Double Blind - Repeating Patterns
Pain makes people change.
Let that sink in.
Pain is a messenger. Even a sculptor.
We spend our lives searching for love... outside.
Our idolised potential partner will complete us.
They will provide us with our shopping list of needs and desires.
We grow up being fed this narrative endlessly in books, movies, TV shows, conversations with friends and now in an avalanche of social media stories.
Love is external, love is transactional, love is scarce, love is fragile, we have to prove our worthiness for love.
We never question whether these beliefs have any foundation, so entrenched in society we take them for granted.
During the flirting, dating, mating game our brains are hijacked by two things.
One: is a cocktail of the most potent drugs (neurotransmitters) on the planet;
Dopamine and noradrenaline rise, cortisol spikes, and serotonin plunges. As bonding deepens, oxytocin (and vasopressin) help consolidate attachment.
But these neurotransmitters blind us to red flags.
Destructive behaviours which should cause us to walk away, are ignored, justified or completely invisible.
Love is blind.
Two: Our subconscious is drawn magnetically not to what is good for us but to what is familiar.
When we were children we inherited an imprint of what love ‘feels like'. It’s imprinted in our bodies, in our nervous system. Its unconscious.
For most people, the first imprint of love is not safety but adaptation: earning approval, managing moods, anticipating withdrawal, surviving chaos.
For more than half of the people on this planet that imprint is misaligned or dysfunctional. No wonder we struggle. So, what exactly does this look like?
We are not attracted to the suffering itself. We are attracted to the familiar emotional landscape in which suffering has been mixed with love.
The problem is not simply whom we choose. It is what we call love once we are inside the relationship. Withdrawal becomes mystery, criticism becomes honesty, emotional volatility becomes passion, and consistency becomes boredom.
Having to earn approval feels like ‘real love’ if affection was conditional in childhood.
Someone who neglects us can feel like ‘home’ if our parents were emotionally unavailable.
Drama and conflict feel like ‘passion’ if our household was chaotic.
When we meet someone healthy, consistent, respectful, emotionally available, our nervous system way not recognise it as love.
There are no danger alarms, no anxiety, no need to chase or fix or perform.
Our body interprets this absence of familiar pattern as ‘no chemistry’ or ‘boring’. Meanwhile, someone who triggers our old wounds - unavailable, critical, unpredictable – it can light up our entire system.
We call it “intense connection” or “never felt this way before”, but it is our nervous system recognising the familiar pattern and mistaking it for love. Never suspecting the pattern is misaligned.
That intensity is not proof of compatibility, safety or love.
Some relationships organise themselves around a painful pursuit-and-withdrawal rhythm: one person reaches harder for reassurance as the other retreats further from pressure. Neither role is always fixed and both can be shaped by earlier learning.
This can create loose relationship dynamics: the Anxious person who craves closeness pairs with the Avoidant person who needs distance, creating an exhausting push-pull cycle.
The person who learned to earn love by giving too much pairs with the person who learned to receive love by taking too much.
One person learned to earn love by rescuing. The other learned to receive love by being rescued.”
One partner dominates while the other submits, recreating the control dynamics from childhood.
These aren't conscious choices, they're automatic patterns our body mistakes for ‘true love’ because the stress hormones feel like passion and the familiar dysfunction feels like coming home. That particular imprint we learned so early.
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The path forward starts with one recognition: the magnetic pull toward someone is often a warning sign, not a green light.
If we can't stop thinking about them, if the chemistry feels ‘crazy,’ if we'd do anything for them after three dates, our nervous system likely just recognised familiar pain, not actual compatibility.
Understanding all this intellectually is one thing. Breaking free is another entirely.
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So, where does this leave us?
The gargantuan task for us mere mortals is to somehow rise above the current of chemical overwhelm and blindness, to spot and reject potential mates whose behaviours will eventually harm us.
While at the same time seeing clearly our own inclination to chase what is corrosive for us. Which sounds easy until we remind ourselves its largely unconscious.
Knowing the pattern does not release us from it.
Usually we're 12-18 months into a relationship before the flood of endorphins abates just enough to begin asking questions about our partners unacceptable behaviour.
Why are they suddenly doing terrible things. Forgetting that we chose them (magnetically) and that we either ignored the same conduct or didn’t see it (blindness).
We are geniuses... at being flawed. Well, I sure am. Two divorces and dozens of failed relationships before I learned there was another way.
The process, which you and I didn’t invent, appears to be set up for failure.
Double blind to the obvious pathology in others and also to our own hidden psychological self sabotage.
So how do we change?
Pain! The great messenger and teacher.
When we look back at the long chain of our relationships we eventually ask ‘What the fuck was I thinking?’
There comes a point where we are so sick of being magnetically drawn to destructive painful disasters that we seek radical change.
Maturity comes slowly and with it we can finally take responsibility for repairing our own inherited pattern in this insane game.
For many people, therapy offers a disciplined place to trace the pattern, tolerate what has been avoided and practise a different response. Others find parts of that work through trusted relationships, groups, reflective practice and sustained self-observation. The essential point is not to keep doing it alone and unconsciously.
Trusted relationships can be a friend, mentor or family member who can witness the pattern without trying to undo it.
Groups include peer support, men’s or women’s circles, recovery groups or communities where people share similar struggles and attempt to live a more authentic and vulnerable life.
Reflective practices are journaling, meditation, artistic expression or any disciplined way of examining one’s inner life.
Sustained self-observation is the ongoing practice of noticing one’s reactions, triggers and choices in real time.
One path for work is to sit down with a therapist and wade back into the dark pool of childhood memories.
Yay! Hand up all those who want to do that? What, no hands?
If therapy works and it can, why do so few people peruse it or stick with it?
The most insightful answer comes from Carl Jung (Swiss psychologist, visionary and huge moustache aficionado)
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
We have spent a lifetime running from pain. We have also spent a lifetime hiding from something more potent.
Down in the pool of childhood memories and often repressed experiences is a hidden mound of shame and unworthiness. Our fear and avoidance of these is a powerful driver of our own inexplicable behaviours.
Once excavated and brought into the light they shrink like the lil’ vampires they are.
According to Brené Brown: If you put shame into a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgement. If you douse that same shame in empathy it can't survive.
A small note on the cost of therapy.
We can justify spending money on a huge range of products, services, necessities and treats. We are masters of clever justification.
But spending money on our mind, the single most important thing we possess, is not a luxury. It’s an investment in repairing and upgrading the operating system we use to navigate life.
We have this hilarious illusion that we make decisions on evidence, logic and reason. Ignoring all along that emotions drive our behaviours from the shadows.
How else do you explain all our inexplicable exes?
A good therapist is literally life changing. How do you find a good one? Therapist are like hairdressers, you just keep trying new ones until you ‘know' this one understands.
If we are to set about reversing our understandably misaligned behaviours we will need help.
We can either continue the long chain of horror relationships or we can learn another pattern, another approach.
One path is to sit down with a specific human who has spent years understanding how this super complex mind, body and emotions work and how it goes astray.
We can then figure out which of the dozen misfiring and erroneous imprints belong to us and begin to retrain them.
Is it hard? Yeeeep, but again the alternative is more links in the chain of woe.
The deeper lesson is to come to the understanding that the only human who will ever meet our shopping list of needs and desires is us. The only person coming to save us, is us.
Self-love is a revelation, a tectonic shift in where we seek love. The gradual waves of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance are the true tonic for most of what ails us.
Self-confidence, self-worth and the dignity and self-respect to say no to love that destructive for us, is born here, in self-love.
When we choose ourselves as the primary source of love everything changes. The need for outside validation shrinks. The desperation to be in a relationship softens. Our sense of worth no longer tied to having a partner.
Self-love is a practice, a daily one. A commitment to reconnect to the deeper self every morning. This profound shift can form the ground of our being.
We can build a new sense of self. We can anchor ourselves to a strong but loving core. An unmoving centre which is the only true safety.
Perhaps then we can stumble onto a new way to love. One that is more free, open, non-transactional. We can learn to show up differently.
Overriding the imprint of our learned attachment model from childhood is a long, difficult and clumsy process. But it’s also infinitely rewarding.
Freedom comes gradually in spurts and surges. Then we slip back to old patterns.
The slow steady march of persistence and determination transform us.
Liberation from confusion, anxiety, self judgement, exasperation and a dysfunctional pattern which were once stuck are all possible.
The goal is a gradual shift to balance, wholeness and harmony.
The bigger goal is to look in the mirror and like/love the person you see, flaws and all.
Remember: pain makes people change.
Not just the heartache of a bad relationship but the deep pain of recognising we've been the blindly drawn into our own suffering through our inherited patterns.
That pain - the messenger, the sculptor - is what finally makes us willing to do the uncomfortable work.
It's what brings us to the therapist's office, the self-love practice, the moment we choose differently.
The pain doesn't go away immediately, but it transforms from something that happens ‘to’ us into something that teaches us.
And that transformation is everything.
So what will we do?
Go on numbing the pain?
Go on repressing shame?
Or turn and face it, address it?
Only to find we're stronger than the fear that's held us hostage.
To also find the life waiting on the other side makes the old patterns look like the prison they were.
You are not unusual. Not broken. Not cursed. Not unlovable.
You are human.
You sit at the end of a long, unbroken chain of blindness and suffering that is, in many ways, self-perpetuating.
You did not choose your reactions, your beliefs or your patterns. You inherited them, as did your mostly unaware parents and grandparents.
The liberation is to step outside the chain.
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Part two of this series is called Flirting Dating Contracting Expanding.
It looks specifically at the process of dating in an attempt to make clear what a new pattern would look like.
Part three The Ground Of Our Being will look at self love in detail.