I didn’t repeat relational patterns because I was flawed or dumb.
I repeated them because I didn’t know what I was looking at. And more than that- I didn’t understand that what I was feeling was information.
This is the part that took me the longest to see clearly. Because my story growing up didn’t have the kind of obvious wound that explains itself. No constant chaos, no clear villain, no dramatic origin point that people can point to and say- “ah, there it is, that’s why.”
What there was instead was subtler & in many ways much harder to name. Emotional withdrawal that occurred often & without explanation. A particular quality of silence in the house that weighed heavy, like a dark cloud holding back an unimaginable storm. Tension that nobody acknowledged, love that must have existed somewhere but couldn’t quite find its way into the room. Nothing that screamed danger. Just something that quietly, persistently, taught my nervous system what connection felt like.
And so I did what most of us do in that situation.
I came to the conclusion that something was wrong with me because on the surface it “wasn’t that bad”. That I should, by all reasonable measures, be fine. So the only logical explanation was that my internal chaos was somehow a flaw in my system.
What I didn’t understand then (what took years of living to learn) is that emotional inconsistency doesn’t require extremity to shape a nervous system. It just has to be repetitive. Many times unspoken & treated as normal by the people whose job it was to show you what normal was.
The absence of a reference point
When we grow up without a stable model of healthy emotional presence, we don’t enter adulthood with a broken compass.
We enter with no compass at all.
So when we begin choosing relationships, we aren’t comparing people to some internalized standard of healthy love. We are comparing them to what is familiar to us. To the specific emotional texture of what we already know. And familiarity, especially through patterning, can be deeply seductive precisely because it requires nothing new of us. It asks us only to continue being who we have already learned to be.
So we found ourselves drawn to emotional unavailability. To inconsistency, maybe even volatility. To the particular mixture of distance and occasional closeness that kept us reaching, trying to understand, working to close a gap in dynamics that weren’t truly ideal to enter into in the first place. This is one of the reasons why someone may come from a home that wasn’t physically violent but still end up in abusive relationships later on.
We didn’t choose those dynamics because we wanted the chaos & pain.
We chose them because nothing in us said “this is not safe.” Because safe was a frequency we had never learned to recognize. We had no imprint of healthy love, so meeting someone who looks nice on the surface but later reveals extreme dysfunction- is exactly what our nervous systems were attuned to.
When “better” isn’t the same as healed
The trickier part (the one I think deserves more honest attention) is what happened after.
Because eventually, most of us do leave the more obviously dangerous situations. We graduate, in a sense. The next relationships look better on the surface. More functional, less visibly chaotic. The kind of thing that doesn’t raise flags for the people around us.
But underneath, the same essential dynamic has simply changed its clothing.
Emotional withdrawal is still there, just more subtle. Silence is still used as control, just more deniable. The distance, the withholding, the confusion we try to think our way through rather than walk away from- it’s all still present, just wearing a more reasonable face which makes it even harder to get away from. We even be getting certain needs met so we feel guilty when something still doesn’t feel right.
And because our baseline is still calibrated to what we grew up around, we register this not as unhealthy but as “less bad than before.” Which, to a nervous system that learned its definitions early, it can feel like real progress, it can even feel like love.
This is where the cycle perpetuates itself most quietly. Not in the dramatic repetitive choices, but in the ones that seem like improvements.
What the nervous system mistakes for truth
In IEC environments, intuition rarely disappears entirely. More often, it gets overridden.
Something feels off- but also familiar, so we stay.
Something feels intense & we mistake the intensity for meaning, so we stay longer.
Over time we learn to confuse certain things that have no business being confused. Anxiety with chemistry- “sparks flying”. Emotional distance with depth. The particular exhaustion of trying to reach someone with the feeling of genuine connection. Confusion with complexity worth untangling.
None of this happens because we are unintelligent or unaware. It happens because we were never given a stable emotional mirror to reflect against. We had no clear, embodied reference point for what safety feels like, for what healthy love actually feels like- in the body, in the chest, in the quality of ease or its absence.
So we navigated by the only instrument we had- familiarity.
And familiarity, however well-intentioned, is a compass calibrated to the past. We are working with an inherently disorganized blueprint for love. So when something comes along that aligns with that blueprint (even if it looks different) our nervous system recognizes it as love.
What repetition was actually doing
I want to say something about the repetition itself, because I think it deserves more grace than it usually receives.
For a long time I saw the repeated patterns as evidence of something wrong with me, as failure. As proof that I wasn’t learning, wasn’t growing, wasn’t trying hard enough.
But I’ve come to understand it differently.
Repetition, in the absence of a stable reference point, is often how the psyche tries to complete something unfinished. It is the compulsion to repeat as an unconscious attempt to finally resolve what was never resolved, to finally get the outcome that the original wound demanded and never received. We aren’t choosing the same dynamics because we enjoy the pain. We’re returning to the territory where the original learning happened, still looking for a different ending.
That doesn’t mean we should stay there but it does mean we aren’t repeating out of stupidity. It is our souls attempt at educating us out of the pattern- in a costly & embodied sort of way. Unfortunately the cost is time & sometimes even more trauma.
But when we choose to learn & integrate our patterns the lessons become incredibly valuable.
Where the shift actually lives
What changes everything is not more analysis.
It’s in the moments when we can feel, in real time, that something is happening in our nervous system & recognize it as pattern rather than truth. When the familiar pull arrives and we can observe it clearly enough to ask “is this connection, or is this recognition of something I already know?” “Is this a spark of true connection or familiar nervous system activation?”
That distinction, held consistently and honestly, is where the cycle begins to loosen its grip.
It isn’t something that can be forced or shamed out of us. Willpower and sheer determination to simply choose differently next time often aren’t even enough. Because when that activation happens the blueprint kicks in and often muffles our common sense & intuition.
But through awareness & patience it becomes possible to break the pattern. Awareness that has finally grown strong enough, and honest enough, to override the authority of familiarity.
It isn’t instant but that’s the turning point.
It’s a quiet yet radical act of finally trusting ourselves, trusting our intuition & recognizing the truth of the situation. We don’t force change upon ourselves (& certainly not others) but we begin to hold ourselves & our patterns lovingly accountable and that is where the real opportunity for change lies.
Where to go next:
The Other Side of IEC: Codependency, Control, and the Internal Split
If You’re Not Getting Your Needs Met, It’s Not Just About the People Around You
The Masked Child: How IEC Environments Teach Us to Hide and What It Costs
The Body Knows: Interoception, IEC Environments, and Learning to Listen From the Inside Out
Why You Keep Repeating the Patterns
IEC-Informed Self-Reliance: When Strength Becomes a Barrier to Connection
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