Why We Repeat the Same Relationship Patterns

Why do so many people end up in the same relationship — different face, same dynamic? In this first episode of Red Flags & Real Love, Virginia McConnell breaks down the psychology of relationship patterns: where they start, why they persist, and what it actually takes to change them. If you've ever wondered why you keep arriving at the same place in love, this episode is for you.

What we cover:

• Why relationship patterns feel like chemistry — and how to tell the difference
• Where patterns actually start (it's not where most people think)
• The four most common relationship patterns and how to recognize yours
• Why awareness alone is never enough to change a pattern

Links:

• Free quizzes: breakthepatterns.netlify.app
• Website: breakthepatterns.net

Connect with Virginia:

• Instagram: instagram.com/officialvirginiamcconnell
• TikTok: tiktok.com/t/ZTSMSNPY4
• Facebook: facebook.com/officialvirginiamcconnell

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Red Flags in Real Love, hosted by Virginia McConnell, dating and relationship pattern coach, specializing in narcissistic abuse recovery, and someone who has lived everything she teaches. This show is about recognizing the patterns that keep us stuck, leaving what's hurting us, and rebuilding into something real. Here's your host, Virginia McConnell.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

All right. So today on episode one of Red Flags and Real Love, I'm your episode, I'm your host, Virginia McConnell. And I actually want to start with a question. Have you ever looked at your relationship history and noticed something? Like, not just that the relationships were hard, but that they were the same kind of hard. Different person, different name, different face, but somehow the same dynamic, like the same feeling, the same ending. Okay. If you're nodding your head right now, this episode is for you. Because here's what I spent years believing that I had bad judgment, that I was somehow broken, that I was just unlucky in love in a way that other people weren't. I'd look at someone who seemed to have a healthy relationship and think, what do they know that I don't? What am I missing? What am I missing wasn't the information. It wasn't effort. Lord knows I tried hard enough. That was like what I was missing was understanding. Understanding of why I kept arriving at the same place with a different person every time. Okay, so that's what this episode is about. Not the person, not the relationship, the pattern underneath it. Because once you understand the pattern, and I mean like really understand it, not just intellectually, know it exists, everything changes. Okay. I didn't come to this work from a textbook only. Like I came to it from real life. I've navigated toxic relationships for most of my adult life, and including my childhood life. Um, for a long time, I genuinely didn't have a language for what was happening. Um, I just knew that relationships felt hard in a specific way, like that I always seemed to end up in the same place, exhausted, depleted, smaller than I started. And here's what nobody was telling me. It wasn't about the people I was choosing, it was about what I had learned love was supposed to feel like. Okay, so like young when we're children through childhood, what it costs, whether it's safe, whether we deserve it. Okay, so during my second marriage, I was also dealing with a health crisis. I was diagnosed with functional neurological disorder. Uh, it's a condition that required me to relearn how to walk, talk, and drive. And everything I had taken for granted about functioning in my own body had to be rebuilt from the ground up, like completely start over. I didn't know how long it was going to last, um, if it was ever going to go away. And in that season was one of the hardest times of my entire life. I started to understand something that the hard wasn't going to be removed. I was going to have to walk through it. And what I thought was the end of everything became the beginning of the most honest version of my life. I started doing the real work, not reading about patterns, like actually sitting with them, tracing them back, understanding where they came from and why they had run, why they had been running my life for so long. And what I found changed everything. I wasn't broken. I wasn't unlucky. I had a pattern. And patterns, unlike luck, can be changed. So that's why I do this work, and that's why I started this podcast. So let's talk about the pattern. What it actually is, where it comes from, and why willpower alone has never been enough to change it. Okay, so we're gonna first talk about what a relationship pattern actually is. Okay, so a relationship pattern is a recurring dynamic, right? A way of connecting, attaching, and relating to other people that plays out across multiple relationships. So regardless of who the other person is. So it could be, you know, romantic, work, family, children, doesn't matter. Siblings, uh, doesn't matter. And here's what makes up so what makes patterns so tricky is they feel like chemistry, they feel like attraction, or they feel like love. Okay. So in many cases, it's familiarity, it's your nervous system recognizing something it's felt before. The person who makes your heart race might not be exciting, like they might just be familiar. And familiar when you grow up with chaos and inconsistency or painful experiences, familiar feels like home, right? So even when home wasn't safe. So where these patterns come from, this this is the part that changes everything for people when they really hear it. Okay, so pay attention to this. Your relationship patterns didn't start with your first boyfriend or girlfriend, they started in your first relationship, okay? The one you didn't choose, the one with your actual caregivers, okay. Not necessarily parents, but caregivers, okay, the ones who who were around you the most, all right. And as children, we are hardwired to attach, okay. So we need connection to survive, like literally. And so we develop strategies based on what we observe. If love was consistent and available, we learn that connection is safe. If love was inconsistent, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, sometimes present, sometimes completely absent, we learn that love requires effort to maintain, that we actually have to work to keep people close to us. Okay, if love felt conditional, like it could be withdrawn at any moment, taken away from us. We learn to be careful, we learn to be small and be little, uh, to not take up too much space, to be whatever version of ourselves was most likely to keep the peace. So, you know, a people pleaser. I know that we've all heard that before, right? Um, so these aren't conscious decisions, they're nervous system adaptations. Okay, so from your core, and they work in childhood. This is exactly what they're made to do, right? They're made to protect you as a child and they help us navigate the environment we're in. The problem is that most people carry those same strategies into adult relationships where they no longer serve them, and then wonder why the same thing keeps happening, right? Okay, so I'm gonna talk about the four most common patterns that I see. In my work, I see four patterns come up again and again. So you might recognize yourself in one of these or a combination of. And the first one I'm gonna talk about is the pursuer. So this is when someone pulls away, the pursuer chases, right? So we're we're gonna send more texts, we're gonna try harder, we're gonna we're gonna try more, we're gonna put more effort in to close the distance. And the more someone withdraws, the harder the pursuer works. And this pattern usually develops when love felt inconsistent growing up, like when attention had to be earned and maintained. Connection required constant effort. Okay, and then we have the distancer. The distancer pulls back when things get close, when intimacy feels uncomfortable. So intimacy does feel uncomfortable. Uh, relationships feel suffocating after a while. There's often an attraction to the chase, so more attraction in the beginning of the relationship. Um, and then someone who's hard to read feels exciting, uh while someone who's stable and available actually feels boring. Okay, so they get very bored with with people. Um, this pattern usually develops when closeness felt overwhelming or unsafe. And then we talked about this one earlier a little bit, the people pleaser. The people pleaser loses themselves in relationships. They say yes when they actually mean no. Uh, they apologize for things that aren't their fault, and they prioritize everyone else's needs, and somewhere along the way, knowing they just like completely stop knowing what they want. Uh, and this pattern usually develops when love felt conditional, when keeping the peace felt safer than being honest, and was was safer than being honest. Um, and then we have the rescuer. So the rescuer is drawn to people who need them, they find purpose in fixing, helping, carrying. Uh, they're often incredibly empathetic and they feel other people's pain very deeply, uh, but consistently end up in relationships with people who are more broken than available, right? So this pattern usually develops when when worth was when you know their worth was tied to being needed. Now, again, remember that there could be a combination of as well, and none of these are character flaws. I want to be very, very uh just point that out again. None of these are character flaws, okay? None of them mean something is wrong with you, they're just adaptive strategies that made sense at some point when you were younger, or at some point, at any point. Younger is literally a minute ago, right? So um they're your nervous system doing what it learned to do. And the work is not to shame yourself for having them, like they're there for a reason, and you know, the work is to understand them well enough to start doing something different, right? So, so we need to do something different about that, and then the last part of this that I'm gonna talk about is why willpower just isn't enough. So here's why people stay stuck even when they know they have a pattern. Um, knowing something intellectually and changing it at a nervous system level are two completely different things. Like you can know that you tend to chase unavailable people, you can know it, like journal about it, talk about it in therapy, read every book about it, and still feel that pull like towards someone who doesn't text you back for three days. Um, still feel the anxiety when someone is too available, or still feel the familiar pull of a dynamic that your nervous system recognizes as love, right? So, and and it and it's not, it's actually not love. Um, it just recognizes it as love. And because the pattern isn't just a thought, it's a felt experience, right? An emotion, it lives in the body and it operates below the level of logic, which means changing it requires more than awareness, it requires actually experiencing something different, like emotionally, learning to tolerate and eventually choose what feels unfamiliar. And it's gonna be like so crazy and wild, right? So, learning to recognize the difference between chemistry and familiarity, uh, learning to trust your nervous system with new information over time, and that's the work. Like that's what break the patterns, uh, my signature course walks you through. It's not willpower, it's not affirmations, like it's a real framework for understanding where your pattern started and what it's actually going to take to interrupt it. So I want to leave you with something before we wrap up. Um, if you've been in the same relationship more than once with a different person, I want you to hear this. You are not broken, you are not unlucky, you do not have bad judgment. Okay, you have a pattern, and patterns have origins, and when you understand the origin, like really understand it, not just know it, you stop blaming yourself for arriving at the same place because you understand why you kept arriving there, and more importantly, like you understand what it actually is going to take to go somewhere different. Okay, so and that's that's the work that I do. That's what this podcast is about. Okay, if today's episode hit something for you, if you recognize yourself in one of those four patterns, I want you to take the next step. Go to breakthepatterns.net and go to the free Monday class. Okay, every Monday at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, it's live, it's free, and it's module one of my Break the Patterns uh signature course, which is exactly what we talked about today, but we go in deeper and we have exercises, a workbook, um, and you actually like can use the exercises um and do everything throughout the week. Um you have access to that as well. So not just Monday. Um, come as you are, that's all you need. Um, I'll see you next week on Red Flags and Real Love.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

That's it for this episode of Red Flags and Real Love. If anything Virginia talked about today resonated with you, visit breakthepatterns.net and join the free class every Monday at 7 30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. It's free, it's live, and it's the best place to start. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a quick rating wherever you're listening. It takes 30 seconds, and it genuinely helps the show reach more people who need it. See you then.