Some people unwittingly choose destructive relationships over and over again.
The consequences of their choices are painful and emotionally damaging, yet those that engage in this repetitive behavior never seem to learn from their experience. Traditional psychoanalytic theory offered an intriguing, yet seemingly unlikely explanation for such self-destructive relationship choices. People who choose such partners must derive pleasure from being mistreated. Simply stated, the choosers are masochistic. Yet, in my years of doing therapy, I never found any client who received any pleasure at all, conscious or unconscious, from the abuse and neglect heaped on them by narcissistic or otherwise destructive partners.