Habits

In Context, they give an analogy to help you understand and let go of things you always seem to come back to.
Here is what they say:
They say, "Every situation, every habit you have, there's something you benefit from, or like, or take pleasure from. The idea is that you will not let go of something, regardless of if it's bad, as long as there's pleasure being taken from it. To illustrate this point, I present the following analogy:
Here's a $20 bill. Sweet action. Now, forget about it. Ignore me as I place it in this wad of newspaper. K. Now, I'm gonna throw this piece of garbage away and take out the trash. No problem, right? It's garbage.
But no, your mind isn't on the garbage part, but on the cash inside that you know is there, even though I told you to ignore it."

Now, the classic psychological approach used by most people, consciously or otherwise, dictates that this situation is governed by a cost/benefit analysis weighing whether the amount of money is great enough to warrant digging through the trash to get it.
The problem is that we are incredibly overconfident in our own sense of discretion. The newspaper analogy is weak, because, well, for most all but the rich, there's not much shy of a dime or a nickel or a penny that isn't worth reaching into the top of the trash to recover.

So let's switch it up. You're in a public bathroom and you see a bill in the urinal, or toilet. Are you gonna retrieve it? How much before it's not worth it? How much are you willing to rationalize to get the value out of that cash? Basically, for me, if it's a bill, it's worth it. I'll wash it off and call it good. How about you? Would your answer change if you were alone in the bathroom? If it were crowded? I encourage you to really consider this.

K, how about if there's a $20 bill with dog shit on top? You get the point. Smoking is a $10 bill covered in lung cancer, fatigue, stench, etc. Yet we still smoke. So either the bad isn't as bad as we make it out to be, or $10 is worth a whole lot more than we think.

The problem is this situation is flawed, especially when we apply it to driving forces, like chemical addiction and, well, instinct. Most people who have habits to kick fall into one of these two categories. "David, how come I can't quit smoking/drinking/shooting up?" "David, how come I keep coming back to this asshole guy/girl all the time?"

Well, chemical addiction is difficult because it becomes instinct, it becomes an unconscious drive, on par with eating, breathing, drinking, and reproducing. Ever watch Trainspotting? Yea. There's no amount of shit not worth wading through.

So if chemical addiction is on par with natural biological instinct, then, is it such a stretch to see why you can't stop coming back to whoever, regardless of how shitty your relationship is? You're fighting against the single strongest biological drive there could ever be, to reproduce, i.e. have sex, at any cost. Your body is gonna find ways to get you in a position to have sex, regardless of mental trauma. It's clever like that.

So how does one overcome that? That's the big question, I guess. Context will tell you that you have to separate what you like from the situation, then discard the things you don't like. Now, it's not like one can extract the pleasure from nicotine without taking on the addiction/other bad stuff, or have actual sex without a partner, or satisfy one's desire to hold someone without having to be intimate, or for that matter, extract that money without dealing with the shit, so what is one to do?

Either relinquish your desire for those things or replace them with less harmful versions, i.e. deal with withdrawal pains and quit, or find something else to do, e.g. chew gum or find a new partner. Replacement is clearly easier than just quitting, but people aren't phenomenally good at picking good replacements, e.g. cigarettes with chewing tobacco, one psycho/abusive partner for another, strikingly similar psycho/abusive partner who was easy to come by because you know the ropes.

So here's the question one must ask when approaching a problem situation rationally:
"What is it that I'm getting out of this I'm not willing to let go of, and would it be possible to obtain whatever that is outside of this particular avenue, in a safer/more reliable/healthier way, or, could I just give it up altogether?"

The problem is it requires you to be rational. And then to actually DO something, or, NOT do something, as the case may be.