am going to teach you the tools that I have used and developed to make that into a systemic process. The first is to notice the difference between what I call Attractions of Deprivation and Attractions of Inspiration.

Attractions of Deprivation and Attractions of Inspiration both feel sexy, they feel like love, they grab you, but one leads to pain, and one has a foundation. It is a place you can build a home on. Attractions of Deprivation are where you somehow keep needing to prove your worth to the other person. It is the almost attractions, the almost connections. The person is almost able to commit, almost able to treat you like they treasure you, almost able to do the hard work of intimacy, but ultimately not enough.

 

These also could be relationships with people who have a mental illness that is not stabilized, or addictions that are not stabilized. There are many forms of these Attractions of Deprivation. The bottom line is they can pull at us sometimes even more than healthy attractions. We need to learn to recognize the difference between them and Attractions of Inspiration, which is where you want to build your home. We often need to develop a taste for those attractions.

It does not come naturally, but Attractions of Inspiration are attractions where there is a basic and ongoing kindness. There is an ability to do the work. There is an ability to commit. There is a steadiness, a solidity, a generosity, and a goodness. I spent decades searching after the sexy, hot guys who I just thought “find them and I am worthy. Find them, and I have got something great. Find them, and I have got somebody I am going to be attracted to my entire life. Find them and get them to be attracted to me, and I have got it made.”

I failed again and again. I am talking decades of failure. Decades. Until I went into therapy, until I started getting help, and until I began to retrain myself. By honoring the qualities in me which I call Core Gifts, my goodness, my sensitivity, instead of thinking those things made me not enough or not cool enough or not masculine enough, when I learned to treasure those, lo and behold, I started noticing and being attracted to men with goodness, kindness, availability and stability, which led me to my wonderful marriage, my relationship of seventeen years and our children and our family together.

I was really bad at this for decades. It was not until I learned to treasure my own goodness, which led to noticing and being attracted to goodness in others, that I stopped this bang your head against the wall search that just was not working and was driving me nuts. Is it a journey? It’s a journey. We are talking about something so profound here. It is a rewiring of self that leads to a rewiring of attraction. The minute you have this concept of the difference between Attractions of Deprivation and Attractions of Inspiration, and you start noticing the difference, you develop dignity, you learn self-honoring, and you save yourself years of potential pain.

The North Star Question

The second piece to this first part is learning the North Star question, with which I invite you to organize your entire search for love from this moment on, for as long as it takes to this question – Does my soul feel safe and seen with this person in a consistent way, not a perfect way, but a consistent way?

Does my soul feel safe and seen with this person in a consistent way—not a perfect way, but a consistent way? When the answer is yes, you’ve got gold. If the answer is no, maybe there’s work to be done—or maybe it’s simply the wrong person. Share on X

When the answer is yes, you have got gold. If the answer is no, maybe there is work to be done, or maybe it is just the wrong person. When you’re in a relationship, you can still ask yourself, and should, the very same question, because all intimacy is a process of rupture and repair. When things do not feel safe, we speak to our partners, and because we have chosen an Attraction of Inspiration, they and we are willing to do the work. Make these changes.

Attractions Of Inspiration Versus Your Attractions Of Deprivation 

I think there is no greater gift that I could give you in the entire body of my work. Maybe the Core Gift work, but those two things I think are the greatest gifts that I am able to give in this work. Make these changes that I just described and watch your future change. Not easily, not quickly, but you will feel the difference. The next piece of this is actually to dive deep into your attraction patterns, recognizing in a fuller way what are your Attractions of Inspiration, what are your Attractions of Deprivation. In my online course, in my Jumpstart to Deeper Dating course.

In those courses, you learn how to tell the difference, and in my intensive of course, but I am going to teach it to you here in simple form, and it is this. First, make a list of all the relationships that have been deprivational relationships to you. It does not mean that there was not good there. There could have been a lot of good there, but it just means that there were parts that were so deprivational that this just ultimately was not going to work.

Make a list of all those people. Put like five lines between each of those names. In those five lines, write down all the negative qualities about that person. You might be thinking, “What about my negative qualities?” Yes, absolutely. I am sure. For this exercise, just for this exercise, we’re externalizing responsibility so that we can do pattern recognition. Do not worry about you in this. Just note their immature, unhealthy, unloving qualities, the qualities that made you feel not seen and not safe, not honored, not appreciated, not matched. Write them all down for each person, and please pause the recording to do this right now, or if you prefer pause the recording and just do it in your head. You can write it, or you can do it in your head. It is better to write it, though, for the next part of this. You are going to write down all of these attributes, these deprivational attributes, and then you are going to count them. All of them that have a certain quality like cockiness or arrogance, those might be the same.

Grandiosity, those would all be the same. You count the one dynamic that is the negative dynamic that showed up the most. That is your key deprivational attraction. You want to know this. It is gold to have this information for three main reasons. One, because you learn what to stay away from. Two, you learn what to go toward, which is the opposite. Three, and this is a deeper one that you would learn by diving into the material more, if there is a negative pattern that you are attracted to again and again, it speaks to a Core Gift in yourself that you have not yet learned to honor.

 

When you learn to know what that is and to honor it, your attractions will actually begin to change. You can learn more about all of this by just going to DeeperDatingJumpstart.com, and I have a beautiful, simple, inexpensive mini course that guides you through this entire process in a much, much richer way. Second, you want to understand your Attractions of Inspiration type. Do the same thing again. Make another list, and you are going to put in these relationships of inspiration.

These do not all have to be romantic relationships. They can be a grandparent. They can be romantic relationships, but for this one, the inspirational one, I do not want you to use relationships that are traumatizing. In fact, for the deprivational one as well, be careful because if something is really traumatizing, you do not need to go back to that one in detail in your remembering of the process.

You do the same thing with Attractions of Inspiration. You make a list of people who had those qualities that really deeply fed you and nourished you, nourished your heart, made you feel safe, made you feel seen, made you feel celebrated, delighted in. You write the people’s names down, and then you write down what their attributes are. Those are qualities that you are capable of being attracted to, and those are qualities that you are going to look for in your next partner.

Making The Commitment & Living The Shift

There is a lot more to this. One of the pieces that comes out of this is that you make a pledge. This is in my courses, and in the Deeper Dating® Jumpstart that I mentioned, it is everywhere. We do it in the intensive. You create a pledge where you say, “I do not do Attractions of Deprivation anymore. I only do Attractions of Inspiration.” You make that commitment, and you plant that flag.

These are key pieces to understand your attraction patterns. How do you change them? The way that you change them is by living the first part of this, by living the North Star question, by noticing the things that hurt your heart and the things that fill your heart. Noticing when your soul feels safe and seen, when your heart feels safe and seen, and when it does not. And when it doesn’t, something needs to be fixed.

 

When you start doing this, you will develop a sense of dignity, a sense of self-honoring, and a spine. You will be more allergic to crappy treatment. You will be more turned off by that. You will be less seduced by immature expressions of desire and love for you. By love bombing, you will be less affected by that. You will start to recognize goodness, solidity, and decency. Might that scare you? Might that make you feel uncomfortable?

Yes, that is another stage of growth, but it is where you want to be. You want to be doing that work of being able to tolerate safety and goodness. If you make this North Star question the defining factor in your search for love, so much will change. I am really excited to think about you doing that. I am also excited to think about you contacting me, letting me know by responding to my emails, letting me know, join my mailing list at DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and let me know what you are experiencing because your stories are going to inspire other people. They’re going to teach me, they’re going to help me, and just the describing the trajectory of your growth will deepen it for you.

Thank you for listening. I think you could see how this is a journey of healing and celebration of self. At the same time leads you so much more quickly to the healthy, beautiful, lasting, decent love that you deserve. Thanks for listening. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast.

 

Important Links

• Deeper Dating
• Deeper Dating Jumpstart
• Deeper Dating Podcast