The Pattern You Keep Replaying in Relationships

by Eiad Asbahi, Mindscape founder and CEO

 

There’s a relationship that keeps ending the same way. Maybe you’ve had the same argument with three different people. Maybe you keep ending up in relationships that follow the same painful pattern. You swore you’d never let yourself feel like that again; you promised yourself this one would be different. But eventually, you found yourself right back in the same place.

 

The instinct is to focus on the other person. Pick better next time. Read the signs earlier. Choose someone who won’t do what the last one did. Better partner, better choices, better luck.

 

It took me a long time to notice the obvious thing, which is that the common denominator was me. I don’t mean that as self-blame. I mean that every relationship had a different story, but I kept bringing the same fears, the same reactions, and the same ways of protecting myself into each one.

 

My Story

 

In 2020 I was going through a divorce, standing in the wreckage of a marriage and looking at my three-year-old daughter, knowing that whatever I did next would shape the way she understood love, safety, and her own worth.

 

I had spent my whole life chasing and achieving success, and here was the one thing I had never managed to build.

 

So I sat down and got honest about my highest purpose. It wasn’t a number or a title. It was this: I wanted to finally have a secure relationship, the kind that had eluded me my entire life, and I wanted to model it for my daughter so she would grow up with the example I never got in my own childhood.

 

The plan was outward facing. I went back to our couples counselor, after my marriage had already ended, and I asked him for a post-mortem. I literally asked him how I could change my partner selection. Every serious relationship I’d had ended in the same place, and looking back, I could see the pattern ran generations deep. I assumed the answer was simply to choose better next time. Pick a more secure person. Get the next one right.

 

Instead, the counselor pointed me inward. That conversation led me into years of therapy, self-examination, and eventually ketamine therapy. None of that was what I’d gone there looking for.

 

The Relationship That Actually Needed Work

 

What I expected was that I would learn to spot the right partner, find her, and give my daughter a stable home that way.

 

What happened was that the work changed me, not my criteria. I gave my daughter a secure relationship by becoming a secure person, not by going out and finding one. The connection I thought I was searching for was actually the one I needed to build with myself. Once that changed, everything else began to change with it.

 

Eventually, I understood. The pattern was never a partner problem. It was old programming. By old programming, I mean the patterns laid down early, before you had any say in them, that keep running quietly in the background and shape how you handle closeness, conflict, and your own sense of worth, before you’ve even had a chance to think. Mine traced back to my parents splitting, when that 10-year-old kid decided he was unlovable. That little kid was still making my decisions thirty years later. I just couldn’t see his hand on the wheel.

 

Breaking the Pattern

 

I began by exploring a type of therapy called Internal Family Systems, and it changed the direction of my life. It showed me something simple but profound: instead of fighting the parts of yourself that react, criticize, or shut down, you can learn to understand them. Over time, I built on that foundation and developed my own practice of working with myself.

 

For most of my life, when a self-critical thought showed up, I shoved it down and ran. The new move was the opposite. When a reaction fired, instead of suppressing it or arguing with it, I turned toward it and got curious. Where did this belief come from? What is it trying to protect? Is it actually true?

 

The Practice

 

Done over and over again, that became more than an exercise. It became a process of self-reconstruction. Each time I questioned an old belief instead of automatically believing it, I was rewriting a little more of that old programming. Little by little, I stopped seeing myself through the eyes of that frightened ten-year-old. I realized I wasn’t broken or unlovable. I stopped looking for someone else to make me feel safe and started becoming that person for myself.

 

The most important part was the practice of noticing, questioning, and gradually reprogramming those old beliefs. Therapy can help. Grounding exercises can too. For me, ketamine therapy became an important tool for that work. It helped create what I think of as an enhanced neuroplastic window: a period when the mind becomes more open to change and old reactions loosen their grip. Building toward those windows, and knowing what to do inside them, is central to how we think about lasting change at Mindscape.

 

But the window isn’t the transformation. It’s what you do inside it that changes your life.

 

Where to Begin

 

Look for the common denominator without turning it into a weapon against yourself. The pattern is information, not a verdict. You’re gathering data, not filing charges.

 

 

When a familiar reaction fires, get curious instead of clamping down. Ask where it comes from before you try to argue it into silence. The reaction is a messenger. Ignore it, and it usually comes back louder.

 

Treat what you find as programming you can update, not a character flaw you’re stuck with. That one distinction changes what feels possible. A flaw feels like a life sentence. Programming is something you can rewrite.

 

Repetition Matters

 

Keep showing up for the practice. The same patterns will come up again. That’s what patterns do. Each time they do, you have another opportunity to notice them, question them, and respond differently. That’s how the relationship with yourself is built: not all at once, but one moment at a time.

 

The Proof: Change Is Possible

 

The greatest proof is my daughter.

 

I set out to find a secure relationship so she could watch one and learn from it. What I discovered is that she never needed the demonstration. When I built security inside myself, it passed to her directly, through our relationship, with nothing standing in between. The steadiness she’s growing up with didn’t come from something she observed. It came from who I became.

 

And here’s the part that stops me when I think about it. The wiring I carried was headed for her next. Same chain, next link, the way it had passed down for generations before me. That’s not how it went. The inheritance ends here.

 

I set out to model a good relationship for her. The relationship I ended up changing was the one with myself, and it reached her more directly than any example I could have shown her.

 

The patterns you learned aren’t your fault. But they don’t have to be your future.