People often repeat painful relationship patterns because the brain prefers what is familiar. That is the core idea from my conversation with psychologist Krista Jordan. Most of what we do each day runs outside our awareness, and our choices in love are part of that.
Jordan explains that automation is by design. The brain handles breathing, digestion and picking up a coffee cup without our input. The same automation reaches into our perceptions, judgments and choices. If we had to think through everything, we would never get anything done.
Why familiar feels safe
Jordan points to Freud’s idea of the repetition compulsion. Evolution tilts the brain toward what it has seen before. If something is familiar, it has not killed you yet. Painful patterns can still feel survivable, so we move toward them.
There is a second pull as well. Jordan notes that cognitive science shows people are motivated to return to a problem they were interrupted in solving. We dislike leaving things undone. So we may seek out situations that echo old wounds, hoping to rework them.
This explains a common surprise. Someone finally meets a safe partner and feels restless. Jordan says people who grew up equating emotional distress with love will notice the absence of distress and find it confusing. In therapy she helps them tell the difference between quiet love, which is sustainable, and boredom, which is not.
Why you can’t do this alone
Jordan is wary of the do-it-yourself approach. Publishers have asked her to write a workbook on fixing your attachment style. She declines because attachment is built between two people, so it has to be healed between two people. She compares it to how babies learn to connect. A baby sends a signal and sees it reflected back. It is a dance between two nervous systems.
She also cautions that time alone can feel calming because it removes interpersonal stress. It also removes connection. For many people, she says, the work happens with a therapist who can point out patterns in real time that are hard to see from the inside.
Her approach is additive. She does not ask clients to give up defenses that serve them. A surgeon who compartmentalizes may be good at the job because of it. The question is where else that habit shows up, such as when a child or partner needs attention. The goal is to add more ways of responding.
Here is one thing to try. Think of a pattern you have noticed in your close relationships. Write down one moment when it showed up. Then note whether the situation felt familiar, even if it was unpleasant. That small step brings the pattern into view, which Jordan describes as the first step toward choosing something different.
From the episode: Navigating Childhood Patterns and Relational Health, with Krista Jordan. Read the full transcript.