Essence: The daddy trap: he was your first love. Are you seeking his traits in a mate?

A woman is walking down the street and falls into a hole.

So I ask you, how many times do you think it should take sistagirl landing in the hole--a muddy and funky hole, I might add--before she learns to walk around it? Once? Twice? After she breaks a leg?

I ask you this because many of us have the habit of falling for the same wrong man time after time. This one's named Terry, the last one was Hakim and the one before him was Pete. But the thing is, they're all similar in some way. And that way may be comfortable to us because it reminds us of Daddy.

Emotionally speaking, say psychologists, we often seek out Daddy's double. Our parents (or whoever raised us) are our first loves. In romance we pursue their qualities, both good and bad, explains Michelle Morancie, Ph.D., a psychologist in Brooklyn. So the woman who gripes about her man, "He's just like my father," may not realize that that was the attraction. Morancie has worked with many women who describe disturbing patterns in their love lives. Like a sister we'll call Lillian, a 37-year-old lab tech, who broke up with her long-term boyfriend recently. "Every man Lillian has been involved with has had other women," says Morancie. "She's aware of it, but she's trying to be the winner in the battle with all the other women."

Lillian's first letdown in love, which set the tone for all the ones to come, was with her father. She knew who he was, but that was the extent of their connection. "She never felt she was important to him," Morancie says. Now she gets involved with men who have multiple partners and burns herself out trying to be number one with them.

Women replay their relationships with their father in many ways. If Daddy was critical, we may marry a critic. If he was controlling, we may fall in love with control freaks. But, say experts, for sisters, the biggest issue seems to be abandonment: fathers who were never there, emotionally withdrawn or often away, or those who wrestled with addictions to alcohol, drugs, women, work or gambling. Dads who have any kind of addiction are unavailable, says Morancie. "Their kids felt the addiction was more important than they were, and it lowered their self-esteem," she explains. Yet as adults they are drawn like a magnet to painful love--just like Daddy's. And they think maybe this time they can make it turn out all right.

Sonia Banks, Ph.D., a Richmond therapist, says only by healing the wounds left by our dad can we learn to form satisfying romantic partnerships. She says women who ask why men always leave (or were never quite there in the first place) need to start asking themselves, Why am I re-creating an abandonment theme? "Common sense would say that if a man is not giving you what you need, step off," she says. But sometimes the little girl within--who's waiting in vain for the moment when Daddy will come home and scoop her up--keeps the grown woman riveted, afraid to move on.

You have to identify these tendencies, says Banks. She suggests that you write in your journal, look for your patterns and take them to a therapist so you can work on them together. Sisterfriends should help one another with this, Banks says. You might say to your ace, "We both have our `addiction': Mine is Joe, yours is Larry," and then agree to sound off when you see each other exhibiting self-defeating behavior. We must cultivate awareness and a level of self-care that allows us to choose a mate who is healthy and open to love, thereby gently moving from hole to whole.

Pamela Johnson is a contributing writer for ESSENCE.