A few years ago a young thoughtful woman in her thirties, generally happy and content with her life, successful in her job and in a relationship with a loving and caring partner, found herself in the midst of a relationship struggle that she was not able to solve by herself. If you had asked her back then, she would have explained her problem like this:

“I have a wonderful partnership and I love my partner a lot. Sometimes though, I just can’t understand my partner at all because what he says just doesn’t make any sense to me. He says something ordinary and it reaches me as an accusation. It hurts and I immediately start explaining myself trying to convince him that what he is saying is completely wrong and misplaced. He usually gets upset by that and doesn’t quite understand what is happening. We would end up having a huge argument for days and I would lose myself in the midst of it.

I was sure we just have a communication problem. I learned communication tools like asking clarifying questions before drawing conclusions and naming my feelings without blaming him and so on and it helped somehow. Our communication is a lot better than it once was except for a few moments when I get so triggered, that the whole thing starts again.

Every time we repeat the same kind of argument it gets better and better but that doesn’t matter because it’s still too painful. Last time that happened we reached a point, where we both were just exhausted and we thought that a break up might be the only way out of this spiral that we seem to enter every now and then. But we have way too much in common for that, and we love each other too much. Also when I replay the situation later, I can see that what he said was somewhat reasonable and I start questioning myself, but at the moment I feel so sure that what he says is not at all acceptable.” 

 

How her pattern started to make sense

The description made it clear that her problem doesn't seem to stem from a communication issue or a misunderstanding. Rather, there must have been something underlying it that's triggering the whole thing, and it just wasn't clear yet what that was. So we didn’t spend time on the whole event of arguments but went directly to the very moment just a second before everything started. 

​

The goal was to go back into one of the conversations while looking at it from the inside, not from an outside perspective and to let herself feel what happened in that moment. After having spent a few moments exploring that scene, it was just a simple question that gave rise to a deeper understanding. It sounded almost too simple to ask, what it would mean about her, if what he was saying (about his feelings) were to be true.
It took her a while to answer as if she was surprised about the question. Equally surprising was her answer, because it seemed to have nothing to do with the topic of argument. It was something along the lines of: “Then it’s me. Then I’m again the thing that ruins everything.” That wasn’t just a thought, instead that was her emotional brain articulating something that it had known for quite a while.

Following this thread further, her very early formed understanding of the world became explicit: “when two people break apart, I am the reason.” 

And once you understand that her system operated on knowing this very specific fact about herself and the world, her behaviour stops looking like a flaw and suddenly makes a lot of sense. Suddenly it made sense that for her hearing her partner say something like “this doesn’t work for me”, was not the beginning of a constructive conversation but rather a confirmation that she had broken or was about to break just another relationship. So she starts explaining, arguing, convincing him that he must have a wrong perspective on the situation etc. 

​

The irony here is that the behaviour that was threatening their relationship existed to protect the relationship based on information that was decades old and wrong. This shows very well that patterns are intelligent and coherent with a given premise learned in the past but never once looked at directly. That is both a curse and a blessing because you cannot rewire a premise you don’t even know yourself you are holding somewhere in your brain but at least there is such a premise that can be identified and revised.

​

Just becoming aware of that implicit knowledge did not yet shift her pattern though. She was able to watch herself acting as if this knowledge was true and it indeed felt that way to her. Looking back, the reason for this is exactly the one I'll come to later: "when two people break apart, I am the reason" was still to broad. Something more detailed sat underneath it and as long as we only had the summary, there was nothing precise enough for her own experience to contradict.

​

The belief nobody would guess

When we finally got to the origin of that conclusion, it was this:
She was aware that one of the main reasons for her parents' divorce was that her father no longer felt any affection for her mother. What she wasn’t aware of is that she had understood, as a baby, that all of this was her fault, because she, the baby, was the reason her mother's belly had grown causing her mother to feel unattractive and therefore breaking them apart. 

​

Read that again. She is an intelligent, educated adult, and if you had presented that sentence to her over dinner she would have laughed. She actually started laughing in session because she found the whole thing so absurd and that this had been organising her closest relationships for roughly thirty years.

​

I share this so specifically because of something I see constantly. When people imagine what's underneath their patterns, they almost always guess something generic. I'm not good enough. I'm unlovable. I don't deserve it. Those phrases are everywhere in personal development, and I understand why because they make sense and sound like the right kind of answer. But in my time as a coach I have almost never met a pattern that vague. 

​

What people are actually carrying is far stranger and far more specific: a particular scene, a particular conclusion, drawn with the logic available to a two-year-old or a five-year-old and then never updated. The vagueness matters practically, not just poetically. You cannot disconfirm "I'm not good enough." It's too diffuse to contradict and there's nothing precise enough to hold up against it, which is why working at that level produces insight that feels true and changes nothing. A specific premise, on the other hand, can meet something specific that cannot coexist with it. Precision is an important condition for the pattern to break apart.

​

And so is testing it against contradictory knowledge. Sometimes it takes several rounds across a few sessions before the brain accepts the contradiction. Here it didn't. The moment both the old ideas and her conscious knowledge were fully present at once, her own mismatch detection did the work in seconds. To the brain both cannot be true at the same time, so the old learning stopped being produced. 

And the aftermath? A ripple effect across her life. Her first reaction wasn't relief but rather bewilderment, asking “how could I ever have believed something like that?” The old version had lost its grip so completely that she had trouble reconstructing why it had ever felt true to her. Something in the way her reality was arranged shifted. His words then landed how they had probably always been intended to land and they were suddenly speaking the same language.

​

And what’s important to mention, she didn't have to maintain any of this. There was no practice to keep up with the new reality, no insight to remember in the difficult moment, and no technique to apply when he said something that used to land badly. The reaction stopped being produced instead of getting easier to handle.

​

Why understanding the pattern isn't the same as stopping it

When looking at what is being taught today the different tools to handle repetitive emotional patterns can be roughly divided in 2 categories: working on meaning or working on the response. 

​

You either learn how to separate the past from now in order to see the situation differently and choose more consciously (e.g. vipassana meditation, understanding the origin, reframing tools etc.). Or you learn better ways to respond to situations and use them to override the reaction that shows up automatically (e.g. nervous system regulation, breathwork, communication strategies, mindset and mindfulness tools etc.). 

 

While I use elements of both and think they're genuinely valuable, they share one structural limitation:

The original learning i.e. the implicit knowledge stays exactly as it is, and something gets layered on top. 

 

This is why the results look as following:

​

1. Those tools work while actively applying them, which means they need to be maintained indefinitely, consuming a lot of time and effort.

2. They all fail under stress, exhaustion or if a lot is at stake, especially in situations you needed them for in the first place.

3. The moment you stop actively engaging them, the old learning is waiting right there, undiminished. 

 

In my opinion this is exactly where the lifelong-journey conclusion comes from. If almost every available approach leaves the original learning intact, then of course it looks permanent and keeps coming back. 

​

So if your experience is something along the lines of I can see exactly what's happening and I still can't stop it, that is not evidence that you are a difficult case or too much in your head or that you need to put in much more effort. It’s just that this kind of work can only improve how a pattern plays out or reduce the negative impact it has on you. But getting rid of it was never something those methods were able to do, no matter how hard you tried.  

​

What the brain actually requires

For the longest time, it was generally accepted that emotional learnings stored in the subcortical brain were permanent. You could suppress them, compete with them, build on top of them but not erase them. This scientific understanding is why so much of the self-help landscape is built around managing and learning how to deal with a specific set of problems instead of changing them.

​

Between 1997 and 2000, that understanding collapsed. Researchers demonstrated that an emotional memory can be accessed and for a limited amount of time returned to a state in which it can actually be revised. By 2004, the specific sequence the brain requires to do this had been identified in the lab. Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley had been arriving at the same thing clinically for years and in Unlocking the Emotional Brain (2012) they map the clinical steps onto the research findings step by step.

 

The sequence is short and straightforward but all of it has to happen:

 

1. The old learning has to be fully activated.

This doesn’t happen by talking about it or analysing it. Instead you have to be in it, feeling that this learning is completely true. Talking about such a learning or schema from the outside changes nothing, which is why so many years of analysing a pattern can leave it completely untouched.

2. Something has to contradict it while it is active.

Something from your own experience that cannot coexist with the old learning has to be brought up at the right moment. Only if the first step has been done correctly, step two will be fruitful. This is why learning new perspectives or ideas or ways of dealing with problems alone don’t help to erase the old learning.

3. That mismatch has to be repeated until experienced fully.

Usually it takes a few repetitions within the session before the change settles. However sometimes, when the contradiction is sharp enough, one experience of the mismatch is enough.

​

That's it. Those three steps are the whole mechanism. Everything I do in a session exists to set up those three conditions accurately, which of course is harder and slower than it sounds on paper.

​

It’s worth noticing that there is one thing missing in that list and that is: convincing you of anything or offering you new perspectives. Why? Because if I told you how it should be, your system would be invited to suppress the old and the whole thing flips back into counteractive work. Both sides get equal respect and your brain does the rest, because that's what brains naturally do with a contradiction they can't escape.

And how fast is all of that? Well the pace varies. While some things surface in the first sessions, others take patience, it really just depends on the complexity or simplicity of a topic. In the end a slower pace in the beginning tends to be faster after all, because the contradiction has to match the old learning precisely, and precision needs a thorough discovery phase.

​

If this made you curious

Then I'd ask you for one thing: don't believe a word of it.

Challenge it, test it and stay curious.

​

Take the three steps I described and hold them up against the methods you have already tried or will come across. Is the approach designed to actually activate old learning or does it only talk about it? Does something contradict the old learning while it's live, or does the method offer you a better perspective from the outside? And take a very close look at your results. See if this method only provoked small changes in your experience, or if the pattern stopped being produced after using the tools/methods.  Also check if it stays gone without you having to keep working at it.

​

Those questions are worth asking about my work as well. You can reach out to me to request your first session for free. This is coaching, not psychotherapy, so I'll say directly if I think you need something else, but once confirmed we immediately start working on your actual topic. While we most probably might not be able to do the full three steps in one session, you'll definitely find out how it feels to have your pattern treated as intelligent rather than defective and whether you want to keep going. If you don't, you've spent an hour learning something about yourself that stays yours.

​

Growth is a lifelong process. A particular pattern doesn't have to be.