Why Am I Like This? Breaking Toxic Relationship Patterns with Sabrina Zohar

The Question We All Ask

Many times in my life I have stood in front of the mirror and asked, “Why am I like this?” If I’m honest, the real version had a lot more profanity in it. Why is this my life? Why is this happening again?

The relationship. The business. The job. The health. The weight. The same story on repeat.

For me, the way out was going deep and taking this work more seriously than anything else in my life. That is exactly what my guest on the Unbroken podcast did too. Sabrina Zohar is the author of Why Am I Like This? Break Your Relationship Patterns and Create the Life That You Want, and she has lived every page of it.

We are living in arguably the hardest time ever to be in a relationship. There is an excess of everything: options, apps, opinions, information. So I asked Sabrina the loaded question right away. Why are people like this?

Where Your Patterns Really Come From

Sabrina laughed and told me her original working title was a lot more blunt. Her publisher said no.

The title is intentional, though. In the book, she explains that “why” questions are often our brain’s attempt to intellectualize pain so we can avoid feeling it.

“When we ask why questions, it’s actually our brain trying to intellectualize, because we want to be able to avoid dealing with the deeper pain and the root of the issue. So we think if we can understand it, then that way, okay, well, then we won’t feel it.”

She was also clear that this is not about blaming your parents or playing the victim. As she put it, “This is not motivation. This is transformation.” It is about understanding where you learned a behavior and who taught you the core beliefs you carry. Even people with incredible parents have patterns, because every child has different attunement needs.

It starts before you can talk

From zero to 18 months, Sabrina explained, we are nonverbal. We learn through facial expressions, eye contact, and one big question: when you cried or were hungry, who came to you, how often, and was it consistent?

Those early experiences shape attachment styles. Sabrina named the four main ones:

•Anxious

•Avoidant

•Disorganized

•Secure

Three are insecure and one is secure. Those early ways of attuning to caregivers can turn into maladaptive coping mechanisms that affect your nervous system and the tools you use to regulate yourself as an adult.

Your brain loves what is familiar

Here is the part that explains why patterns repeat. According to Sabrina, your brain loves familiarity, and its job is to keep you safe, not to help you grow.

“If my dad used to do this when I was this, then that means everyone’s going to do it. So great, let’s just keep doing this. And that’s why we start to see patterns.”

Information Is Not Transformation

We have more access to information about becoming our best selves than any generation in history. Sabrina believes it has crippled a lot of us. Many people know why they are the way they are. Her next question is always, “Cool, what are you gonna do about it?”

That hit home for me. I was a trauma coach for a decade, and about 18 months before this conversation I stepped away after coaching over 3,000 clients. One of the truths I learned along the way is simple: people love information, and they hate doing the work.

The clients who truly transformed were the ones who reached the same point I did. They looked at their life and asked, “What are you doing? You’re gonna sit here and let this be your life?”

My own story was stacked against me. I was homeless as a child from eight to twelve, grew up with parents who struggled with addiction, and did not graduate high school. What carried me was one belief: no excuses, just results. Even then, it took decades of work and failing in every way imaginable.

So I asked Sabrina what brought her to write this book. Because nobody writes a book like this unless they had to overcome their own stuff first.

Sabrina’s Road to Rock Bottom

Sabrina described herself as “the poster child of anxiety, anxious attachment.” She did not hold back. A good portion of the book is her own stories, and she wants readers to see something important in them: you can be a total mess and still deserve compassion.

“I’m not trying to get rid of them, but I want to give them a limelight to say, ‘I did this because of you, not in spite of you.’”

A childhood without boundaries

Sabrina shared that she grew up with abuse in the home, both physical and emotional. She described her father as narcissistic. Her brother was sent away when she was a child, which is one of the first stories in the book, and it deeply affected her relationship with men, her core beliefs, and her sense of worth. Her mother, she said, completely dissociated.

She also watched her father cheat on her mother for years, bringing the children around his mistresses and telling them not to say anything. As a child, she did not understand boundaries at all. Later, she dropped out of college eight different times and struggled with authority, which she connects to father wounds.

Seeking validation in New York

When she moved to New York at around 19 or 20, Sabrina went from being the awkward kid with a pixie cut and gold braces to suddenly getting a lot of attention. She believed that sex was how you kept a man, because that was what she had seen from her father. Some days she went on dates with two or three different people.

“‘If you just tell me I’m pretty and I’m not too much.’ Repetition compulsion. I kept dating the parts of me that needed to be healed, because I kept hoping by doing that it would heal me.”

Then she met someone who was just like her dad. He is the major story in the book, and he sent her to rock bottom. She called her mom, said she couldn’t do this anymore, and started therapy.

Therapy is not a magic switch

Sabrina wants to dispel the myth that once you start therapy, everything goes away. It didn’t for her. She kept dating narcissists and kept abandoning herself for years. The difference was that she became more aware. Awareness helped her understand her behavior, and understanding her behavior let her ask, “What are my choices?”

Business success did not fill the hole

In 2017, doctors found six brain aneurysms in her mother and, as Sabrina described it, gave her a three to five percent chance of survival. Around the same time, the company she worked for closed, and she was stuck with a new apartment and no money. Her mother survived thanks to a coil procedure. Sabrina saw a photo of her mom in the hospital giving two thumbs up and decided to start her own clothing company with a friend’s brother.

She bootstrapped for years. When COVID hit, she shared, she made a million dollars that year. But it was never enough.

“If I made $5,000 in the day on the company, I needed to make six. If I made six, I needed to make seven. It was a moving target, because nothing external was satisfying the internal.”

The core belief underneath it all: “I’m too much, but I’m not enough.”

Shark Tank and the final collapse

After 12 years in New York, Sabrina moved to Los Angeles in 2021 and hated it more than she expected. Then came what she thought would save her business: an appearance on Shark Tank. After six or seven months of preparation, she was on set in 2022, and she was sent home. They gave her spot to someone else.

She called it the “when this, then this” mentality. When I get this, I’ll be a millionaire, then I’ll be respected, then people will like me.

That was rock bottom. But it was also the turning point. She had already been changing how she dated and applying what she learned in therapy. She started creating TikToks, and they grew. Then her dog passed away, and after that loss she let go of trying to control everything. She ended things with the man she was seeing, met her partner Ryan three days later, and launched her podcast a month after that.

“I just really allowed me to lose everything so I could rebuild it.”

My own version of the same story

Listening to Sabrina, I felt like I was hearing the female version of my own life. Building businesses and failing. Hooking up with multiple people a day. Debt. A constant, painful spiral. I watched my stepdad cheat on my mom, watched my mom struggle with alcohol, and watched her attempt suicide. Half my family has been in prison, and I lost friends to violence growing up.

I was a people pleaser with no boundaries and no values. I believed that if someone would sleep with me, it meant I was special. Then a book called The Game came out in the 2000s and poured jet fuel on the fire.

My rock bottom came when I sat in my life and thought, “Dude, you are exactly what everyone told you you were gonna be. And at what point are you going to decide to be someone different?”

Two things changed my life. First, I let go of white knuckling my business. Second, I stopped caring whether everyone liked me. That second one is where most people stay trapped. They are afraid to say no, say yes, or exist the way they actually want to exist.

The Moment She Chose Herself

I asked Sabrina what the final straw was. She said her path was not a dramatic, lightning-bolt moment.

It began with the ex she writes about in the book. She met him after quitting smoking cold turkey, quitting sugar, and throwing herself into working out. (She is clear: talk to your doctor before quitting anything cold turkey.) He was into fitness and wellness, and she was convinced he was the one. After about a month and a half, he stopped answering for hours, then ended it with, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

She remembered screaming and calling her mom: “What the f*** is wrong with me? This has to be up. This keeps happening, Mom, every time.”

Two weeks later he had a new girlfriend. Months later, she found him on Bumble, sent him a message thinking someone was catfishing him, and they matched again. That began what she called “the worst year and a half of my entire life.”

He broke up with her “to teach me a lesson” and went on a vacation they had planned together without her. Sabrina shared that she became suicidal. At five foot eight, her weight dropped to between 90 and 100 pounds.

The crack in the armor

The turning point came during a tapping session, a technique that uses acupressure points. She kept saying, “It’s all my fault.” Her therapist repeated it back to her.

“And I remember just going, ‘Well, it couldn’t have all been my fault.’ And that was the crack in the armor that then I never saw him the same. I took the shine off of him.”

Not long after, while he was living in her apartment, he told her she was pathetic and would never make it in business. Something snapped. She told him to get out of her house, and she never spoke to him again.

“That was the moment where I was like, I had never chosen myself before. I had never said that I mattered.”

Did she still make mistakes after that? She said, “You betcha.” But it started there.

Why You Keep Dating the Same Person

For years, when my relationships ended, I thought, “I guess this is just what it’s going to be for me.” Then around 2011 or 2012, I read The Truth by Neil Strauss. In it, a therapist tells him, “Your problem is you keep dating your mother.”

I was sitting at my desk building my first company, and I had a complete breakdown. Every one of those women was my mom. All of them.

But realizing it was only the beginning. I still had to become someone who didn’t do that anymore. The first four years of my journey were two steps forward, a hundred steps back. I just kept going.

Therapy is the trainer, not the workout

Sabrina compared relying only on therapy to seeing a personal trainer once a week and then going home to eat Twinkies and donuts. One hour a week will not change your whole life if nothing else changes.

“Intellectualizing is very different than implementing and integrating.”

She shared two questions from the book that blew her mind when she started:

1.How old do I feel?

2.Where did I learn this from?

She explained that when we obsess over people, it is usually people who don’t make us feel safe. That is intermittent reinforcement, which she compared to a slot machine. When chaos is your baseline, chaos feels normal.

Self-awareness is not the finish line

A friend once stopped Sabrina and said, “Sab, you’re so self-aware, but what the f*** are you gonna do with it?” Sabrina thought self-awareness was the goal. It isn’t.

“Knowing why doesn’t mean I’m actually doing anything about it. Doesn’t mean I’m making different choices, doesn’t mean I’m responding versus reacting.”

You have to be okay losing people

This was the biggest lesson from her healing journey. When you start setting boundaries, saying no, and choosing yourself, the people who benefited from you not doing those things will be upset.

“Those are the people that’ll say, ‘After everything I did for you, this is how you treat me?’ It’s like, ‘Because I said no? Yeah, this is how I treat you. I don’t owe you anything.’”

She credits much of her career to openly sharing her stories and making people feel less alone. She doesn’t see herself as a guru. She is just further along the journey, and she is honest that the journey never ends. She has never met anyone who is fully healed, because there is no such thing.

Does the Pinch Match the Ouch?

This was one of my favorite lines from the entire conversation.

Sabrina pushes back hard on the “just stay single and protect your peace” advice all over social media. In her words, “No, baby, that’s just avoidance.”

To be clear, she is not saying you should stay with someone who ignores your emotions or consistently mistreats you. But you will meet people who make you feel anxious or avoidant or who remind you of a parent. That doesn’t automatically make them bad people.

“That just means that we need to see, does the pinch match the ouch? And the way that I’m perceiving this and the story I’m creating, is that matching the actual situation that’s in front of me?”

I’ll admit it: even at 41, sixteen years into my healing journey and seventeen years as an entrepreneur, I still sometimes feel ready to freak out. I have a therapist I can call when I need him. Sometimes he tells me something I already knew. That’s fine, because it moves the needle forward.

I also used to tell myself I was better off alone. Now, in the relationship I’m in, I’m willing to fight for it. I’m not the guy who walks out over the smallest thing anymore.

Burn the Checklist

I shared that my most viral piece of content ever started with this line: “Most women are single because they want to date guys who are six feet tall.” A friend of mine inspired it. He is an Army Ranger, college educated, and one of the most impressive people I know, and dating was a nightmare for him for years.

So I asked Sabrina what mistakes she sees people making that eliminate possibilities in their dating lives.

Dating has become Amazon

Sabrina works with both men and women, and she sees the same problem on both sides. People treat dating like online shopping:

“I want it at my door immediately. I want to know what is gonna happen. I want to know how it’s gonna go. If I don’t know, then I want it to go and get out of my way. And if it’s not here right now, then f***ing cancel my order.”

We have lost the ability to be uncomfortable. God forbid you get rejected.

Love is not a bumper sticker

People also see dating in black and white. “If he wanted to, he would.” Sabrina calls these bumper stickers, because they’re easy. But love and relationships are not linear, and they are not binary.

She tried the “text this to get the guy” advice from dating coaches. It got her attention, but not the kind she wanted.

She also used to believe that if someone didn’t text her every day, they didn’t like her. Then she met Ryan, who was not a big texter. On their first date, she told him directly that she didn’t do casual, and that if he wanted to see her again, it was because they were building something.

His response surprised her:

“Dude, you were more afraid of losing yourself than you were of me.”

How do you want to feel?

When people come to Sabrina struggling, she asks what they want in a relationship. She usually hears a list: someone who travels with me, texts good morning, buys me flowers.

But most people forget how they want to feel with someone. Do you want to feel seen, heard, and understood? Safe?

“‘Yeah, I do feel safe with this person sometimes.’ ‘Okay, so then you don’t actually feel safe with this person.’ Because ‘sometimes I feel safe with them’ is conditional.”

She wanted daily texting. What she actually needed was an anchor, someone who set boundaries. In her experience, what you need is usually what you didn’t have growing up.

“The checklist, burn the f***ing checklist.”

Ask better questions

I shared something similar. After my last relationship ended, I realized I had been asking the wrong questions. One of my mentors used to say, “The quality of your questions determine the quality of your life.” On paper, that relationship checked every box except the two that mattered most: religion and family.

So I created what I call the 60 questions. Now I’m with someone incredible, and we’re building and growing together.

For me, it starts with telling the truth. I used to be “my way or the highway,” and that cost me amazing opportunities. Now it’s, “This is who I am. Where are you? Can we build something together?” People are afraid to say what they need because they don’t want to seem needy or get rejected. Sometimes you will be rejected, even inside a relationship. It isn’t always personal.

Boundaries and the Fear of Losing People

As a man, I think there is nothing more attractive than someone who simply tells the truth. So I asked Sabrina: how much of her work is just getting people to admit the truth?

She said many people intellectually get it. Then they get triggered and dysregulated, and they feel like they can’t make a different choice, because they are back to being a child.

“When you go back to feeling like you’re six, at six years old, I was terrified of losing people. I didn’t want anyone to go anywhere. So of course I did everything I needed to to keep them. I’m not a six-year-old child anymore.”

Nothing changes if nothing changes. You have to learn to be uncomfortable, handle rejection, and say, “I don’t need an answer right now.”

“Will this book fix me?”

People often message Sabrina asking if she can fix them. Her answer:

“Nothing’s gonna fix you, because you’re not broken.”

Taking up space can feel threatening, because it means you might lose people. As she put it, “If you’re not ready to grieve, then you’re not ready to be authentically yourself.”

When she started creating content, she lost longtime friends. People unfollowed her, and some announced it. She had to be okay with criticism. Her mom used to say, “If you don’t stand for something, you fall for everything.”

One question from her therapist changed her life: “What are the parts of yourself that you think are unlovable?” Her answer was her anxiety. She realized she couldn’t expect anyone else to accept a part of her she didn’t accept herself. Today, her partner will sometimes tell her, “I don’t think you’re too much, by the way.”

Two people, two stories

Sabrina described a common situation (not involving abuse or neglect): two people date for one to three months. One says, “This isn’t right,” and moves on. The other mourns for eight months and keeps checking the other person’s social media.

“The only difference between the two is the story that they’re telling themselves.”

The person who can’t let go usually misses how they felt, the idea of the person, and their potential. The other person saw the relationship for what it actually was.

Confirmation bias then kicks in: “See, I knew it. All men do this.” Sabrina’s response is to go back to the beginning. What questions were you asking? Did you set boundaries? Were you going slow? Were you challenging your thoughts?

The celebrity who canceled twice

Sabrina shared a story to show what holding a boundary looks like. A well-known celebrity reached out asking to book a session with her. She admitted she started “future faking,” imagining where it might lead, and had to remind herself to stay present.

Her team cleared her day. Ten minutes before the session, his team canceled and asked to move it to Monday. She has a firm cancellation policy but made an exception and fit him in at 9 a.m. At 8:55 on Monday, they canceled again and offered to pay her.

She told them it wasn’t about the money. It was about principle. She offered one more reschedule and never heard from them again.

Her takeaway: if she had held her boundary from the start, she would have ended up in the same place, but without losing four client appointments, rearranging her day, or losing her dignity.

“If me setting a boundary with you is what sends you running, then you’re not f***ing right for me.”

Serve the people at your table

I tell my team the same thing. We serve the people at our table. At a four-day event I hosted, I offered refunds within the first hour. About 25 minutes in, a woman asked for a refund because I curse. I gave it to her immediately. She wasn’t my person.

I used to be a massive people pleaser, because as a kid I had to keep the people around me calm to stay safe. In my twenties, I was terrified of rejection. Now I chase it. Your no doesn’t change my life.

And no doesn’t always mean “I hate you.” Sometimes it means “not right now.” Their dog died. Their business is struggling. They’re sick. They have a life too.

How to Regulate When You Feel Rejected

So how do you get back to center when rejection throws you off?

Step 1: Feel it

Sabrina said she lets herself feel it. When the celebrity situation fell apart, she told Ryan she was bummed, cried for five minutes, and felt better for having done it.

Step 2: Question your core beliefs

Core beliefs run the show: “I’m not worthy. I’m not good enough. I’m too much. I’m not enough.” These become absolutes.

“Your feelings are valid, but they’re not factual.”

Just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to follow it. Sabrina compared thoughts to clouds passing by.

She also explained the salience network, the part of the brain that hyperfocuses on whatever you’re focused on. If you go looking for six yellow things, you’ll suddenly see yellow everywhere. The same thing happens with rejection. Focus on it, and your brain finds more of it.

She shared an example. A manager she hired misunderstood their agreement and it cost her business. The next day, a brand emailed her with a $200,000 contract. She realized she would have had to pay that manager 15% of it.

Step 3: Regulate your nervous system

Sabrina’s quick regulation tools include:

•Snapping a rubber band on your wrist

•Sour candy

•Ice cubes

•The mammalian dive response

•Going for a walk

•Doing 20 jumping jacks

“Regulating doesn’t mean you all of a sudden feel better. It means your prefrontal cortex is activated, so you can come from a place of choice.”

Step 4: Separate facts from the story

“They didn’t text me” is a fact. “They hate me, they’re leaving me, and I’ll be alone forever” is the story.

Step 5: Get into your body

Sabrina explained that as children we are bottom up. We feel things in our bodies, and since no one taught us what to do with emotions, we go to our heads and create meaning. As adults, we are top down. We start in our heads and avoid our bodies at all costs.

That is why she suggests replacing “why” questions with “I don’t like.”

•Instead of: “Why didn’t they choose me?”

•Try: “I don’t like that they didn’t choose me.”

•Then ask: “What don’t I like about it?” Maybe the answer is, “I didn’t feel like a priority.”

Step 6: Ask how old you feel

Then ask, “How old do I feel right now? Do I feel seven?” If so, this probably isn’t about the text. It’s about perceived abandonment. From there, you can support that younger version of yourself:

“Yeah, dude, no wonder that would feel really shitty, but this isn’t Dad. And I need you to know that I’ve got your back, and I’m gonna take care of this.”

Reparenting Yourself

Reparenting is real. At some point, you have to step up and give yourself what you should have been given.

I run two companies and a podcast. I’m not texting back at three in the afternoon. But when I’m with you, I’m with you. We have become so attached to our phones that we forget the real world is out there.

Around four years ago, when I lived in Las Vegas, a woman I had been on two dates with told me she didn’t like how I communicated. She had texted 90 minutes earlier and saw that I had posted on social media. I explained that I have a team who posts for me, and then I told her I recognized I wasn’t the right person for her.

The old Michael would have apologized and sent a flood of texts trying to become who she wanted. That moment was me reparenting myself. My boundaries mattered more than her need for something that didn’t fit my life.

Sabrina summed it up perfectly:

“Your boundaries have to be stronger than their discomfort, because then they’re regulating through you.”

The text Ryan sent

Early on, Ryan texted about once every other day. Sabrina chose to sit in the discomfort and pay attention to how he showed up. After about a month, she asked for more texting between dates.

He said no, and explained why. He worked in tech and stared at a screen all day. He’d rather have consistent dates and get to know her in person. If that didn’t work for her, no hard feelings.

Her reaction: “My God, that was so hot.”

Her advice when something bothers you early on: ask yourself, “In a year, if I live with this person, will that still bother me?” Instead of fixating on texts, look at how they show up. Are they progressing the relationship? What are your conversations like?

Sabrina pointed out that black and white thinking, and the “see, I knew I was right” reaction, is often the very behavior that keeps people single.

Accountability Goes Both Ways

We also talked about how we’ve villainized avoidant people while treating anxious people as victims. Sabrina’s view: they are the same side of the coin. Take accountability.

I believe a lot of people today need to toughen up. We grew up with participation trophies and the message that life should be perfect. I’m concerned about dating advice that tells women to hold out for everything, and I’m equally concerned about men who don’t stand up for themselves. I recently saw a man sitting in his car playing a video game while a pregnant woman pumped the gas.

Sabrina’s response went straight to accountability:

“What you allow is showing you how much you love yourself.”

She shared that she demands a lot in her own relationship. She is the primary earner, Ryan works for her company, and they have agreements that work for them, like him doing the cooking and cleaning. She still expects him to show up for her in the ways she needs.

Triggers are not red flags

Sabrina pushed back on the idea that “if your partner triggers you, they’re not right for you.”

“Anybody’s gonna trigger you, because a trigger is a neutral action or inaction… Your responsibility is the meaning making, the story, and then communicating like a goddamn adult to your partner.”

If you can’t handle a delayed text, she asked, how will you handle a truly hard conversation with a partner?

Short-term discomfort or long-term pain?

Her brother once asked her something that changed her life:

“Sab, do you want to be uncomfortable for the next six to eight months while you walk away from this, or the rest of your life? To you, which one’s longer?”

She chooses short-term discomfort for long-term gain over abandoning herself to keep people around. As she said, knowing something is bad for you doesn’t mean you’ll change. That’s why, as she put it, people stay in relationships for twenty years when they should have been in them for twenty minutes.

Why You Should Read This Book

When I asked why someone should read Why Am I Like This?, Sabrina was direct: the book will change your life only if you actually implement what’s in it.

She said self-compassion releases more dopamine than external validation. When you can say, “Given everything I’ve been through, of course it makes sense I would feel this,” you are holding space for yourself.

“This book is the roadmap. It’s the blueprint. It helps you break your bullshit blueprint.”

But there is no shortcut. We both see people looking for overnight hacks. People look at where we are now and think reading a book will get them there. It won’t. You have to do what’s in the book, for years, falling down and getting back up.

“Because if you know better, you might not do better. And now is your chance to actually f***ing do something.”

I don’t read many physical books, but I kept flipping page after page of this one saying, “Yep, yep, yep.” I wish someone had put this book in my hands at 25 instead of The Game.

What It Means to Be Unbroken

I closed the conversation the way I always do: what does it mean to be unbroken?

“To me, being unbroken just means you’re a human, because you’re not broken, there’s nothing to fix. You just have to heal through things.”

Sabrina explained that if we see ourselves as broken, we believe someone else has to fix us. Reframing it as “I’m a human going through an experience, healing from things I learned along the way” lets you move forward without shame and blame.

Key Takeaways

•Patterns start early. Attachment styles form from how caregivers responded to you from birth, and your brain repeats what is familiar.

•Awareness is not action. Knowing why you do something doesn’t change it. Implementation and integration do.

•Ask better questions. “How old do I feel?” and “Where did I learn this from?”

•Check the story. Does the pinch match the ouch?

•Burn the checklist. Focus on how you want to feel, not a list of traits.

•Be willing to lose people. Your boundaries have to be stronger than other people’s discomfort.

•Regulate first. Calm your nervous system, separate facts from the story, and support the younger version of you.

•Take accountability. What you allow shows you how much you value yourself.

•You are not broken. You are human, and you can heal.

Connect with Sabrina Zohar

•Website: SabrinaZohar.com

•Instagram and TikTok: @sabrina.zohar

•Podcast: The Sabrina Zohar Show

•Book: Why Am I Like This? Break Your Relationship Patterns and Create the Life That You Want

For the full episode and show notes, visit unbrokenbsgpodcast.com.

If this conversation gave you value, share it with someone in your life. If you’ve ever wondered why they are like this, it might help them too.

Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and until next time, be unbroken.