Why the Same Old Patterns Keep Repeating
When patterns keep repeating it is not a failure to learn. It is often an attempt to repair something that was too much to bear at the time.
Most of us carry a pattern that keeps coming back. It often seems to have a momentum of its own, whatever we do to avoid it. Patterns keep repeating for reasons, and the reasons are rarely the ones we blame ourselves for.
Sometimes we can see it clearly. The same argument, with different people. The job or the boss that turns out like the last one. The way we still are around our parents, decades on, almost to the word. Who we keep becoming in a relationship, no matter who it is with.
More often we cannot. A sense of loss, or a looming sadness. The row that went out of all proportion, and afterwards we could not say what it was about. Going cold on someone for days without ever deciding to. Pulling away from whoever is being kindest. We get close to naming it, then lose it. All that stays is the familiarity: we have been here before, and we still do not know how.
What is clearer is where it leaves us. The same disappointment, arriving on schedule. Stuck in work, or in love, or in both. Somewhere we did not choose and do not want. Suddenly we find ourselves feeling a certain age, hurt or lost. And then blaming ourselves for being back there at all, as though we had chosen it.
It brings sadness, and frustration, and after long enough something flatter than either.
Why patterns keep repeating even when we understand them
It is tempting to think the answer is to work it out. Sometimes that helps. Often we have worked it out, more than once, and found that the knowing sits alongside the pattern rather than ending it.
Why patterns keep repeating with the same people and situations
Often, in an attempt to repair, we unconsciously recreate the very situation we swore we would never be in again.
Not because we have failed to learn, but because somehow we are trying to get beyond what we could not take in at the time. For some of us that is nameable: an abandonment, a betrayal, a devastation. For others it is neglect that nobody ever called neglect, or no single event at all, just a dynamic we grew up inside and took to be normal. Whichever it was, the truth of it was more than we could bear at the age we were. So we did not bear it. We managed it instead.
And the need to heal past that, rather than around it, is a natural one.
We go back towards it, or towards something shaped like it, because that is where the unfinished part is. Sometimes it is recent and nameable. More often it is early, from before there were words for it, which is the territory of the primal wound.
How depression fits the pattern
Depression can settle over the same situations, the same relationships, the same kind of work. It feels like being stuck, and nothing more than that. It can also be an attempt at repair, which is almost impossible to see while we are in it. Mind has clear, practical information on depression itself if that is what you are looking for first.
The flatness tends to arrive where the aliveness would have been, and it is not empty. The anger turned inwards. The shame we tell ourselves is ours. A humiliation we never got over and decided was true. The inadequacy we keep in at all costs, made worse by every comparison.
Every one of those began outside us. The anger had an object. The shame came from someone. The humiliation was done to us. At some point they were taken in and filed as facts about who we are, and that is the part that can be worked with.
None of which means the pattern is there to be admired, or that we should wait until we understand it before wanting it to stop.
The defences we built, and what they cost
The overwhelm was more than we could let ourselves feel at the time, so we found ways to manage it. Not one decision, but defences built up over years: the things we stopped expecting, the subjects we learned to avoid, the version of ourselves we put forward instead. They worked, and at the time they were the only ones open to us. That is why they stayed.
What they cost is that the feeling never got finished. And they rarely come down on their own, because not being seen is part of what they were built for.
Finally telling someone
Most of us put this off for a long time. Then something tips. A recommendation from someone we trust. A night that is worse than the others. A lonely decision to reach out.
And then we say it out loud, often for the first time, to someone who can sit with it. That is braver than it feels at the time, and the relief of it tends to surprise us. Not because anything has been solved, but because it is no longer being carried alone.
My part in it is mostly to be alongside you, and to help bring awareness to what has been running without any.
What we could not feel alone then, we can feel with someone alongside us now, at your pace.
What begins to change
What changes is rarely dramatic. You start catching the pattern while it is happening rather than three weeks later, and saying the things you would once have swallowed, until you find you are less committed to the version of yourself you built and more able to be who you actually are.
Hope does not wait for change, and change does not wait for hope. They come up together, each making a little more of the other possible. So hope that arrives before anything has visibly shifted is not a trick. It is part of the shift.
And your life starts to matter more to you, maybe in a way that is new. Your feelings, your preferences, what you want and what you will no longer put up with. Enough, now, to take seriously, to do something about, and to stand up for. Not only the symptoms lifting, but greater meaning, and richer contact with your own soul and spirit, and with other people.
If any of this is familiar, you can book a free fifteen minute call to see whether working together makes sense.
