I'm Emotionally Healthy...So Why Aren't I Attracting Healthy People?

We’ve all heard cliché lines about the laws of attraction. Usually they are in the vein of “If you’re confident you will attract confident people”, “if you are happy, you will attract happy people,” etc.…

All these lines promise people who have been disappointed in friendships and relationships that if they just work on themselves, they will become surrounded by a slew of only amazing people. I’d like to debunk that cliché. It’s not about expecting only awesome people to enter your life. It’s about allowing awesome people entry while being able to distinguish the awesome from the not-so-stellar.

When you are emotionally healthy, you will attract the following groups of people:

The Follower

Think back to any high school movie — there’s always that scene where the popular girl/guy is walking down the hallway, flipping their hair back while their posse of groupies is sauntering cooly, one step behind, happy to bask in the awesomeness of their leader.

People who lack self esteem tend to search out a leader. You might think “I don’t mind being the leader.” The problem is, we are not teenagers trying to ‘get in’ with the cool kid so we can get invited to the cool party. Decisions are heftier when we are adults, and frankly, as adults, we should have the guts and the brains to make them ourselves. Adults who search out a leader, often do so because they don’t want to be accountable for their own lives and their own decisions. Sometimes these people are simply insecure, but oftentimes they are toxic. They will ask you for advice and then blame you when anything goes wrong. Not only do they choose to not take accountability for their general life choices, they choose not to see that while everyone is free to seek out advice, they are accountable for choosing to take or not take it. So, you will be these people’s shining star, until you become their scapegoat.

And, ask yourself this: if you need followers then are you truly confident and emotionally healthy? Or, are you still suffering from your own insecurity and need to feed off of the shallow adoration of a Follower?

The Climber

The Climber might be insecure, just like the Follower, however, Climbers differ in that their goal is to be the leader…or at least someone important.

Using an easy example, if you’ve ever seen Harry Potter, typical Followers would be Crabbe and Goyle while climbers would be Professor Slughorn with his special club for students that he thought might become “important” adults. A less obvious climber was Romilda Vane, the witch who tried to give Harry Potter the love potion. Romilda didn’t know Harry. She wanted to date him because she thought he was someone “important”. Climbers are the every day equivalent of a slimy politician: they want to climb, scramble and crawl over you, to the next level up.

If you’re exuding confidence, whether you are someone socially, politically or financially “important” or not, you will appear to be. That means that among the people who will be attracted to you, there will be some Climbers, trying to become your ‘pals’ just in case you are somehow useful to them.

The Downer

This is that lack-lusterless person that feeds off your energy. They’re not trying to suck you dry…but they do. They are the person that believes that somehow another person’s positive energy will rub off on them. So, rather than sitting down and doing the hard work necessary to improve themselves on deeper levels, they go from healthy person to healthy person, grinding them down until each healthy person cuts them off.

You’ll often recognize the Downer by the fact that they have had the same (easily solvable) issues for years. They are the people who can’t understand why friend after friend, or date after date, keeps ghosting them. They’ll put the blame on the fickleness of humanity rather than seeing the trend: that they are not curing their disease, but simply covering up the symptoms, and they are using healthy people around them to do so.

And Finally…..DRUMROLL Please….The person you’ve been waiting for…..

The Equal

This is that healthy, emotionally mature individual that you want in your circle of friends or as your partner. Yes, your emotional healthiness WILL attract this individual to you like a magnet, because just like you, they have been wading through Downers, Climbers and Followers to find YOU.

Trust me, it’s been just as hard and griding of a search for them as it has for you. And, they might not come along tomorrow, or next week. However, by being emotionally healthy and open to healthy people, you at least give yourself the chance to have these amazing people in your life. Otherwise, you might still manage to meet them, but, you will be one of the Followers, Climbers or Downers that they are running away from or ghosting.

On an even brighter note, by being emotionally healthy, you will STOP attracting the following:

Bullies

Bullies can be physical or emotional. Either way, they feed off of pushing others down; it’s the only way they know to feel ‘up’.

If you come off as a very nice person, bullies may still initially come after you, because they often confuse kindness with weakness. As soon as you display any semblance of a backbone though, they will disappear, moving on to an easier victim.

I have a friend, Maria*, who stopped dating because she noticed that the types of men she attracted tended to be emotional bullies. Rather than grating on about how there are no good guys out there, she took a hard look at herself and realized that there ARE good men, just like there are good women, but she wasn’t attracting them. She was attracting all the wrong men due to her low self-esteem. Even if she met a good guy, he would not be attracted to her, for the same reason. So, rather than continuing to try and meet someone, she stopped dating for a couple of years to work on herself.

If you are still, consistently, attracting bullies, ask yourself if you are truly emotionally healthy yourself.

Psychopaths, Sociopaths and All Other Manners of Personalities Ending in ‘Path’ And sometimes ‘ist’ (Narcissist, Sadist etc..)

What I find fascinating about the majority of individuals that fit into this category of ‘personalities requiring medical treatment’ is that they almost always possess an intrinsic awareness, or an instinctual knowledge, of who they can prey on.

My husband is a highly intelligent man but he still suffers from random, guilt instilled into him over an entire childhood. That leads to him having a difficult time in saying “no” when he should. So, every now and then he will randomly attract a person from this grouping. What’s amusing is that as soon as they meet me, they disappear. Apparently, I terrify them. I do nothing in particular — I’m not rude or condescending etc.…I think they simply sense that they’re getting nothing out of me, and as an extension I won’t let them get much out of my husband.

Interestingly, as my husband has come into his own over the years, he attracts fewer and fewer of these individuals as well.

So, just like with bullies, if you are saying that you are emotionally healthy and yet you have to keep practically beating off this grouping of individuals with a stick, then I beg to differ on your level of emotional health. I repeat: these individuals can intrinsically sense the types of people that they can prey on. If that’s you then it means you have some things to work on.

Should You Automatically Cut All Ties with Followers, Climbers and Downers?

The short answer: No.

The longer answer: Not necessarily.

Look, first off, you need to be able to tell who belongs to this group. Once you have identified them, you can decide on an individual basis who might have hope.

The way I decide is by assessing the person’s general sense of self awareness.

That friend Maria that I mentioned is self aware. She sees the role she is playing in her life and she’s working on it. We are none of us finished works of art. Life is a work-in-progress. I’ve got my stuff to work on, but, just like Maria, I am aware of it. I don’t gaslight people around me if they call me on my stuff. I try and work on myself because the people I love deserve the best version of me.

So, personally, I'm more likely to stay friends with someone who has ten issues but is aware of them and is working on them versus a person who has one issue which affects their interaction with others, yet which they refuse to acknowledge and/or work on.

For me, self-awareness also heavily coincides with age.

If a person is in their twenties and not fully self-aware, I’m cool with that because our twenties are really for figuring out who we are, and want to be, after the shit-show of puberty. However, if a person is in their forties and isn’t showing an ounce of self-awareness, I very slowly back away towards the exit door…which I tightly lock behind myself.

Life circumstances may also change a person. A work acquaintance of my husband’s was the epitome of Climber until he got Cancer. He survived, but he changed. For the better. There’s a depth to him now that we never felt before and while I could previously take no more than five minutes at a time with him, I now really enjoy his company.

How long you are willing to stick around and give people chances for, is for you to judge. I had a school friend that turned into a Downer over the years. People were always either slowly chatting with her less and less until the contact finally turned to zero, or quickly ghosting her. I tried to stick around because of our long history: it felt odd to lose a childhood friendship after so many years. But eventually, even I couldn’t take listening to the same issue for decades. I called her on it and just like with everyone else, she flipped it around, making the issue about me not being a supportive friend. It truly did make me sad, because I was the only friend who actually cared enough to make an effort and be honest with her, rather than simply ghosting her like everyone else. But, I realized that me being there for her was not helping her become a healthier person. All I was doing was acting as a soft, landing pad so that she could continue messing up. By being her friend, I had become her enabler.

So, the last question is, are you sticking around, long past the point where you became the enabler to someone’s unhealthy behavior? Are you convincing yourself that if you just give it another week, month or year, they’ll change and be a good friend or partner? Are you telling yourself that if you help them, forgive them, or just keep standing by them, that one day they’ll see what a good friend/partner you have been and finally realize how lucky they are to have you in their lives?

If you have answered yes to the above questions then you may not be as emotionally healthy as you believe…. because it sounds like you may have some co-dependency issues to work on.