Why We Keep Repeating Patterns

Two years ago I left a career that had run almost thirty years. There was no plan, no backup, no landing pad waiting on the other side. I left because I knew I couldn't do another year like the last one, and that was the entire strategy. What I didn't know was what I'd finally have time to notice once I stopped.

Some of what I found, I knew was there. My father died weeks before I started a new role at a new firm. I should have been joining as Mrs Barnett. Instead, I was still Miss Humphries. We moved house in the middle of all of it. Throughout, I went to work. I told myself the grief could wait until it wasn't so overwhelming. Apparently I'd decided grief could be scheduled as an Outlook invitation, and for years it seemed to accept the decline without complaint.

It hadn't. Six months after he died, I became seriously ill, and my anxiety climbed with it. I treated the illness as an illness and the anxiety as anxiety. I couldn't stomach what had happened, and even then I didn't link the two. It took years before I could see them as connected.

That was the deliberate deferral. I knew I'd suppressed the grief, and I always intended to go back. I hadn't expected it to still feel so strong whenever I did. What I hadn't counted on was everything else I'd set aside without ever realising I'd done it. Those things didn't announce themselves as unfinished business. They showed up as behaviour, and the behaviour had been running so long I'd stopped seeing it as anything other than who I was.

I replayed conversations for days afterward, searching for proof I'd said the wrong thing. I rewrote emails over and over before sending them, spending more time on some of them than anyone spent reading them. When something stopped working, I added more effort, because effort had solved everything for thirty years and I had no second strategy. I drank more than I should have so I didn't have to look at any of it too closely.

When a colleague treated me badly, and the conversation with my manager became about my reaction rather than the behaviour I was reporting, I accepted that framing without a fight. I went home questioning what was wrong with me instead of asking whether the treatment was acceptable. I stopped raising concerns at all, because I had decided I was probably the problem.

Repeating patterns, not separate habits

At the time it didn't feel like avoidance. I was so numb I didn't feel much of anything. It felt like coping. It took leaving my career, and months with nothing demanding my attention, to see that these weren't separate habits with separate causes. They were the same move, made over and over: assume I was the problem, treat it as fact, and never question it. It made me realise that repeating patterns don't feel like patterns when you are living in them. They feel like personality.

The habits didn't stay behind when I left, either. Since leaving I've written hundreds of posts and deleted every one because they sounded like everyone else's.

Two years on, I still catch myself assuming I'm the problem. The difference is that I don't automatically believe it anymore. Instead of asking what's wrong with me, I ask whether I've mistaken the symptom for the problem. More often than not, I have.

This is the work I do now through my Catalyst Day. A single day spent looking at what you've been trying to fix, and asking whether it's the problem at all. If you'd like to explore whether that's right for you, take a look at rosinabarnett.com.