“Why do I keep doing this?” — on patterns, and how they change

Almost everyone who comes to therapy brings a version of the same question. Why do I keep choosing partners who can’t commit? Why do I freeze every time I’m criticised? Why does everything feel fine until things are going well — and then I sabotage it?

There’s usually an answer. It’s just not where people expect to find it.

Patterns are old solutions, not character flaws

Here’s a useful way to think about it: the patterns that frustrate you now were almost certainly intelligent once. A child who learned that staying quiet kept the peace; that achievement earned love; that wanting things led to disappointment — that child wasn’t being difficult. They were adapting, brilliantly, to their particular world.

The trouble comes later. The strategies we needed at seven rarely fit our lives at thirty-seven — but they run automatically, below awareness, like software written long ago that’s never been updated. We don’t experience them as choices. We experience them as just how things are, or just who I am.

Why insight takes time

If you’ve ever thought “I know why I do it, so why can’t I stop?” — you’ve discovered something important. Knowing about a pattern intellectually is not the same as being free of it. These habits live in the emotional brain, and they’re updated through experience, not information.

That’s where therapy comes in. In a psychodynamic approach, patterns don’t just get discussed — they tend to show up, live, in the room. The way you relate to me will quietly echo the way you relate to people outside. That can sound alarming, but it’s actually the opportunity: it means we can catch the pattern in the act, gently and in real time, and you get to try something different with someone who won’t respond the old way.

Change at the roots

I often think of symptoms — anxiety, low mood, repeating conflicts — as branches. You can prune branches, and sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But psychodynamic therapy is interested in the roots: the old beliefs and feelings the branches grow from. When something shifts at the roots, the changes tend to spread in ways you didn’t plan — relationships soften, choices widen, the inner critic loses some of its conviction.

It isn’t fast, and it isn’t magic. It’s two people paying close, kind attention to things that usually go unnoticed. But in my experience, that attention — sustained over time — is quietly powerful.

If you’ve noticed a pattern you’d like to understand, you’re welcome to get in touch.