44: The Most Important Word I've Added to My Vocabulary

For years, I believed words like anxious, people pleaser, perfectionist, and over thinker described who we are.

Then one word changed everything.

Pattern.

In this episode, I share why understanding ourselves through the lens of patterns completely transformed the way I see human behavior, relationships, parenting, and healing.

Children don't consciously choose survival strategies.

They adapt.

Over time, those adaptations become familiar patterns that shape the way we relate to ourselves, other people, conflict, love, money, and even our own worth.

When we stop asking...

"What's wrong with me?"

...and begin asking...

"What pattern created this?"

everything changes.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why many adult behaviors are intelligent childhood adaptations
 • How our nervous system learns what feels safe and familiar
 • The connection between attachment, subconscious programming, and relationships
 • Why awareness creates compassion—not blame
 • The question that completely changed the direction of my life after my divorce
 • Why I believe people aren't broken—they're patterned

If you've ever wondered why you keep repeating certain behaviors, relationships, or emotional responses, this episode is for you.

Because healing doesn't begin with fixing yourself.

It begins with understanding yourself.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Reparenting Radio. I'm Lisa Watson, architect of human transformation. This is a space for leaders, parents, and anyone ready to break old patterns, regulate their nervous system, and show up in their life with clarity and self-trust. If you're ready to change the way you lead, love, and live, you're in the right place. Let's begin. Hey friends, welcome back to Reparenting Radio. If I could go back 10 years and tell myself one thing, I'll tell you what it wouldn't be. Everything's gonna work out, and it also wouldn't be, you're gonna be okay. It would simply be, Lisa, you're not broken, you're patterned. Because understanding that one idea has changed the way that I have seen myself. And once I finally saw myself differently, I started seeing everyone else differently too. And over the past 10 years, I have to tell you, I have added a lot of new words to my vocabulary. From getting into a spiritual podcast back in 2016 to going back to school to get my PhD in integrative health medicine and neurolinguistic program training and Reiki and spiritual healing and light language. I can't even tell you how many things I've learned in the past 10 years. Some of those words are epigenetics, neuroplasticity, attachment theory, polyvagal theory, co-regulation, neuroscience, somatic healing, esoteric, just to name a few. And every one of those has changed the way that I understood human behavior. But recently, there's one word that I have found that I'm using more often than most, and that's the word pattern. And not because I think it's trendy or scientific or anything like that, but because it's the one word that completely changed the way I understand people, including myself. I used to hear people say things like, I'm just anxious, or I've always been a people pleaser. I'm terrible with money. I'm just an overthinker. I've always struggled with relationships. I'm just a perfectionist. It's just the way I am. And for years, when I heard those statements as descriptions of personality, almost like people were saying, or they really were saying, this is just who I am. But somewhere along the way, something shifted. And I stopped hearing identities, and I started hearing adaptations. Not flaws, not character defects, not permanent parts of who someone is, but simply patterns, patterns of behavior. And patterns have origins. They develop for a reason, they solve problems. Many of the behaviors that we struggle with today were actually intelligent adaptations that our younger selves created to help us survive, to keep us safe, and to feel more connected with the environments that we grew up in. And once I understood that, I was able to become much more compassionate towards my clients, my parents, my children, my friends, and perfect strangers, as well as most importantly, myself. Think about it for a minute. Children don't wake up one morning and decide, I think I'll become a people pleaser. Or I think I'll spend the rest of my life overthinking everything. Or, hmm, I think I'll become hyper-independent and then never ask anyone for help. Although many of us have probably said that as children. I'm never asking for help because when we did, it was not a pleasant experience. But children adapt. Children adapt. They pay attention, they observe the people around them, they learn from modeled behavior, they absorb what feels safe and what doesn't. And without ever consciously deciding to, they begin creating strategies that help them feel safer, more accepted, more connected. Because belonging isn't just something children want, it's something that they need. We often think that children need food, shelter, clothing, and you know, then they're good. And of course, they do need those things. But emotionally, they need something just as important. They need connection. They need to know I'm safe. I matter, my emotions are welcome. Someone is here with me when I'm scared. I can make mistakes and I can still be loved. Those experiences don't just shape childhood, they shape the subconscious, they shape the nervous system, they shape expectations, they shape what becomes familiar, and eventually they shape the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, and they impact every aspect of our lives, especially our relationships, which is why I find attachment theory to be so fascinating, because at its core, attachment theory asks one very simple question. What did your earliest relationships teach you about relationships? Did they teach you that people can be trusted or that people leave? Did they teach you your emotions matter? Or that they were too much? Did they teach you it was safe to ask for help? Or that you had to figure everything out on your own? Children don't just learn facts. They learn emotional rules. Rules about love, conflict, safety, belonging, worthiness, everything. And most of that learning happens long before we're consciously evaluating any of it. It simply becomes familiar. Remember, the brain is in a hypnotic state, the theta brainwave state, from ages zero through age seven up until age eight. Everything's a download. There's no logic or conscious thinking that is happening to determine what ideas I'll keep and which ones I'll get rid of. It's all simply absorbed as truth. And that's why two people can experience the exact same situation and walk away with completely different experiences. One hears constructive feedback, another hears rejection. One experiences space, and another experiences abandonment. One may feel supported where another one is feeling controlled. The event isn't creating the experience. The pattern is assigning meaning to the experience. And we can replace the word pattern with program or conditioning. That realization changed the questions that I was asking. Instead of asking what's wrong with this person, I started asking, what happened that made this response feel necessary? Because that question creates compassion, not permission. And there's a difference. Understanding a pattern doesn't excuse harmful behavior. It simply helps explain why that behavior may have developed and that it probably has nothing to do with you. And understanding that creates choice. Sometimes people hear conversations like this and they think, so what, we're just going to blame our parents for everything? No, not at all. I am not interested in blame. I am simply interested in awareness. Because blame keeps us stuck. Blame is actually the lowest point on the David Hawkins scale of emotional frequency. To say I'm just an anxious person versus what taught my nervous system to become anxious? Or when you're dealing with someone who's anxious instead of, oh my gosh, she's so anxious. Wow, I wonder what happened to her to make her nervous system feel so anxious all the time. One feels permanent, the other feels curious and compassionate. I'm just controlling versus what unpredictability taught me that control equals safety? And again, putting that on someone else. Oh my gosh, he's so controlling. Well, what behaviors and patterns did this person go through to make them controlling? It doesn't excuse their behavior, and it doesn't mean that you want to continue to give energy to that person. That pattern may not be in alignment with your patterns, and you may, once you recognize patterns in a relationship, you may decide that that relationship isn't the best relationship for you. Understanding patterns doesn't excuse them, it just brings awareness. It brings a response that can be based in love rather than fear and judgment. You can still walk away from a relationship without being judgmental because the relationship isn't in alignment with you. There's a difference here. Can you feel it? One conversation leads to shame, and the other just leads to understanding. And the older I get, the less interested I become in judging people, and the more interested I become in understanding them. I guess the real truth is the more compassionate I get, and maybe that comes with age, and maybe it doesn't, I don't know. But the more compassionate I become, the less interested I am in judging people. I just have compassion for them and their patterns that are getting in the way of them living a beautiful, fulfilling, you know, joyful and regulated life. And as I said, it doesn't mean that we tolerate unhealthy behavior, but we certainly stop abandoning our own boundaries. We stop confusing understanding someone with agreement. We can understand someone's pattern and still decide that relationship isn't healthy for us. And those two things, they can exist together. It's one of the reasons why recently I started a new series called One Minute of Awareness. I'm posting it on TikTok and on YouTube. Not because the internet needs more videos, Lord knows there's plenty of them out there, but because I just kept thinking like, what if someone only needed 60 seconds to stop seeing themselves as broken and start seeing themselves through a completely different lens? A lens of compassion, a lens of curiosity rather than a lens of judgment. So every day I take one pattern, either people pleasing, overthinking, busyness, comparison, whatever it may be. There's lots of them. And I'm gonna do it for 365 days. So we're gonna find 365 patterns. And not because I want people collecting labels either. It's the opposite. I want people to stop identifying with them as being who they are. Because every time we replace this is who I am with this is something I learned, we create possibility. Even with something like ADHD, I hear so many people say, oh, I just have ADHD, oh I have ADHD. Like it's just who they are and it's their personality. No, it was a pat it's a pattern of your nervous system that was developed to keep you safe. That's all. And you know, when I think back to that day, sitting alone in my new townhouse after my divorce, listening to Bruce Lipton on YouTube, which I spoke about in last week's podcast, I thought I was gonna learn about biology. I really had no idea that I was about to spend the next decade learning about people and behavior and children and relationships and parenting and leadership and the nervous system. But mostly what I learned was about myself. And I realized Bruce Lipton didn't just introduce me to epigenetics and subconscious programming. He introduced me to a question, which is if so much of my life is being shaped below my conscious awareness, then I need to find out what that is. That question changed everything. And I'm still following it every day. It's why I do this podcast, it's why I write my newsletters, it's why I continue to be a coach and a consultant. And if there's one thing I hope you take away from today's conversation is this the story you tell yourself about yourself, it matters. If your story is unbroken, then you'll spend your life trying to fix yourself. But if your story becomes, I've developed patterns that once help me stay safe and connected, but now I don't need them. Now you're no longer fixing yourself. You're understanding yourself. And I think understanding is one of the greatest acts of self-compassion that we can offer ourselves because personalities can often feel permanent, but patterns they create possibility. And I want to share with you a quote. I was having lunch with a friend of mine today, and we were talking about this kind of stuff, and and I had this realization. And I wrote to her, I'm actually going to read it to you. I just texted her. I said, when I was speaking with you today, it became really obvious to me how we are not trying to get anywhere but away from the noise that keeps us from hearing ourselves. And I refined it a little further and said, there comes a season when growth is no longer about becoming someone else, it's about removing enough noise that you can finally hear yourself. Maybe clarity isn't something we find. Maybe it's what remains when everyone else's expectations become quieter than our own inner knowing. And that's what I have for you today. But before we wrap it up, I want to say if you've been enjoying these conversations, I would love to invite you to join my newsletter if you aren't already a part of it. It's where many of these ideas begin and how I turn them into a podcast. And you'll also find my new One Minute of Awareness series on TikTok and YouTube if you'd like a daily 60-second reminder. And everything is linked in the show notes below. And one more thing, my next book, Reparent Yourself to Find Healing in All Relationships, is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality. And this entire episode is really the heartbeat of that book because I believe healing begins the moment we stop asking what's wrong with me. And we start asking, what pattern created this? Thanks for being here, friends. Until next time, be gentle with yourself. You're not broken. You're patterned. And patterns can be changed. Thank you for listening to Reparenting Radio. If today's conversation supported you, take a moment to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with someone who knows they were made for more than the patterns that they inherited. If you're ready for serious inner work and real transformation, personally or professionally, you can explore my leadership pathways at Lisa-Watson.com. And if you're raising little ones alongside your own healing, you'll find my children's books at awakentheone.org. Until next time, stay grounded, stay open, and keep reparenting the parts of you that are ready to come home to their authenticity.