Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Relationship Patterns?
Different person. Different circumstances. Same relationship pattern.
Maybe you keep finding yourself with emotionally unavailable people. Maybe you're always the one doing the emotional heavy lifting. Perhaps you repeatedly ignore red flags, struggle to trust, fear being abandoned, shut down when someone gets too close, or find yourself having essentially the same conflict with completely different people.
Eventually, you may start wondering:
Why do I keep doing this when I know better?
That's actually a very interesting question, because recognizing a pattern consciously doesn't necessarily mean you've changed everything that may be contributing to it.
Psychology Has Been Studying Repeating Patterns for a Long Time
Different schools of psychology explain repeating relationship patterns in different ways.
Attachment theory, schema-focused approaches and psychodynamic theories all examine ways earlier experiences can influence expectations, emotional responses and behaviors in later relationships.
Research has also found connections between earlier family and peer experiences and patterns in romantic relationships later in adolescence and young adulthood.
In psychodynamic psychology, there is even a term called repetition compulsion. The American Psychological Association describes it, within psychoanalytic theory, as an unconscious tendency to reenact aspects of earlier experiences in new circumstances.
That doesn't mean every disappointing relationship is caused by childhood, trauma or some hidden psychological mechanism. Human relationships are much more complicated than that.
But it does give us an important idea to consider:
Some of the patterns influencing our relationships may operate outside our immediate conscious awareness.
“But I Already Know I Do This”
This is where things get especially interesting.
You can recognize that you repeatedly choose unavailable partners.
You can know that you become defensive when you feel criticized.
You can realize that you tolerate behavior you shouldn't.
You can understand that you learned certain relationship dynamics growing up.
And then you can find yourself doing it again anyway.
Clinical psychologists who work with schemas and other unconscious or automatic patterns frequently describe this disconnect between intellectual awareness and the emotional response that occurs when a familiar situation is actually triggered.
Knowing about a pattern and changing the pattern aren't necessarily the same thing.
Think about how many times you've heard someone say:
“I know this makes absolutely no sense, but this is how I feel.”
That gap between what we consciously know and what we automatically feel or do is one reason I became so interested in subconscious work.
This Is Where I Look at the Problem Through Another Lens
My background includes more than 20 years in nursing and healthcare, along with a lifelong interest in psychology, human behavior, and the connection between our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. My current work is in energy healing, and I'm a certified Emotion Code®, Body Code®, and Belief Code® practitioner.
These methods approach subconscious patterns from a different framework than conventional psychology.
The Emotion Code® works from the premise that unresolved emotional energies — referred to within the method as trapped emotions — may continue to influence how we feel and respond.
The Belief Code® focuses more specifically on identifying and releasing limiting or unwanted subconscious belief patterns.
These concepts should not be confused with established psychological diagnoses or presented as replacements for psychotherapy or medical care. They are energy-healing frameworks developed by Dr. Bradley Nelson and Discover Healing.
What interests me, however, is the overlap in the question being asked:
Could something outside our everyday conscious awareness be helping to maintain a pattern we consciously want to change?
Psychology has its ways of exploring that question.
Energy work has another.
What Might a Subconscious Relationship Belief Look Like?
Imagine someone consciously believes:
“I deserve a healthy, loving relationship.”
But underneath that conscious intention are deeply learned expectations such as:
People leave.
I have to earn love.
My needs aren't important.
It's dangerous to trust someone.
If someone really knows me, they won't want me.
I'm not suggesting that everyone who struggles in relationships secretly holds one of these beliefs, or that one subconscious belief explains an entire relationship history.
But beliefs and expectations can be worth exploring — particularly when the same emotional theme seems to keep appearing with different people.
That's one of the areas I explore with clients using the Belief Code.
Sometimes the Pattern Is Emotional Rather Than Belief-Based
There can also be another layer.
Maybe you understand why something happened years ago. You've analyzed it, talked about it, and consciously decided to move forward.
Yet a present-day situation that resembles the old experience still produces a surprisingly strong emotional response.
That's where I may explore the pattern through the Emotion Code® or Body Code® instead.
Rather than deciding ahead of time what must be causing someone's experience, I prefer to ask questions and see what patterns emerge during the session.
Sometimes the work points toward beliefs.
Sometimes emotions.
Sometimes another energetic imbalance.
For relationship patterns specifically, I may also explore whether a Heart-Wall is present. Within the Emotion Code® framework, a Heart-Wall refers to emotional energies that are believed to accumulate around the heart as a form of protection during emotionally difficult experiences. While that protection may have served a purpose at one time, the theory is that it may later affect how comfortable we feel giving or receiving love, trusting others, or allowing ourselves to feel emotionally vulnerable.
And sometimes something is simply outside the scope of what I do.
Repeating Patterns Are Information
If you repeatedly find yourself saying:
“How did I end up here again?”
it may be more useful to become curious about the pattern than simply criticize yourself for repeating it.
Ask yourself:
What feels familiar about these situations?
What tends to trigger me?
What role do I repeatedly take?
What do I expect from other people?
What do I believe I have to do to receive love, approval or safety?
What do I fear will happen if I behave differently?
And perhaps the biggest question:
What do I consciously know that I still have difficulty actually feeling or living?
That discrepancy can contain useful information.
There May Be More Than One Way to Work With a Pattern
Psychotherapy can be an appropriate way to explore persistent relationship patterns, particularly when trauma, significant distress, abuse, anxiety, depression or other mental-health concerns are involved.
Energy healing doesn't need to compete with that.
I see Emotion Code®, Body Code® and Belief Code® work as another way of exploring the emotional, energetic and subconscious patterns a person may be carrying.
If you've recognized a repeating pattern and you're curious about what might be happening beneath the level of conscious awareness, that's exactly the kind of territory I find fascinating.
I'm Tracey McQuinn, founder of Illumination 11 Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code®, Body Code® and Belief Code® practitioner. I work with clients remotely, so location isn't a barrier.
If you'd like to explore whether this type of work might be a good fit for you, you're welcome to schedule a complimentary consultation.
Sources & Further Reading
American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology — “Repetition Compulsion”
Corradi, R. B. — The Repetition Compulsion in Psychodynamic Psychotherapy.