There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from knowing better but still finding yourself doing the same thing. You understand the relationship isn’t good for you, yet you keep going back. You know that you don’t need to chase someone who is emotionally unavailable, but when they pull away, you feel compelled to move towards them. You know that you want to communicate calmly, yet when conflict appears, you either become overwhelmed or shut down. You may have spent years trying to understand why you keep repeating these patterns, and perhaps you have blamed yourself for not being able to simply make different choices.
But what if the problem isn’t that you don’t know what to do? What if, at certain moments, your nervous system doesn’t believe that you have the choice to decide?
This is one of the most important shifts we can make when we begin to understand trauma and emotional patterns. Instead of asking, “Why do I keep doing this to myself?”, we can begin to ask, “What is happening inside me when I do this?” That question takes us away from shame and towards curiosity. It also recognises something that trauma researchers and clinicians have increasingly explored, that our emotional responses are not created entirely in the present moment. They are shaped by our previous experiences, our relationships and the ways our bodies learned to respond when we were younger.
Your nervous system is trying to protect you
We often imagine that our behaviour begins with a conscious decision. Something happens, we think about it, and then we decide how to respond. In reality, much of our emotional life happens much faster than this. Our nervous system is constantly taking in information about whether we are safe, whether we are connected, whether something is changing and whether we need to protect ourselves.
This means that a situation in the present can activate an old response without us consciously choosing it. Someone doesn’t reply to your message and suddenly you feel abandoned. Your partner becomes quiet and you immediately assume you have done something wrong. Someone criticises you and you become defensive, angry or overwhelmed. Someone gets emotionally close and, instead of feeling safe, you suddenly want to create distance.
From the outside, these responses can seem disproportionate to what is actually happening. From inside the nervous system, however, they may make perfect sense. Bessel van der Kolk’s work on trauma has helped popularise the understanding that traumatic experiences can continue to influence the way the brain and body respond to the present, meaning that trauma is not simply something we remember but something that can shape how we experience ourselves and the world around us.
Your conscious mind may understand that you are safe while your body is responding as though you are not. This is one reason why insight alone does not always create change.
Familiar does not always mean safe
One of the most difficult things to understand about emotional patterns is that we can become attached to what is familiar, even when what is familiar isn’t particularly good for us.
If you grew up around unpredictability, you may have become highly sensitive to changes in other people’s moods. If affection was inconsistent, you may have learned to work hard for closeness. If you experienced rejection, criticism or emotional disconnection, you may have learned to anticipate it before it happened. If you had to become independent early in life, relying on somebody else may now feel uncomfortable or even dangerous.
This does not mean that you consciously want these experiences. It means that your nervous system has learned them.
Gabor Maté’s work on trauma and the mind-body connection repeatedly brings attention to the adaptations we develop in response to our environments. His work encourages us to look beyond the question of what is wrong with us and instead consider what happened to us, what we needed at the time and what we learned to do in order to cope.
This distinction can be transformative. A behaviour that causes problems in adulthood may have once been a remarkably effective way of getting through childhood. People-pleasing may have helped you avoid conflict. Emotional disconnection may have helped you survive experiences that felt too overwhelming. Hypervigilance may have helped you anticipate what was coming next. Becoming exceptionally self-sufficient may have protected you from the disappointment of needing people who weren’t consistently available. The difficulty is that the nervous system doesn’t always know when an adaptation has outlived its usefulness.
The pattern may have made sense once
This is why it can be unhelpful to think of trauma responses as simply dysfunctional behaviours that need to be eliminated. A trauma response is often an adaptation. It developed for a reason, even if that reason no longer exists.
Deb Dana, whose work has focused on bringing Polyvagal Theory into therapeutic practice, describes the importance of understanding the nervous system as we work with trauma, attachment and emotional regulation. Her approach encourages us to become more aware of the states we move through and to recognise the difference between being in a state of connection and being in a state of protection.
When we are in protection, our choices can become narrower. We might fight, flee, freeze, shut down, become hypervigilant or desperately seek reassurance. The response can feel automatic because, in a sense, it is. Our system has identified something that resembles danger and has moved towards the strategy it has learned is most likely to keep us safe.
This is why telling yourself to “just stop overthinking” or “just set a boundary” can be much harder than it sounds. You may intellectually know what you want to do while another part of your system is prioritising immediate safety. Healing therefore isn’t simply about learning what the healthy response should be. It is about creating enough internal and external safety that the healthy response becomes possible.
You cannot always think your way out of a survival response
We live in a culture that places enormous value on understanding. We read books, listen to podcasts, learn about attachment styles and discover the language of trauma. All of this can be incredibly valuable, but there comes a point where knowing why you behave the way you do is not the same as being able to respond differently when you are activated.
You can know that someone else’s silence does not necessarily mean rejection and still feel your chest tighten when they don’t respond. You can know that conflict doesn’t mean a relationship is ending and still feel an overwhelming urge to escape. You can know that you are worthy of love and still find yourself pursuing someone who repeatedly makes you question your worth. This is because regulation is not purely cognitive. It involves the body.
Van der Kolk’s work has emphasised the importance of reconnecting with bodily experience in trauma recovery, rather than treating trauma solely as a problem of thought or memory. This might mean learning to notice tension, changes in breathing, agitation, numbness or other physical sensations without immediately reacting to them. The aim isn’t to become calm all the time. That isn’t realistic, and it isn’t necessarily desirable. The aim is to develop a greater capacity to experience difficult emotions without immediately being controlled by them.
Healing happens in small moments
We often imagine healing as a major breakthrough. We think that one day we will finally understand our past, resolve our wounds and become the person we have always wanted to be. Sometimes profound insights do happen, but much of nervous-system healing is quieter than this.
It happens in the moment when you notice that you are becoming activated and choose not to send the message. It happens when you feel the familiar urge to chase someone and allow yourself to pause. It happens when you recognise that someone else’s disappointment does not mean you have done something wrong. It happens when you stay present during a difficult conversation instead of automatically shutting down. It happens when you allow someone to care for you without immediately looking for the catch.
These moments may seem small, but they give your nervous system new experiences. They allow you to discover that the thing you feared would happen doesn’t always happen, and that you can experience discomfort without needing to return to the old strategy. Over time, this can create something incredibly important, choice.
You are not your pattern
Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that your emotional patterns are not your identity. You are not an anxious person, a difficult person, an avoidant person or a broken person. These words can sometimes be useful for describing patterns, but they become limiting when we start treating them as definitions of who we are. You are a person whose nervous system learned particular ways of responding to particular experiences.
Those responses may no longer serve you, but that doesn’t mean they need to be hated or forced away. They need to be understood. They need to be met with enough safety, compassion and curiosity that your system can begin to discover there are other possibilities.
Healing doesn’t mean you will never be triggered again. It doesn’t mean you will never become anxious, angry, overwhelmed or afraid. It means that, gradually, those experiences don’t have to determine what happens next. The goal isn’t to become someone who never feels fear. It is to become someone who can feel fear without automatically allowing it to make every decision.
And perhaps this is the deeper reason we return to the same emotional patterns. Not because we secretly want to suffer, and not because we are incapable of change, but because some part of us is still trying to keep us safe using the only strategies it knows. The work of healing is not to shame that part of us into disappearing. It is to help it learn that things can be different now. Sometimes the most useful question isn’t, “Why am I still doing this?” It is, “What is my nervous system trying to protect me from, and what would help it feel safe enough to choose something different?”
References
- Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. https://catalog.nlm.nih.gov/discovery/fulldisplay/alma9917307643406676/01NLM_INST:01NLM_INST
- Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Vintage Canada. https://archive.org/details/whenbodysaysnoco0000mate
- Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery. https://ia801504.us.archive.org/23/items/the-myth-of-normal-by-gabor-mate/The%20Myth%20of%20Normal%20by%20Gabor%20Mate.pdf
- van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking. https://ia601604.us.archive.org/35/items/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-PDF.pdf
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton & Company. https://archive.org/details/polyvagaltheoryn0000porg
