Part 1: The Patterns We Carry Into Love
Have you ever noticed yourself pulling away just when things start to feel close? Or anxiously checking your phone, waiting for a text back? Maybe you keep ending up in the same kind of relationship, even though you swear you won’t this time.
These patterns can feel confusing, even frustrating. You might wonder why you react the way you do, or why certain moments trigger such strong feelings. Sometimes we blame ourselves, or wonder if we’re just “too much” or “not enough” for the people we care about.
If that rings true, you’re definitely not alone.
How attachment begins
We’re built for connection. It’s one of the most fundamental things about being human. And the way we learned to connect—or struggle to connect—started very early, in our relationships with the people who raised us.
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby and expanded by Mary Ainsworth, is really about this: how our earliest relationships become the template for how we love, how we trust, and how we handle closeness and distance.
Before we even have words, before we can think consciously about relationships, our bodies are learning. We’re absorbing patterns, developing expectations, building an internal sense of what connection feels like and whether it’s safe.
The night-time cry: where it all begins
Think about a baby waking in the night. They’re scared, uncomfortable, unsure. They cry. And in that moment, everything depends on what happens next. Does someone come? Are they warm, consistent, there? Or do they stay away? Come too harshly? Come sometimes but not others?
These aren’t small moments. A baby’s whole nervous system is learning what connection means. They’re learning whether the world is predictable, whether their needs matter, whether there’s someone who will show up for them.
Survival strategies
Over time, babies adapt. If their cries are usually met with comfort, they learn that reaching out works—that people are safe. If responses are inconsistent or unavailable, they learn something different. Some babies cry louder, trying harder to get a response. Others seem to give up, turning inward, protecting themselves from the disappointment of unmet need.
These aren’t conscious decisions. They’re survival strategies, written into the body itself. The baby is doing exactly what they need to do to stay as connected as possible, given what they’re experiencing.
From childhood to adult relationships
What matters is that these early attachment patterns keep showing up in relationships and stick with us. The way we learned to seek love, to trust, to handle rejection or distance—we carry all of that forward. In adult relationships, we might find ourselves repeating the same cycles without fully understanding why. We might react intensely to small moments of disconnection. We might struggle to ask for what we need. Or we might push people away before they can leave us.
It’s easy to judge ourselves for these patterns. To think something is broken in us. We might feel ashamed, or convinced that we’re just “difficult” or “complicated” when it comes to love.
They’re not flaws—they’re adaptations
But seen differently, these patterns make complete sense. They’re not flaws. They’re adaptations—ways you learned to survive and stay connected in your early relationships. They worked for you once. They helped you navigate what was happening around you, and they kept you as safe as you could be.
Think of it this way: your nervous system was doing its job. It was picking up signals from the people around you—how available they were, how predictable, how safe—and it was adjusting your behaviour in response. If reaching out worked sometimes, you kept trying. If it didn’t work, you found other ways to manage. Maybe you learned to be very attuned to other people’s moods, always scanning for what they needed so you could stay in their good graces. Maybe you learned to rely only on yourself, to expect disappointment, to keep your guard up. Maybe you became the peacekeeper, the helper, the one who made sure everyone else was okay so there’d be less chaos.
None of these are character flaws. They’re intelligent responses to your environment. Your system figured out the best way to survive with the resources and relationships you had.
The challenge is that these strategies, which made perfect sense then, don’t always serve us well now. The hypervigilance that kept you safe as a child might now show up as anxiety in relationships. The independence you had to develop might feel like an inability to be vulnerable. The people-pleasing that protected you from conflict might leave you exhausted and resentful, always giving and rarely asking.
The good news? Attachment patterns aren’t fixed. With awareness and support, they can shift. New relationships—including a therapeutic one—can help us rewrite what we learned about connection. It takes time, and it takes gentleness with yourself, but change is genuinely possible. As you experience relationships where you’re consistently met, where your needs matter, where it’s safe to be yourself—your nervous system begins to learn something new.
What comes next
In the next parts of this series, I’ll dig into the different attachment styles, how they show up in real relationships, and what actually helps when you want to change these patterns.
If any of this is resonating with you, I’d welcome the chance to explore it together in a session. Sometimes just being heard and understood in a different way is where the real change begins.
