Examining Our Relationship Patterns

Why Does this Keep Happening? Examining Our Relationship Patterns

You’re several months into a new relationship (friend or romantic). You’ve enjoyed your time together, and you feel hopeful things will last. But something’s nagging at you. You find yourself feeling insecure when they don’t reply to your messages soon enough. You’ve noticed they often change or cancel your plans last-minute. You try to push away the anxiety and disappointment, telling yourself, “Don’t mess this up!” But ultimately, a familiar feeling of insecurity has crept in. “Why does this keep happening?” Relationships can be complicated in the best of circumstances, but when we’ve experienced repeated heartache or harm, they can feel like a vicious cycle. How do we make sense of things?

How Familiarity and Fear of Aloneness Influence Attraction

Imagine you’re in a new restaurant with friends. You’re unfamiliar with the food, and you’re next in line – time to make a decision! Sometimes you go for something new, or maybe you ask for a recommendation, but not today. You’re hungry, you really want something satisfying, and you don’t want to send it back, so you pick the item with the most familiar ingredients. You get your food and it’s the right temperature and tastes pretty good, but something’s off. Is it the flavor? The texture? It’s bugging you…but not enough to send it back. Your hunger and fear of sending it back outweigh the things you don’t like about it, so you stick with it. 

We can experience similar dynamics in our relationships, but we don’t typically think to ourselves, “This person’s lack of emotional availability feels familiar and I don’t want to be alone, so I’m going to ignore how it makes me feel and stick with them.” As children we couldn’t leave our environment, so we adapted to ignore the things that hurt us, and focused on the things that gave us hope or a sense of control. Acknowledging our caregivers’ shortcomings was too overwhelming, so maybe we focused on their better qualities and told ourselves that any pain we experienced was our fault. After all, if it’s my fault, I can fix it! We carried this adaptation into adulthood, ignoring painful feelings and focusing on other things instead. Our goal to have and keep relationships continued to outweigh our other needs. 

Understanding Our Adaptations

Therapy often gets pigeonholed as nothing more than “blaming your parents”. But this is an oversimplification. Understanding our adaptations/coping mechanisms means acknowledging that not all our needs were met in childhood, and we had to adapt in order to live in that environment. Adaptations can include things like denial, avoidance, or self-blame for feelings that couldn’t be held by our caregivers. We might also split our emotions, ourselves, and other people into categories of good and bad (or acceptable and unacceptable), giving us a false sense of justice and security. In order to change our relationship patterns, we need to understand the childhood adaptations we’ve carried into adulthood. 

This is not to say therapy never includes parent-blame, therapists have our own wounds and adaptations after all. But with education and support, therapists can learn to recognize the way our wounds impact the work we do with clients (for better or worse). If you find yourself in a situation where you feel uncomfortable with the amount of blame (or lack thereof) being put on your parents, let your therapist know – this can be a golden opportunity to have a different experience that leads to healing and change. 

Therapy can help us recognize and understand the adaptations that may be causing us to encounter the same types of relationship struggles over and over again. Importantly, it can help us to see that self-blame is one of these adaptations that causes us to see ourselves and others unrealistically and leads us to use up time and energy trying to extinguish painful or uncomfortable emotions instead of communicating our needs, setting boundaries, and letting go of relationships that aren’t a good match. As with anything worthwhile, healthy relationships with ourselves and others take time, commitment, and patience. But we don’t have to do it alone. Reach out if you’d like support. 

Ileana Arganda-Stevens, LMFT #129032

Therapist/Program Manager/Supervisor

she/her