I Keep Getting Into the Same Painful Relationship Pattern

Most people who come to therapy with a recurring relationship pattern arrive already knowing what the pattern is. What they don’t have is a way out of it.

“I know exactly what I’m doing. I know I do this every time. I’m doing it again.”

They say it ruefully, sometimes with a kind of black humour, sometimes with a despair that has been worn down into a shrug. They have read enough, talked to enough friends, sat with the pattern long enough that they could write it on a postcard. The unavailable ones. The ones they over-functioned for. The ones who didn’t quite see them. The ones they pulled back from the moment they actually wanted them. The diagnosis, in their hands, is impeccable. They are still in it.

Insight is not the same as change

This is one of the more peculiar facts of being a person. We can know quite precisely what we are doing and continue to do it. The relation between insight and change is not at all what people think it is. We assume, perhaps because the culture has trained us to, that understanding the problem is most of the work, and that the rest is a kind of follow-through. In my experience of therapy it is rarely like that. The understanding tends to arrive years before the change. Sometimes the understanding arrives and the change does not come at all.

What is going on here? Not stupidity, certainly. The people I see who keep landing in the same shape of relationship are not failing to learn. They are learning rather a lot, in fact, about what they keep doing and why. The trouble is that the learning happens in one part of them and the choosing happens in another. By the time the conscious mind has noticed a particular sort of charm, or a particular kind of unavailability, or the early warning sign that this is the same relationship pattern again, some other, faster part of the self has already decided.

Patterns of this kind have, I think, been somewhat misdescribed. We have been encouraged to think of them as bad habits, or unhealed wounds, or, in the more clinical accounts, the legacies of attachment patterns. There is something to all of these. But they each, in different ways, locate the pattern as a problem to be fixed, a remnant to be cleared up. This isn’t quite what they are. Patterns of this kind are intelligent. They were set up to do a job. They are still doing it. Often the job they are doing is no longer one we want done. But it is being done with great efficiency, by a part of the self that learned its work in conditions where the work was needed.

Where the pattern came from

For queer people specifically, the conditions in which these relationship patterns set themselves up are worth thinking about. Most of us did not grow up watching queer love handled well. The relationships we saw were not ours. The advice we absorbed was not designed with us in mind. We started our romantic lives, often, improvising, without templates and without the everyday education in love that other people had been receiving since they were small.

Improvisation copies the shapes available to it, including some that did not work even when they were the only shapes on offer. We may also have grown up in homes where being fully oneself came at a cost, and the body learned, early, that being fully seen is a risky proposition. A pattern that involves not being quite seen, or seeing partners who don’t quite show up, or attaching to people who can’t quite be there, is not, in this light, a piece of bad luck. It is a piece of intelligent design.

The other thing the body learned, in many cases, is that one is not quite enough. Internalised shame does its quietest work in the choice of partner. It picks people who will confirm the verdict. Then, in the relationship, it is proved right. The pattern is, in this sense, not failing. It is succeeding at what it was set up to succeed at, which was to be right.

I think this is part of why insight on its own does not break the cycle. The pattern does not feel itself to be wrong. It is doing exactly what it learned to do, and there is some part of the self that is, in a way that is hard to admit, satisfied each time it works. “I knew this would happen.” That sentence, said often enough, is not only a complaint. It is also a confirmation. We had been right about ourselves all along.

What actually shifts a relationship pattern

What does change a relationship pattern of this kind? Not, I think, a heroic effort of will. The will is not the part of the self that runs the pattern. What seems to help, in my experience, is something slower and stranger. It involves catching the pattern earlier, before the body has committed. The first moment of attraction. The second date. The pull. What happens in one’s body when they don’t reply for a day. What one decides to overlook. What one tells oneself one does not need to ask. The interesting work is in these small, fast moments, the ones we are most inclined to skim over. They are where the choice is actually made.

It also involves having a different experience. Relationship patterns shift, mostly, by being given new evidence, not by being argued out of the old. This is part of why therapy itself can be a useful place for this kind of work, and part of why it matters who one’s therapist is. Not because of any particular technique, but because the relationship in the room turns out to be a place where the old story is allowed not to play out. One can be known without it ending the way the pattern always predicted. Slowly, that begins to register. The body gets new data.

There is one more thing worth saying, because almost everyone who works on this discovers it eventually. Stable, available, kind people often start out feeling boring before they start feeling safe. The body has been so trained on chaos that the absence of chaos can read, briefly, as the absence of love. Knowing this in advance does not prevent the experience. It only prevents the experience from being mistaken for a verdict.

“I’m not feeling the spark.”

Sometimes that means the relationship is wrong. Sometimes it means the body has not yet caught up with the fact that it is, for once, not in danger.

The pattern made sense once. Most patterns do. It learned what it needed to learn at the time it was set up, and it has been running the same programme ever since. That doesn’t mean it has to be the rest of one’s life. But the work of changing it is slower than naming it, and slower than wishing one could, and almost never happens alone.

Therapy for recurring relationship patterns

I work with LGBTQ+ and queer clients in individual therapy, online and in person from my practices in London and Hitchin. If something here has resonated, you’re welcome to book a free 20-minute discovery call through my website.