Nobody warns you about the pattern. The same ache in your chest, the same hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach. You look across the table at this person you are sharing a meal with, this person you are sharing your body with, and you feel a sickening sense of familiarity. It’s not the good kind. It’s the ‘oh, it’s *you* again’ kind. Different face, different name, different story, but the same damn ghost haunting your love life. You’ve chosen them again. The emotionally unavailable one. The one who needs fixing. The one who mirrors your deepest wound and then pours salt in it for fun. This isn’t bad luck. This isn’t a curse. This is a choice. A choice made from a place of deep, unconscious patterning. You are choosing from your **karma**, not your **dharma**. You are choosing from what Dick Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems calls the unhealed parts of you, the screaming child in the basement of your soul who just wants to be loved, and will accept any counterfeit version of it that comes along. You are choosing from the grooves of trauma etched into your nervous system, the ones that tell you love is