Why Do I Keep Choosing the Same Type of Relationship?

 

Why Do I Keep Choosing the Same 

Type of Relationship?

Have you ever looked back at your relationships and wondered how you ended up here again?  The person may be different.  The circumstances may be different.  However, the emotional experience is the same.  You may be continually choosing someone emotionally unavailable, difficult to connect with, someone you feel responsible for, someone you have to prove yourself to, or someone who makes you question your worth.  The most frustrating part of all of this is that you may know exactly what you don't want in your relationships, so why do the same patterns keep showing up?

Before I go much further, I want to make sure you understand that there is nothing wrong with you and the Universe is NOT conspiring against you.  We don't always choose what is healthy for us; we choose what is familiar.  The human mind is designed to recognize patterns.  Familiarity creates a sense of safety, even when the familiar experience isn't actually good for us.  Your nervous system doesn't care if the person is aligned with the life you want.  It feels the familiarity in the experience, not the person.  

Essentially, you end up choosing the emotional environment that feels safe and that you understand rather than choosing the person, because what is predictable will feel safer to your nervous system than what is unknown.  If you grew up in a family dynamic where you learned early in life that love required effort, you may feel drawn towards relationships where you have to earn closeness through what you can offer the person.  If you learned that being needed equals being valued, you may unconsciously choose relationships where you over give and become the fixer.  There are no "random" relationships; every relationship, good or bad, is revealing your programming.

After each relationship that inevitably ends, most people end up blaming the other person or blaming themselves.  This isn't a question about why you keep attracting the same type of people into your life.  There is no true answer to this way of thinking, and it only leaves you in victim mentality.  The question you want to ask yourself is, "What role do I automatically step into in these relationships?"  Are you the rescuer? The Peacekeeper? The one who puts others' needs before your own?  The one who tries to prove they are worthy of love?  The response to this question is important because the pattern you are repeating isn't only who you choose; it's also who you become when you are with them.  

If you can learn to see your relationships as mirrors showing you all the places you lack love for yourself, judge yourself, abandon yourself, or are too attached, you can begin to change the patterns by choosing differently.  Your relationships are simply exposing deep beliefs about yourself that you haven't questioned yet.  Every relationship activates your beliefs around love, worth, safety, belonging, abandonment, and responsibility.  The relationship is the container where these unconscious beliefs become visible.  

The goal isn't to blame your past, but to understand your present.  Understanding where the pattern came from isn't about staying stuck in the past; it's about gaining awareness of the invisible rules influencing your choices today.  You don't want to get stuck in asking, "Why did I allow this?"  You want to ask, "What do I believe I had to do in order to be worthy of love, safety, belonging etc."  The moment you can see the pattern, you are no longer completely controlled by it.  You create a space between the old reaction and the new choice.  Your goal is not to become someone who never makes mistakes; it's to become someone who chooses differently from being aware of the unconscious conditioning.

By: Dr. Laurie Williams D.Ms

https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/

 

The Difference Between Who You Are and Who You Learned To Be

Most people are not living as their true selves.  They learned from an early age that being themselves was not safe for one reason or another.  Maybe you have never felt safe because of needs not being met or because you were sent the message that being you was too much or not lovable.  So you create a version of you that feels cared for, loved, seen, heard and valued because in receiving these needs also receive the safety that being you didn't allow.  This is your survival self.

People then grow up thinking that this survival identity is actually who they truly are at their core, but it isn't.  There is a difference between adaptation and identity.  Many people mistake people-pleasing, coping mechanisms, performance, hyper-independence, emotional shutdown, overachievement, or perfectionism for their true identity.  The issue isn't that these patterns formed; the issue is that they become your entire identity until you are able to recognize and release them.  If you continue to hold onto these patterns, they will continue to run your life unconsciously, and the truth is that as an adult, you don't need them to keep you safe anymore.  You no longer live in your childhood, and the adult you is more than capable of keeping you safe without these survival tactics.

The Person You Learned To Be Was Built For Protection

Survival patterns are learned responses to environments, relationships, expectations, and emotional consequences.  Children learn very quickly who they have to become to receive safety, love, approval, or stability.  A child may have to become the "responsible one" in order to gain the praise and love of their parents.  Or maybe a child learns that trying to express their needs isn't safe because they get yelled at when they do so, they become the "easy one", the one who does what they are told to not upset anyone.  The overachiever quickly realizes that their parents are only happy with them when they bring home A's on their report card.  These are just a few of the identities that we develop early in life, and they often begin as protection, not truth.  What once felt like it protected you will eventually disconnect you from yourself in adulthood.

High-Functioning Does Not Mean Aligned

Once we become adults, many people build their entire lives around survival patterns.  Many people may look successful on the outside while being internally disconnected from themselves.  Functioning is not the same thing as knowing who you truly are.  With this functioning usually comes burnout.  The internal can never seem to get enough rest, soul-tired, type of burnout.  This affects your career, relationships, parenting style and even social identities.  This exhaustion comes from working overtime to maintain an identity built around survival rather than self-truth.  Your nervous system can become addicted to performance, predictability, and external validation, so the loop continues even without you being aware of it.

Signs You Are Living As Who You Learned To Be

Self-awareness is the key to realizing what a survival pattern is and what your true identity is.  Here are some signs that you are living as the person you needed to be to survive and not your true self:

• Chronic overthinking and/or struggling to make decisions
• Feeling as though you are stuck in your life
• Not knowing who you are outside of the roles you play
• Struggling to trust yourself without needing outside validation
• Feeling like your life is "fine" but knowing that something internally feels off
• Feeling emotionally numb or emotionally overloaded
• Feeling guilty for resting, saying no, or putting yourself first

The True Self Is Usually Quieter Than The Survival Self

The survival self was built on fear.  It's urgent, reactive and loud.  The true self is the quiet whisper that you hear when you silence the survival self.  So much of what people believe is their intuition is actually their true self having its voice heard.  It feels foreign when you can finally hear the true self after years of conditioning and believing that the identity you have come to know is not actually who you are.  This is extremely uncomfortable and unfamiliar.  Your nervous system often interprets truth as being unsafe at first because it threatens the old survival patterns.  In time, your nervous system will recalibrate itself to the true self, so it's imperative that you stick with the releasing process, but also have patience and compassion for the process that you are going through.  

Being your true self is not about becoming someone new.  It's not about learning how to regulate your nervous system (your nervous system is built to regulate itself).  It's about having the self-awareness to see the survival patterns as they come up and reprogram your response to them in real time.  You can not journal or meditate your way through releasing your survival self.  Becoming your true self will require honest self-reflection, awareness of how your nervous system is programmed, what triggers you, and where you are abandoning yourself.  These are all part of the survival roles that need to be released.

You Are Not Broken

You simply became who you needed to be, but there comes a point where survival will start to cost you yourself and your truth.  The goal is not to hate the version of yourself that adapted, but to recognize where adaptation is not imprisonment.  The real work begins when you stop asking yourself, "Who do others need me to be?" and start asking, "Who am I underneath everything I learned to become?"  This is the point when you can begin to uncover the authentic you in all your glory and truth.

Dr. Laurie Williams

https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/

Stress Isn't the Problem; Your Relationship With Stress Is

 Stress Isn't the Problem; Your Relationship With Stress Is

Stress is one of the most misunderstood experiences in the human body.  We treat it like a villain, a weakness, a force that steals our peace and pushes us to the edge.  We blame stress for our burnout, our anxiety, our frustration, and our tension in our relationships.  But stress is not the real problem.

Your relationship with stress is.

You can't eliminate stress (and you wouldn't want to).  But you can learn to understand it, respond to it differently, and transform its impact on your life, your work, and your well-being.  This is the difference between emotional survival and emotional mastery.

Let's take a minute and take what we think stress is and break it wide open.  Stress, at its core, is simply information.  It's your body's internal communication system saying: 

• "Pay attention."
• "This matters."
• "Something feels off."
• "You're stretching beyond your current capacity."

Your stress response is ancient, intelligent, and meant to protect you.  But in modern life, you're not running from lions, you're running from deadlines, expectations, unresolved emotions, and self-imposed pressure.  The response is the same. But the context has changed.  This mismatch is what leads to overwhelm, burnout, and emotional dysregulation.  

The Root Issue: Chronic Dysregulation, Not Stress

The real problem happens when your body stays in a stress response for too long.  When you live in chronic reactivity, your nervous system never gets a reset.  Your emotions stay heightened, and your sleep, mood and focus decline.  You eventually develop physical symptoms such as tension, headaches, and fatigue.  You may also find yourself losing access to your mental clarity, creativity, and the ability to make calm, rational decisions.  This creates a loop that keeps you stuck:

More reactivity = More stress = More overwhelm = Less Capacity = Even more reactivity

This doesn't happen because stress showed up; it happens because we were never taught the skills to navigate stress.  Most of us were taught to:

• Push through
• Shut down
• Suppress emotions
• Numb out
• Avoid discomfort
• Live on autopilot
• "Be strong" instead of being supported

This creates a poor relationship with stress.  One rooted in fear, avoidance, and urgency

Reframing Stress: Changing the Internal Dialogue

What if stress wasn't an alarm but a messenger?  When you pay attention to the message that stress carries, you may begin to realize that it's shining a light on aspects like where you need boundaries, where you are out of alignment, where you are trying to control too much or carrying emotional weight that doesn't belong to you.  Or maybe it's showing you where you need to focus your healing or abandoning your own needs.  When you shift how you define stress, suddenly it becomes less of an enemy and more of a teacher.  When you make this shift, everything changes.  Your body will soften, your mind will become clearer, and your emotional resiliency will skyrocket.  This is emotional leadership, over your life, your work, and your inner world.

How to Build a Healthier Relationship With Stress

The mental shift: Question the story your stress is creating.  Every stress response comes with a thought attached, and that thought usually exaggerates the truth.  It may tell you things like, "This is too much," or maybe, "People will be disappointed," or even "I'm failing."  These stories activate fear, urgency and self-judgement, but when you pause and observe the story, not obey it, you reclaim your power.  When you feel stressed, ask yourself:

• What story and I telling myself right now?
• Is this true?  Or is it my fear talking?
• How can I shift my current perspective?
• What would I tell a friend in this situation?

This breaks the old stress-response cycle and opens the door to clarity.

The emotional shift: Feel instead of fight.  Most people fear their emotions more than the stressful situation itself.  But emotions only overwhelm you when you resist them.  To change your relationship with stress, you must change your relationship with your emotions.  Let yourself feel and sit in the discomfort of those feelings.  Acknowledge your emotions instead of pushing them away or suppressing them.  Ask yourself:

• What emotion is underneath this stress?
• What does it need from me?
• Where is there emotional tension in my body?

When your emotional body feels seen, your nervous system instantly softens.

The Physical Shift: Learning how to re-regulate your nervous system is crucial for effectively managing your stress response.  Your body speaks louder than your mind.  If your body feels unsafe, no mindset work will stick.  Regulation practices help bring your nervous system out of survival mode and back into balance.  These include:

• Deep, slow breathing.  Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth
• Placing your feet firmly on the floor
• Drop your shoulders and correct your posture
• Gentle movements like yoga or going for a walk
• Humming or shaking your entire body
• Make sure you are taking rest breaks between tasks
• Drink water and focus on being fully present
• Step outside for fresh air

Each of these creates micro-recovery moments that restore emotional capacity.  This is how you build daily resiliency instead of waiting for long breaks, such as vacation.

The Deep Inner Shift: Stress often appears when you're living out of alignment with your values, your boundaries, your purpose, your truth, your intuition, and/or your energy.  When you slow down and reconnect with your inner wisdom, stress stops feeling like chaos and starts feeling like communication.  Ask yourself:

• What is my soul trying to tell me?
• Where am I abandoning myself?
• What needs to change so I can live more authentically?

This is where true and lasting transformation begins.

The most important shift you will make is learning to respond instead of react.  The greatest form of emotional power is the ability to pause, because in that pause, you have the choice to:

• React from fear, or respond from awareness.
• React from survival, or respond from a place of inner peace.
• React from old patterns, or respond from your highest self.

Stress no longer controls you when you lead the experience.  This is the difference between living overwhelmed and living empowered.  Stress isn't your enemy, it's your evolution.  Stress doesn't come to destroy you, it comes to reveal you.  It shows you a disconnection from yourself and asks you to slow down and listen.  When you learn to listen instead of resist, your entire relationship with life transforms.  Stress becomes wisdom.  Challenge becomes clarity.  Pressure becomes purpose.  And you become the powerful, emotionally resilient version of yourself that you were always meant to be.

By Dr. Laurie Williams, D.Ms

https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/

 How to Recognize When You’re Living From Wounds Instead of Authenticity

There comes a point on every healing journey when you realize, what you thought was you was actually a collection of wounds, defense mechanisms, and survival strategies you picked up along the way.  We build identities around pain without even knowing it.  We call it strength.  We call it independence.  We call it success.  But sometimes, those labels are just protection in disguise.  So how do you know when you're living from your wounds instead of your authentic self?  Let's explore this deeper.

You're always "fine", but never free.

When you are living from your wounds, you have mastered the art of composure.  You may appear grounded, capable, even inspiring to others, but inside, there is a tension that you can't quite name.  Your nervous system never fully relaxes because the body doesn't trust that it's safe to be soft.  You might keep yourself busy, overgive, or intellectualize emotions to avoid feeling the truth of what is beneath them.  Authentic living, on the other hand, feels open.  You can feel joy and sadness.  You can rest without guilt.  You no longer perform wellness; you are actually living it.

You confuse control with peace

Wounds crave control.  They tell you that if you can manage every outcome, you'll never be hurt again.  But peace is not control, it's surrender.  When you are living authentically, you don't need to manipulate, please, or perform.  You move from clarity, not fear.  You trust yourself enough to allow life to unfold without forcing it into what feels "safe."

Your relationships mirror old pain

Have you noticed patterns that keep repeating?  The same kind of partner, friend, or relationship dynamic.  There may be different faces, but the end result and lesson are the same.  Wounded living attracts familiarity, not fulfillment.  It's your inner child trying to recreate the past in hopes of healing it.  When you start living from your authentic self, those cycles and patterns lose power.  You no longer chase love; you become it.  You no longer tolerate disconnection; you create boundaries that honour your truth.

You're driven by fear of losing something 

A wound-based life is full of "what ifs."

What if they leave?

What if I fail?

What if I'm not enough?

Fear becomes the quiet engine behind your choices.  Authentic living shifts that energy completely.  You begin making decisions from what feels right for you rather than being anxious.  You stop seeking safety outside of yourself because you've built it within.

You feel disconnected from your own essence

Perhaps the most painful sign is the feeling of being fragmented within yourself.  Like, somehow your body, mind, and soul are all separate rather than connected and whole.  You might have moments of clarity or deep knowing, but they fade quickly.  You feel like you're constantly "trying" to reconnect, not realizing that your authenticity isn't lost, it's just buried under layers of old patterns that you had to acquire to keep you safe.  The path to your authentic self isn't about creating someone new.  It's about remembering who you are at a soul level before the world told you who to be.  

Doing the inner work of coming back to your authentic self isn't about rejecting the parts of you.  It means meeting all the parts of you with the love and compassion you have always been looking for outside of yourself.   Your wounds are not your enemy; they are lighting the path back to who you are here to be.  When you begin to live as your authentic self, everything shifts.  Your energy softens.  You show up as the pure love that you are here to share.  You begin to live the life you have only ever dreamed of.  This is where peace lives, not in perfection but in presence.

By: Dr Laurie Williams

Website: https://lauriewilliamswellness.com/