DR MAX PEMBERTON: I know exactly what’s going on with Katie Price. I can’t believe no one else can see it – it’s so obvious when you spot the signs…

Of course, it’s no surprise that Katie Price is in the news again. He rarely leaves. This time, a strange and disturbing incident of her husband’s ‘disappearance’ in Dubai makes headlines; His father now claims that he has been arrested or even in prison.

Of course, the weather system Katie experiences is bleak and disturbing. There’s always a crisis, a feud, a crazy midnight video, a marriage on the rocks or falling apart in the public eye.

She ‘met’ Lee Andrews (husband number four) online and they were married a few days after meeting.

If you count, this was her ninth engagement, and so were a lot of people. You can almost hear the bookmakers betting on the odds of how long this marriage will last, if it’s not already over.

It would be easy to roll your eyes, and I understand the temptation. But I never managed to participate. Because when I look at her long, chaotic relationships, I see her reaching again and again for something a woman was once never allowed to have: the knowledge that there is safety and tranquility in love.

The lazy verdict is that she’s an attention seeker and the drama going on is just a performance. I do not believe in that. There is also a gentler judgment that he is unlucky in love, a hopeless romantic who is forever backing the wrong horse.

This is closer to the mark, but I think it still misses what’s really going on underneath.

I’ve spent my career sitting across from people like Katie, and what I see isn’t bad luck. This is a model. And in my experience, patterns are almost never coincidence. It’s about what we learned a long time ago about what love feels like.

When we follow such a model, we imitate the blueprint for relationships that was given to us in our childhood. Katie has spoken openly about being sexually abused as a child and about a series of frightening relationships she had in her teens and 20s. I suspect this may be the most important thing to understand about him.

Childhood is where all our expectations are formed. If those early years are warm and safe, then a quiet home becomes your default preference (what you expect) for the rest of your life. But if it is scary, if love comes bound with fear and betrayal, the mind learns what love is. like that.

Chaos becomes the baseline, and when calm eventually emerges, it feels wrong, suspicious, even boring.

What often happens next has a name. Psychologists call this relapse. The wounded part of us is drawn, unselfishly, directly to the thing that hurt us in the first place.

Some believe it’s an attempt to master the things we couldn’t master as children, to go back and find the truth in the end, to make sure the bad guy stays and turns good.

Others think it’s simpler than that, that the familiar will always feel safer than the unknown, no matter how painful.

Either way, you arrive at the same place. You keep choosing the person who will disappoint you because deep down, being disappointed is exactly what you’ve been preparing for and expecting.

Of course, the weather system Katie experiences is bleak and disturbing. There is always a crisis, a marriage that is publicly shaken or falling apart, writes Dr Max.

I once dealt with a woman who was a brilliant and very formidable lawyer who left behind three nearly identical men. Each of them is controlling, each of them is unfaithful, each of them is slowly wearing him down.

He would sit in my office genuinely confused and ask why this was happening to him. When we traced back, we found a father who came and went as he pleased, full of great promises and empty of everything else.

She had spent her entire adult life falling in love with men who felt incredibly familiar the moment she met them. They felt like they were at home. And of course that was the whole problem.

This is not a problem for the rich and famous. I see this all the time in my patients and, honestly, my friends. The woman who blindly swears that the next one will be different somehow finds herself facing another version of her end. The man who thinks jealousy is passion, because what he watched while growing up is jealousy.

What can you do if you suspect this is you? The first step is also the most difficult.

You need to see the pattern. Sort out your relationships and take an honest look at what they have in common. The annoying answer is always you. Not because any of these are your fault, but because you are the only thread going through all of them.

Then help comes. Trauma-focused therapy can be quietly transformative, slowly unwinding the impact of those early lessons until the calm no longer feels like a threat.

And finally, slow down. This intoxicating rush, the marriage that takes place in a few days, the bone-deep certainty that it is the one at the end, often comes not from the heart but from the old wound speaking.

I hope Katie finds a way to get through all of this. And hopefully, if you’ve caught a glimpse of yourself somewhere up there, you’ll find your way too. The plan can be redrawn. It takes some courage to pick up the pen and start.

Kylie’s special pain

When Kylie Minogue was treated for breast cancer for the first time in 2005, at the age of 36, she did so in front of the world press.

So there’s something quite remarkable about the revelation in the new Netflix documentary that he told almost no one about a second diagnosis in 2021.

The reason is heartbreaking in its honesty.

When Kylie Minogue was treated for breast cancer for the first time in 2005, at the age of 36, she did so in front of the world press.

He explained that he was a ‘shell of a person’ and that he was so afraid of what would happen next that he sometimes didn’t want to leave the house.

There is a special cruelty in dealing with cancer for the second time.

You fight the first time, you heal, and you convince yourself that everything is behind you.

When it occurs again, it steals more than just your health; It steals your belief that you are truly saved.

Choosing who to recognize may be one of the few things the patient has control over.

Secrecy is a courage in itself.

There is not a single approved drug against cocaine addiction. A new trial published in the journal JAMA Network Open is worth checking out. Researchers gave people with severe cocaine problems a single dose of psilocybin, the active alkaloid in magic mushrooms, and administered weeks of psychotherapy before and after. After six months, about a third of those given cocaine had stopped using cocaine. The drug appears to relax addiction by opening the mind. It’s still early, but it’s exciting.

Dr Max prescribes… Life Reviewed

This slim and beautiful book by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has stayed in my mind for years. This is a collection of short, true stories drawn from his decades in practice; each one a small window into why we do the confusing things we do. No lectures and no jargon. You can read each one in a few minutes. One of the wisest books I’ve read about people.

Buy it from the Mail bookstore here.