Familiarity Keeps Us Stuck in Unsatisfying Patterns

Once we enter into habitual relational roles and patterns, they captivate us. With each new interaction, we are subtly pulled back into behavioral scripts.

Couples often begin therapy proclaiming that things need to change now, or else! They are exhausted by repetitive arguments, disconnection, and simmering tension. Many are or eventually become aware of the patterns that lead them down these familiar roads. But recognizing and disrupting patterns are very different tasks.

Relational change requires consciously choosing to act and relate differently than you have before. Often, it requires a significant shift in perspective, not merely understanding the patterns, but questioning the assumptions and expectations that sustain them.

That is difficult work.

We avoid this work in many ways, consciously and unconsciously. A common strategy is to insist that the other person is the one who needs to change – if only he communicated better, if only they were more affectionate/accountable/understanding/less reactive, if only she would see things my way. Sometimes this strategy works for a while, especially in relationships where one partner occupies the position of righteous authority on what a "good relationship" should look like and the other complies. But sooner or later, that arrangement either collapses or becomes another unsatisfying script in the collection.

Another strategy is to devote lots of time and energy to making adjustments while leaving the underlying relational system untouched. Examples – seeking to improve communication while continuing to avoid vulnerability, learning conflict-management techniques while maintaining the same assumptions about who is right and who is wrong, scheduling more date nights while continuing to avoid difficult conversations, dividing household responsibilities more evenly while preserving longstanding patterns of resentment, criticism, or emotional withdrawal.

Those types of adjustments can be valuable but should not be confused with the transformational shifts that many yearn for in their intimate relationships.

Meaningful change requires interrogation and action. Sometimes this means making different choices regardless of what the other person is willing to do. It means examining one's own habits, assumptions, defenses, and contributions.

Sometimes, change means stepping so far outside of the existing relational patterns that the relationship itself must change form. And not every act of change/growth leads to greater closeness. Sometimes change involves deciding to leave a relationship that repeatedly violates your dignity, safety, or fundamental needs. Sometimes it involves establishing and maintaining non-negotiable boundaries, even when doing so creates rupture, conflict or disappointment.

For example, someone may decide they will no longer remain in conversations where they are being verbally degraded. Someone may refuse to continue rescuing a partner from the consequences of chronic irresponsibility. Someone may decide that repeated infidelity, dishonesty, substance misuse, or financial secrecy is incompatible with remaining in the relationship.

And while this type of work is difficult under any circumstances, it is especially difficult amidst modern life. Many people are already stretched thin by work, family responsibilities, financial pressures, an endless news cycle, and a persistent sense of existential uncertainty. Under those conditions, familiarity becomes even more appealing.

What's simpler is to fall back on what you know.

Even if what you know is unsatisfying, painful, lonely.

A major tension of intimate relationships is that people desperately want things to be different while simultaneously organizing themselves around keeping things the same.

Therapy can offer challenge, perspective, experimentation, but change still requires willing, active participation. It requires choosing, again and again and again, to move toward something unfamiliar. It requires tolerating the discomfort of not knowing exactly how things will unfold. Yet it is precisely through this kind of reckoning that people discover possibilities that were previously obscured by familiarity. The juice is worth the squeeze.