Psychologist Ainhoa ​​Vila explains why many people stay with someone who hurts them: "Your brain is conditioned."

Staying in a harmful relationship has a psychological explanation that's more common than it might seem at first glance. Psychologist Ainhoa ​​Vila , a social media content creator, explained in one of her videos what leads a person to remain attached to someone who hurts them . "When someone treats you badly, you hate them with all your might, but with the slightest shred of hope, you love them as if there had never been a mistake, and therefore, you fall again," she explains about this problem.

"It's supernormal; it's the intermittent reinforcement of a lifetime," Vila clarifies, a pattern studied by behavioral psychology, where the reward is delivered unpredictably. This concept is related to the theory of operant conditioning , developed by American psychologist BF Skinner, this expert points out.

"When behavior is reinforced from time to time, it becomes much more resistant to change, and therefore becomes much stronger and much more addictive ," he warns.

"Your partner isn't always affectionate; sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't... And that unpredictability makes your reward system, that is, dopamine, fire much more strongly than if you were receiving constant love," explains the psychologist.

This means that "every nice message, 'I miss you,' 'I love you,' etc., reinforces all the waiting, the silence, and the previous abuse," she continues. In this sense, the person has "learned to endure" or has "grown accustomed to enduring" the "small doses of affection."

In a situation like this, behavioral therapy attempts to solve this problem and break the vicious cycle through "contingency restructuring" and "operant extinction." In other words, he clarifies, it involves "working to ensure that this inconsistent affect ceases to have reinforcing value."

"You are taught to detect, stop, and not respond to that intermittent behavior as such," he adds, an approach known as an "extinction program," which must be linked to "decision-making training under a stable contingency."

In other words, Vila points out that "it's not that you can't quit, it's that your brain is super conditioned to it ," he concludes.