Why the Familiar Feels Like Love: Matthew Hussey on Tanks, Walls, and Corrective Experiences
Matthew Hussey
In this conversation on André Duqum's Know Thyself podcast, dating coach Matthew Hussey asks why people keep choosing partners who are bad for them, even when they can see what a healthier relationship looks like. His answer is that nobody who does this is broken. We tend to choose what feels familiar, and what feels familiar can be painful. Hussey argues that a person's romantic past does not have to decide their future. He also argues that changing it takes deliberate effort: curiosity at first, and in the end real experiences with other people that disprove old beliefs. He illustrates the point with a candid story from early in his relationship with his wife, Audrey, and a childhood memory it brought back.
We Opt for Home, Not Happiness
Hussey begins with a principle he says is worth keeping in mind: people tend not to choose what makes them happy. They choose what feels like home, what feels comfortable and familiar. That "home" can be terrible. Depending on how someone grew up and what influenced them, their normal might be chronic anxiety or chaos. It might be a partner who makes them earn love. It might be someone inconsistent who goes cold for days and then offers a small hit of affection that feels amazing. That cycle can become what a person is used to.
So when someone asks, "Why do I keep going for people that are bad for me?", Hussey's reply is that they are not broken. They are doing what everyone does. In a chapter of his book called "Never Satisfied," he lists several reasons people gravitate toward bad partners. The first is a scarcity mindset: when we think nothing better is coming, we settle for what is in front of us. The second is that we choose people who treat us poorly because that treatment is what we know.
The Dolphin in the Tank
Hussey insists the second reason is not simply a self-confidence or self-worth issue, and he explains it with an analogy. A dolphin raised in a tank might learn that to get a fish it has to do backflips or jump through a hoop, and then humans feed it. If that dolphin were released into the ocean tomorrow and kept doing backflips or swimming up to boats for food, the behavior could be fatal. Nobody would say the dolphin had a self-worth problem. They would say it is doing what it knows, because it cannot tell the tank from the ocean.
Hussey argues that people are in the same position. While we grew up in our own tank, the tank was the ocean. It was life and the world. As adults we go out looking, unconsciously, for the experience we had in the tank, because it is familiar. We may see friends in healthier relationships, with partners who don't cheat, belittle, or demean them and who make them feel safe. If we have never experienced that ourselves, it isn't real to us. Hussey calls this a kind of myopia: "I know that's their life, but it's not my life." What feels real is whatever our own experience has taught us life is, and that is what we go looking for.
"Your Car Goes Where Your Eyes Go"
To show how these patterns steer us, Hussey cites something he writes about in the book: race car driver Mario Andretti's tip for racing was "don't look at the wall," because your car goes where your eyes go. Hussey says this is not a throwaway line for him but "kind of a mini obsession." He can think of many places in his own life where the wall was something he kept crashing into, and he believes it takes something very intentional to turn one's eyes away from it.
He gives a personal example. For most of his life, Hussey says, he struggled to trust people. He grew up in an environment with a sense of agenda and of waiting for the other shoe to drop. As an adult, he found it hard to believe that someone could act in a pure way, that a relationship could be reciprocal, or that people were not simply out to take what they could get.
He has since come to see people differently: they are just people, with good days and bad days, sometimes more selfish and sometimes more generous. He adds that people tend to be more generous when they feel safe and feel they are not being taken advantage of. That is hard to offer someone if you are always in protection mode, carefully monitoring how much you give because you fear being exploited. In that state, Hussey says, "you end up creating the wall." You either find people you can't trust, or your own behavior turns the relationship transactional because you are afraid of getting hurt. You bring about the very thing you most fear.
Mistaking the Wall for the World
This is why Hussey says he has become fascinated by the idea that our past in love does not have to equal our future, "no matter how long it's been that way." The catch is that a person has to find ways to create a different reality from the one they have lived in so long that their brain treats it as reality itself. As he puts it: "if you stare at the wall long enough, you won't know it's the wall anymore. You'll just think it's the world."
Curiosity as a "Gateway Drug" to New Beliefs
Hussey's first tool for breaking this is curiosity, which he calls "a really important gateway drug to new beliefs." He uses it to help people see that there may be other ways of being in the world that produce different results from the ones they have been getting. He describes the effect of even a slightly different result as "mind-blowing." It suddenly becomes clear that other ways of being and other realities exist outside the one a person has lived in for so long. After that, he says, life becomes expansive, and people realize there are many more possibilities than the ones they have been telling themselves are available.
Duqum: Relationships as a Mirror
Duqum responds that the dolphin analogy hits the point squarely. He compares it to the cliché of seeing life through tinted lenses until our eyes adjust and we think that is simply how life is. He quotes Wayne Dyer, one of his favorite lines: "when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change." Because our assumptions about reality become normalized, Duqum says, we often cannot see them at all. They become "the ecosystem in which our consciousness is an inhabitant."
For Duqum, this is where relationships matter. Because we live in a world of duality and relate to things through other people, others reflect back the blind spots we can't see ourselves. He suggests romantic relationships are probably among the most trying, testing, and potent reflections there are.
Why Healing Alone Is "One Hand Clapping"
Hussey agrees, and says this is why at some point a person has to "be in the game." Trying to heal yourself and do all the work in isolation, he says, is like one hand clapping. Eventually you have to meet the frontier between yourself and another person, along with all the friction that happens there.
A Jealous Night Early in His Relationship
Hussey illustrates this with a story from when he and his wife, Audrey, were first dating. Something happened that made him jealous. It came out of nowhere and snuck up on him. In the moment he wouldn't have called it feeling unsafe; it simply made him angry. He now thinks that underneath he felt unsafe, afraid, and perhaps slightly emasculated.
His reaction, by his own account, was not his best. He shut down, became passive-aggressive and probably a little controlling, which he calls "not a version of me I would ever want to air publicly." He says they probably argued for a couple of hours, clashing for a while, until he shut down completely and "went completely avoidant."
After a while, Audrey came to him compassionately. She told him she wanted to understand what the situation had made him feel and where it came from, because she would never want to make him feel that way. She also told him, "You can't bring it to me in this way." Hussey stresses that this mattered: she was compassionate but held a standard, because the way he had handled it was not okay. He had been very activated.
Eventually he told her what he had felt, why, and where it might come from. He got vulnerable, and she responded with love and compassion. Then he shut down again. In his mind, he says, what he had said "wasn't sexy." He felt he had gone from being a heroic, masculine, in-control person to someone showing all his insecurities. He describes it as a "vulnerability hangover."
The Sleepover He Missed at Eleven
Hussey says the episode reminded him of a childhood moment. When he was about 11, he was playing outside at home on a sunny day with his brothers and a couple of friends, including Alex, one of his best friends at the time. He can't remember exactly what happened. Perhaps his mother came out and yelled at him about something. Whatever it was, it embarrassed him and made him feel vulnerable.
He went to his room, shut the door, and wouldn't let anyone in. His brothers, Alex, and Alex's brother came up one at a time to coax him out, telling him about the trampoline and the other fun they were having. He told each of them he was fine. His mother came up too, asking him to come play because everyone was having a good time. He still said no. Looking back, Hussey describes this as his way of reacting to being hurt: trying to punish everybody else rather than admit he was hurt, embarrassed, or ashamed.
A couple of hours later they came up again to say everyone was going to Alex's house to continue the sleepover there, and urged him to come. One by one he refused them, including his mother, who pleaded with him not to do this. Hussey emphasizes that he "had no enemies in the house. Not one. Everyone loved me. But I shut everyone out."
The next day his brothers came home talking about how great the sleepover had been: movies, pizza, all of it. Hussey says he felt sick inside, because he had missed something he could never get back. Nobody had been against him. His inability to share what he was feeling had led him to punish everyone else, "but really I wasn't punishing anyone. I was punishing myself."
The Same Pattern, Twice Over, with Audrey
Hussey sees the same pattern in how he treated Audrey. First he refused to be vulnerable and, in effect, shut himself in the room and told her to go away. Then, when he finally did open up, he thought, "What have I done? I'm not lovable now," and shut down again. He describes the logic as pre-emptive: at least she couldn't hurt him if he went quiet before she could tell him he was no longer attractive.
Eventually he admitted to her that he felt she would now see him differently. Her response, as he recounts it, was that the idea was "so crazy." She told him she thought he was amazing and loved getting to know him better, and that the more she knew, the better she understood him because she had context for who he was. It didn't change all the other things she knew about him. It just meant she knew more, and she loved that.
A Corrective Experience, and Who Gets the Credit
Hussey admits he isn't sure he believed her in that moment. Over time he realized she meant it, and it became "this incredibly corrective healing experience." He saw that she accepted all of him, and that his belief that people would stop seeing him the same way once they knew these things was completely false. What made her love him more, he concluded, was seeing him as a whole person.
He divides the credit. He takes some himself, because he had to do what he had never done before: come forward with how he felt and how something had affected him. He gives Audrey "an enormous amount of credit," because the environment she created made him brave, and her response when he was brave made him braver still and made him feel accepted. This, he says, is what he means by one hand clapping: it was not something he could have achieved alone in a room.
He also says the experience didn't have to come from a romantic partner. It could have come from a friend, a father figure, or someone else. What he needed was some corrective experience that helped him question the belief that he wouldn't be lovable if he talked about these things.
Being Braver Now, and the Role of Self-Compassion
Hussey tells Duqum there is something "so meta" about telling this story on the podcast at all. Five years ago, he says, he wouldn't have told it. He would have brought a more heroic version of himself to the conversation. Because of that healing, he says he is now much braver in the world. He has accepted himself differently and made peace with parts of himself.
He has also learned to give himself compassion for where these patterns came from. If he was already doing this at 11, he reasons, it was deep and long-standing. If it had been easy to change, he would have changed it years ago. He acknowledges it has probably cost him a lot, but says the behavior got wired up at a time when he wasn't making conscious decisions about how he was being wired, and that is exactly why it deserves compassion rather than blame.
He ends by connecting this back to dating. When people can give themselves that compassion, he says, they can offer others a completely different level of it. In his view, people looking for love tend to judge others more harshly when they offer themselves no self-compassion.
It's always good to just have in your mind the principle that we tend not to opt for things that make us happy. We opt for things that make us feel at home, and comfortable, and feel familiar. And the things that feel like home to us or familiar to us can be terrible.
Depending on how we've grown up or what influences we've had, our normal can be really, really tough. It could be chronic anxiety. It can be chaos. It can be someone making us have to earn their love. It can be someone who's inconsistent and goes cold for days on end and then gives us a little hit of affection and it feels amazing. And that can be what we're used to.
And so, when we say, "Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep going for people that are bad for me?" You're not broken. You're just doing what we all do. I list in a chapter called "Never Satisfied" in the book some of the reasons why we keep gravitating towards people who are bad for us. One of them being a scarcity mindset, as you mentioned, that when we think nothing else is coming along, we tend to settle for what's right in front of us.
The second reason is we choose bad people or people who treat us poorly because it's what we know. And that's not just some self-confidence issue or a self-worth issue. A dolphin in a tank might grow up learning that to get a fish it has to do backflips or jump through a hoop and then humans will feed it a fish. If that dolphin was released into the ocean tomorrow and it started doing backflips or swimming up to boats for food, that could be fatal. We wouldn't say that the dolphin had a self-worth problem. We would say this dolphin is doing what it knows. Yeah.
And it doesn't differentiate between the ocean and the tank. When we were growing up in the tank in our own lives, the tank was the ocean. The tank was life. The tank was the world. So we go out into the world sort of looking for the experience we had in the tank because it's what's familiar to us. Even if we see friends who are in healthier relationships, who are with people who don't cheat or don't treat them badly or make them feel safe, don't belittle them or demean them, if we've never experienced that, then it's not a reality for us. And we have that kind of myopia that, "Yeah, I know that's their life, but it's not my life." It doesn't feel real to us.
What feels real to us is whatever we've come to believe is whatever life is to us, whatever is our experience, that's what's real to us. And unconsciously, we go looking for that experience out there in the world.
I write in the book about the race car driver Mario Andretti and how he said his tip for race car driving was, "Don't look at the wall," because your car goes where your eyes go. And that's not a throwaway thing to me, what he said there. It's kind of a mini obsession because I think of so many places in my own life where the wall has been something I keep crashing into. And how it takes something very intentional to kind of orient our eyes away from the wall.
My whole life I had a hard time really trusting people. And I kind of grew up in an environment where there was a sense of agenda and waiting for the other shoe to drop. And so, for me in my adult life, I found it hard to think that someone could be doing something just in a pure way or that it could be reciprocal. Or even just that people aren't just going to take what they can get. Not everyone is a bad person or out to get you. They're just people like you. They have good days and bad days and some days they're more selfish and other days they're more generous, and they tend to be more generous when they feel more safe and when they feel like they're not being taken advantage of.
And it's hard to make someone else feel like they're not being taken advantage of if you're constantly in protection mode and you're constantly kind of monitoring how much you give because you're worried someone else is going to take advantage of you. You end up creating the wall. You literally end up creating scenarios where you either find people you can't trust or, by the way that you are in relationships, you create this very transactional relationship because you're worried about getting hurt. And so you end up precipitating the very thing you're most afraid of because that's your wall.
And I've become fascinated with how our past in our love life does not have to equal our future, no matter how long it's been that way. But you have to find ways to start to create a different reality than the one that you've been experiencing for so long that your brain has started to think is just reality. Because if you stare at the wall long enough, you won't know it's the wall anymore. You'll just think it's the world.
And so, what I help people to do is to start to use curiosity, which I think is a really important gateway drug to new beliefs, to help people start to see that there may be other ways of being in the world that create new results than the ones they've gotten. And when you get a new, even a slightly different result than the one you've gotten, it's kind of a mind-blowing thing because suddenly it becomes apparent to you that there's a different way of being and there are other realities outside of the one you've been living for so long. Then life becomes really expansive and you start to realize there's so much more possibilities than the ones you've been telling yourself are available to you.
So beautiful. Thank you, man. Thank you for sharing. I love dolphins.
Wasn't too abstract.
No, I think it hits it right on the head because it's the cliché of looking at life through our color-tinted lenses, then our eyes adjust to just think that's the way that life is. And I love one of my favorite quotes from Wayne Dyer: "When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change." Yes. And it's coming back again to that first principle of seeing how we look at things. And oftentimes we can't always see the things that we're perceiving about reality that become the default way and the wall that we're staring at because it's become so normalized for us. It's just the ecosystem in which our consciousness is an inhabitant in.
And so I feel like relationships often do, because you feel good enough, happy enough to go into relationships that can give you the opportunity to reveal those blind spots. Because I feel like that is ultimately, and I want to dive into how really relationships do become that mirror for us to see those spots where we're not fully aware of, because we do live in this realm of duality where we relate to things and that's how we can see the reflection from other people. And romantic relationships got to be one of the probably the most trying, testing, potent reflections there could be.
Yeah, which is kind of why at some point you have to be in the game. Because the idea of healing yourself and doing all of the work in isolation is like the one hand clapping. Right. At some point you're going to have to meet the frontier between you and another person and all of the frictions that occur on that frontier.
Early in my relationship with my wife, when we were just dating, something happened that made me jealous. And it kind of came out of nowhere, really snuck up on me. And I felt immediately unsafe. Not that in the moment I would have framed it in terms of, "I feel unsafe." It made me mad. Yeah. But really beneath it I was unsafe and afraid and maybe felt slightly emasculated.
But in that moment I kind of shut down. I became passive-aggressive and probably a little controlling and just not a good version of me. Not a version of me I would ever want to air publicly. And we probably argued for a couple of hours. It was just clashing for a while. And eventually I kind of shut down and went completely avoidant.
And I think after a while she came to me in a very compassionate way and was like, "Look, I want to understand what this made you feel and where it's coming from because I hate the idea that—I would never want to make you feel that," and so on. She also said, "You can't bring it to me in this way." So she's compassionate but with a standard at the same time, which was important because it wasn't okay, the way that I handled it. I was very activated.
And eventually I shared with her what I had felt and why it made me feel that and maybe where it was coming from, and I got a little vulnerable. And she was really loving and compassionate. And then I shut down again because I was like, "I should never have said all of that." In my mind I was like, "That wasn't sexy. I've now gone from being this heroic, masculine, in-control person to here's all of my insecurity and here's all the things I really feel." And I shut down. I had a vulnerability hangover.
And it's so funny because I can think back to a time in my childhood when I was playing outside with my brothers and a couple of my friends, Alex, one of my best friends at the time. I was probably about 11 years old. And we were all at our house and I can't remember what happened, but maybe my mom came out and yelled at me about something. Something happened that embarrassed me and made me feel vulnerable. And I went up to my room in the middle of this beautiful sunny day. We were all playing outside. I went up to my room and I shut the door and I wouldn't let anyone in.
And my brothers, my friend Alex, his brother would all come up one by one and be like, "Come out. We're having fun. We're going to do this. Now we're going to go on the trampoline. We're going to..." And I was just like, "No. I'm good. I'm fine." Then my mom came up, "Matt, come on. Come play. Everyone's having a good time." No. And this was my way of reacting to me being hurt, was to try to punish everybody else. God forbid I actually tell anyone I was hurt or embarrassed or ashamed.
And then I remember a couple of hours later they came up and they went, "We're all going to go to Alex's house now for the night. We're going to carry on the sleepover at Alex's. Come on. Let's go." And I was like, "No." One by one everyone came up. "No." My mom came up, "Matt, please, come on. They're all going. Don't do this. Everyone's having a nice time." I had no enemies in the house. Not one. Everyone loved me. But I shut everyone out.
And I'll never forget the next day when my brothers came home from that sleepover and they were like, "Oh, it was so great. We watched movies. We did this. We ordered pizza. It was so good." And inside I felt sick because I'd missed out on something that I couldn't get back. I'll never have been in that sleepover with my brothers and my friends and had that moment, not because anyone was against me. Everyone loved me. But because my inability to share what I was feeling or to just be vulnerable about the fact that something had affected me made me punish everyone else. But really I wasn't punishing anyone. I was punishing myself. I deprived myself of that moment.
And I look back on that moment with Audrey, my wife Audrey, when I pushed her away. First I wasn't vulnerable because I did the same thing, right? I shut myself in the room and told her to go away. And then when I finally did get vulnerable I was like, "What have I done? I'm not lovable now." And so I shut down again and went, "Well, at least you're not going to hurt me because I'll just now go quiet on you before you can tell me that I'm now not sexy." And so I tried to shut her out again emotionally.
And I ended up confessing to her that I really felt like now that I'd said that she would look at me differently. And she said, "Oh my God. That is so crazy. I think you're amazing. And I love getting to know you better, and the more I know you, the more I just feel like I know who you are and I understand you better. I have context for you. It doesn't change all the other stuff I know about you, all the amazing things that you are, and it doesn't change any of that. It just means I know more about you and I love getting to know more about you."
And I don't know if I really believed her in that moment. But over time I started to realize she meant that. And that became this incredibly corrective, healing experience for me because I actually realized, "Oh my God, this person really does—not only do they accept me for all of me, but this idea I have in my head that if you know these things, you'll change the way you see me and you'll never see me as this other person again was completely false." And actually what made her love me more was seeing me as a whole person.
That corrective experience helped heal me. I take some credit for it because I had to do what I hadn't done before, which is to actually come forward with how I was feeling and how something had made me feel. I give her an enormous amount of credit because the environment she helped create for me to do that made me brave. And then how she responded when I was brave made me even more brave, made me feel accepted. So that's what I mean when I say the kind of one-hand clapping thing, because that's not something I could have achieved in a room on my own.
Yeah. It didn't have to be with someone that I was romantically engaged with. It could have been with a friend. It could have been with a father figure. It could have been with someone else, but I needed some kind of corrective experience that helped me to question that belief that I wouldn't be lovable if I started speaking about some of these things.
And André, it's so funny. There's something so meta about the fact that I'm even telling this story right now because honestly, if I'd have done this podcast five years ago, I wouldn't have told this story. I really wouldn't. I would have brought a more heroic version of myself to this conversation. But because of that healing I now am much braver in the world. Because I have accepted myself differently. I've made peace with parts of myself. I give myself a completely different level of compassion for where those things come from.
Because, by the way, if I was doing that at 11 years old, that was deep stuff. Right? That's not new in my life. I've been doing it my whole life. If it was easy for me to change that, I would have changed it years ago. How much have I cost myself in my life by being that way? I need to give myself compassion for wherever that comes from. Because it certainly got wired up in a time when I wasn't making conscious decisions about how I was getting wired up.
So that's how I think about these things. And I think when you're able to give yourself that compassion, by the way, you're able to give someone else a completely different level of compassion. In trying to find love, especially when we're out there dating, we tend to be much more judgmental of other people when we're not offering ourselves any self-compassion.
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