Relationships & Recurring Patterns
Understanding the patterns that shape how you relate to other people, and to yourself.
Relationships tend to bring out our most established ways of thinking, feeling and responding. You might find yourself repeating the same dynamics with different people, struggling with trust or boundaries, becoming anxious when someone gets close or distant when things become more intimate, or going over conversations again and again trying to work out what they meant. Often you can see quite clearly what's happening and still find it hard to respond differently.
Why do the same patterns keep repeating?
The way we relate to other people is shaped by experience, including early relationships, the relationships that came after them, and the ways we learned to cope with difficult feelings along the way.
Many patterns began as ways of coping with the situations a person was in, which is partly why they're so persistent, and why they tend to continue after the original situation has changed. They also tend to reinforce themselves, because the way we expect others to respond influences how we behave, which in turn influences how they respond to us.
This is not the same as saying that everything goes back to childhood. Present relationships matter too, and part of the work is telling the difference between an old pattern being activated and a real difficulty in the relationship you're in. If you'd like to read more about how this works, I've written about it in Why Do I Keep Repeating the Same Patterns in Relationships?.
Anxiety, overthinking and reassurance seeking in relationships
Relationship anxiety often involves analysing conversations, trying to work out exactly what someone feels, asking for reassurance, or checking your own feelings for certainty.
These are familiar processes, and they can appear in many areas of life, but in relationships it's worth understanding what the uncertainty means to you and where that sensitivity comes from, rather than just trying to manage the thoughts.
How can psychotherapy help?
Understanding a pattern and being able to change it are two different things, and most people who come to therapy about relationships have already done a lot of thinking.
What therapy can add is the chance to notice a pattern as it happens, in your current relationships and sometimes in the relationship with me, and to find out what it's like to respond differently.
The relationship we develop in therapy can itself offer insight into how you relate to others. How you experience trust, disagreement, vulnerability or being understood in therapy can show us something about how you relate elsewhere.
My approach is relational and depth-oriented, and I'm also interested in practical change. The aim is both to understand why a pattern developed and to give you more choice in how you respond to it.