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…

Katie Price is back in the news, which is, of course, no great surprise. She rarely leaves it. This time, it’s the strange and unsettling business of her husband ‘going missing’ in Dubai that is making the headlines, with his father now suggesting he’s been arrested in and is even in jail.

Murky and unsettling is rather the weather system Katie lives in, of course. There is always a crisis, a feud, a frantic late-night video, a marriage teetering or falling apart in full public view.

She ‘met’ Lee Andrews (husband number four) online and they were married within days of meeting in the flesh.

It was her ninth engagement, if you’re keeping count, and plenty of people are. You can almost hear the bookies shortening the odds on how long this marriage lasts, if it’s not over already.

It would be easy to roll your eyes, and I understand the temptation. But I’ve never been able to join in. Because when I look at the long, chaotic run of her relationships, I see a woman reaching out, again and again, for something she has never once been allowed to have – the knowledge that in love there is safety and calm.

The lazy verdict is that she’s an attention-seeker, that the rolling drama are all just performance. I don’t believe it. There’s a kinder verdict too, that she’s simply unlucky in love, a hopeless romantic forever backing the wrong horse.

That one is closer to the mark, but I think it still misses what is really going on underneath.

I have spent my career sitting opposite people like Katie, and what I see is not bad luck. It is a pattern. And patterns, in my experience, are almost never accidents. They are about what we learned, a very long time ago, about what love is meant to feel like.

When we follow a pattern like this, we mimic the blueprint for relationships that was handed to us as children. Katie has spoken openly about being sexually abused as a child, and about a string of frightening relationships through her teens and 20s. I suspect it may be the most important thing to understand about her.

Childhood is where all our expectations are formed. If those early years are warm and safe, then a calm home becomes your default – what you expect – for the rest of your life. But if they are frightening, if love arrives bound up with fear and betrayal, the mind learns that this is what love is.

Chaos becomes the baseline, and calm, when it finally comes along, feels wrong or suspicious, or even dull.

There is a name for what often happens next. Psychologists call it repetition. The wounded part of us is drawn, without ever quite choosing it, straight back towards the very thing that hurt us in the first place.

Some believe it is an attempt to master what we could not master as children, to go back and finally get it right, to make the bad man stay and turn kind.

Others think it is simpler than that, that the familiar, however painful, will always feel safer than the unknown.

Either way, you arrive in the same place. You keep choosing the person who is going to let you down, because somewhere deep inside, being let down is exactly what you are braced for and what you expect.

I once treated a woman, a clever and rather formidable solicitor, who had left three almost identical men. Every one of them controlling, every one unfaithful, every one slowly wearing her down.

She would sit in my consulting room, honestly bewildered, and ask why on earth this kept happening to her. When we traced it back, we found a father who came and went as he pleased, full of grand promises and empty of everything else.

She had spent her whole adult life falling for men who felt, the very moment she met them, wonderfully familiar. They felt like home. And that, of course, was the whole problem.

This is not an affliction of the rich and famous. I see it constantly in my patients and, if I’m honest, in my friends. The woman who swears blind that the next one will be different, and somehow finds herself with another version of the last. The man who mistakes jealousy for passion, because jealousy is what he watched growing up.

What can you do, if you suspect this might be you? The first step is also the hardest.

You have to see the pattern. Lay your relationships out in a row and look honestly at what they have in common. The uncomfortable answer, every time, is you. Not because any of it is your fault, but because you are the single thread running through all of them.

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

And finally, slow down. That intoxicating rush, the marriage within days, the bone-deep certainty that this, at last, is the one, is so very often the old wound talking, not the heart.

I hope Katie finds her way through all this. And I hope, if you’ve caught a glimpse of yourself somewhere in the above, you find your way through too. The blueprint can be redrawn. It just takes a little courage to pick up the pencil and start.

Kylie’s private agony

When Kylie Minogue was first treated for breast cancer in 2005, at the age of 36, she did it in the full glare of the world’s press. 

So there is something quietly remarkable about the revelation, in her new Netflix documentary, that she told almost no one about a second diagnosis in 2021. 

Her reason is heartbreaking in its honesty. 

She has described being ‘a shell of a person’, so frightened of what lay ahead that at times she didn’t want to leave the house.

There is a particular cruelty to a second brush with cancer. 

The first time, you fight, you recover, and you let yourself believe it is behind you. 

When it happens again, it steals something more than your health – it steals your faith that you ever truly escaped. 

Choosing who gets to know may be one of the few things a patient controls.

Privacy is its own courage.

Not a single approved medicine for cocaine addiction So a new trial, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, deserves a look. Researchers gave people with a serious cocaine problem a single dose of psilocybin, the active alkaloid in magic mushrooms and weeks of psychotherapy before and after. Six months on, about a third of those given it had stopped using cocaine. The drug seems to prise the mind open, loosening dependence. It is early days but this is thrilling. 

Dr Max prescribes… The Examined Life

This slim and beautiful book by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has stayed with me for years. It is a collection of short, true stories drawn from his decades in the consulting room, each one a small window into why we do the baffling things we do. There are no lectures and no jargon. You can read each in a few minutes. It is one of the wisest books about people I’ve read. 

Buy it at the Mail bookshop here.