5.3 - See the childhood pattern

Almost all of the heaviest material that surfaces in adult relationships is childhood material.

The way your parents treated you, treated each other, withheld from you, gave to you, abandoned you, smothered you, met you, or didn't, set the templates that your adult relationships are now re-enacting. You don't choose your partners as randomly as you think. You choose them in ways that almost guarantee the unresolved childhood material gets another chance to come up.

This is not a bug either. It's the psyche's way of trying to finally finish what it couldn't finish back then. The unconscious is endlessly resourceful at recreating the conditions for healing, even when the conscious mind would rather not.

A few patterns worth noticing:

• The way you experienced your opposite-sex parent (or whichever parent you bonded most with) is often the template for what you seek and what you fear in romantic partners.

• The way conflict was handled in your childhood home is often the way you handle conflict now, even when you swore you'd do it differently.

• The way affection was shown, withheld, or weaponized in your family of origin shapes your nervous system's response to affection in adult relationships.

• The things you most easily get triggered by in your partner are almost always things that map back, in some way, to something unresolved with a parent or caregiver.

The work is to notice the connections. When you're triggered, ask: when have I felt this before? In what context? The answer is almost always somewhere much earlier in your life. The current moment is the surface; the actual material is older.

This isn't about blaming your parents. They were operating from their own childhood material, which came from their parents, who were operating from theirs. The point isn't blame; the point is seeing the inheritance clearly.