One of the questions I hear most often in my office is some version of, “How did I end up here again?”
The relationship may look different from the last one; the circumstances may have changed. Yet there is often a familiar feeling running through it. A person may realize that they are again drawn to a partner who struggles with intimacy, or they notice they’re taking responsibility for everyone else’s emotions while quietly setting their own aside.
By the time many people arrive in therapy, they already understand the pattern. They’ve read the books, listened to podcasts, talked with friends, and spent countless hours trying to make sense of it. What they’re struggling to understand is something else.
If I know what’s happening, why do I keep doing it? It’s an important question because it challenges a common assumption about therapy. We often imagine that insight naturally leads to change. If we can identify where a pattern began and understand why we developed it, we assume we’ll be able to choose something different the next time. In my experience, though, insight is only part of what is needed for healing. Relationships are often where that gap becomes most obvious to us
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Over the years I’ve come to believe that relationships aren’t guided by insight alone. They’re shaped by experiences we’ve had, expectations we’ve developed, and by a nervous system that has been learning from the very beginning of our lives.
Long before we had words for our experiences, our brains and bodies were paying attention. They noticed what happened when we cried or when we made mistakes. Gradually, those experiences became expectations about what closeness feels like and what relationships require from us.
Attachment theory has described these expectations as internal working models. Introduced by psychiatrist John Bowlby, the idea is that our earliest relationships help shape the expectations we carry into adulthood. Those expectations influence how we interpret other people’s behavior, how we respond to closeness, and how we regulate our emotions. They aren’t destiny, but they often become the starting point from which we relate to others.
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate over the years is that these models don’t exist only as ideas. We don’t consciously decide each morning to expect rejection, criticism, or emotional distance. Much of what we’ve learned about relationships is expressed automatically—in our expectations, our emotional reactions, and often in the way our bodies respond long before we’ve had time to think.
Working from a somatic perspective has deepened my understanding of this because I no longer think these patterns live only in our thoughts. I think they’re reflected in our nervous system as well.
Our nervous system is constantly learning from experience. It isn’t primarily concerned with whether we’re happy or fulfilled. It’s trying to anticipate what comes next based on what it has encountered before. If emotional distance, inconsistency, criticism, or caretaking were common experiences early in life, those dynamics can continue to feel surprisingly familiar as adults. Familiarity, of course, isn’t the same as health, but our nervous systems often recognize what they’ve practiced long before they recognize what’s actually good for us.
I think that’s one of the reasons people sometimes feel surprisingly unsettled in relationships that are kind, consistent, and emotionally available. Their mind may recognize that the relationship is healthy while their nervous system quietly wonders why it feels so unfamiliar. At the same time, relationships that recreate old dynamics can evoke an immediate sense of recognition, even when they ultimately lead to loneliness or disappointment.
That doesn’t mean people are choosing pain. It means the nervous system is often responding to what it has practiced before, even when those familiar patterns no longer serve us.
One of the books that has influenced my thinking is The Body Keeps the Score. In it, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how overwhelming experiences continue shaping us long after they have passed. I also return often to What Happened to You?, in which psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey explore how repeated experiences influence the developing brain and nervous system. Reading their work helped me appreciate that our bodies often remember patterns before our minds fully understand them.
This perspective has changed the kinds of questions I ask in therapy. Instead of focusing only on why someone chose a particular relationship, I’m often curious about what feels familiar inside it.
These days, I find myself asking different questions in therapy. What happens in your body when this person pulls away? What happens when someone offers consistent care? What feels surprisingly easy? What feels unexpectedly uncomfortable?
Those questions often reveal something that insight alone has missed.
One of the experiences I see most often is someone recognizing that a relationship isn’t meeting their needs while simultaneously feeling deeply attached to it. Friends may wonder why they stay, and sometimes they wonder the same thing themselves. It’s easy to mistake that conflict for weakness or poor judgment, but I think it reflects something much more understandable. Part of them knows the relationship isn’t working, while another part is responding to a kind of familiarity that developed long before this relationship ever began.
That understanding doesn’t remove responsibility for our choices, but it often replaces shame with compassion. It also changes how I think about healing.
For many years, I thought healing came primarily through understanding. I still believe insight matters, but over time my focus has shifted. I’m just as interested in helping people have experiences that gently challenge what they’ve always expected from relationships. Sometimes that’s expressing a need and discovering the relationship survives. Sometimes it’s allowing someone to care for them without immediately feeling the need to earn it, or staying present with the discomfort that can come from choosing someone who is emotionally available instead of emotionally unpredictable. Those experiences don’t erase the past, but they gradually give the nervous system new evidence to work with.
Our nervous systems learn through repetition. Just as old experiences shaped our expectations, new experiences can gradually reshape them. That process is rarely quick, and it usually isn’t linear. There are setbacks, old habits, and moments when familiar patterns feel almost irresistible. But little by little, something begins to shift. For example: The conversations that once seemed impossible become a little easier to have.
When I think about the people I’ve had the privilege of working with over the years, those are often the changes I notice first. Not dramatic transformations, but quiet ones. Someone pauses before responding instead of immediately chasing reassurance. Someone notices they’re apologizing for something that isn’t theirs to carry. Someone chooses a different kind of partner, not because they forced themselves to, but because what feels familiar has slowly begun to change.
I don’t think our histories ever disappear. They become part of us. But I also don’t believe we’re destined to keep repeating them. With enough experiences of safety, honesty, and genuine connection, our understanding deepens, our nervous system begins collecting new evidence, and over time what once felt unfamiliar begins to feel possible.