Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns, Even When You Know Better
- 7 hours ago
- 7 min read
Dr Greg Schreeuwer is a Human Behaviour and Health Pattern Specialist, speaker, and Integrative & Functional Chiropractor with over 20 years of experience. His work explores how unconscious patterns shape health, performance, decision-making, and personal growth, helping people create lasting change by addressing causes rather than symptoms.
Have you ever looked back at a situation and thought, “How did I not see this while I was in it?” Maybe the same conflict keeps appearing in different relationships. You keep saying yes when you want to say no. Or your body responds in a familiar way whenever you experience a particular type of pressure.
The patterns shaping our lives rarely feel like patterns while we’re living them. They feel normal. Sometimes they simply feel like who we are. That’s what makes them so difficult to recognise.
Everything you experience teaches you something. If you were criticised every time you spoke up as a child, you might learn that expressing yourself leads to conflict. If people withdrew from you when you disagreed with them, you might learn that being accepted means keeping your opinions to yourself.
Years later, the people and circumstances might be completely different, but the response you learned can still show up.
Someone disagrees with you at work, and you immediately back down. Your partner becomes upset, and you abandon what you wanted to keep the peace. Someone questions a decision you’ve made, and you feel an overwhelming need to explain yourself.
You’re responding to what is happening now, but a large part of your response has been shaped by what happened before. That’s what I mean by conditioning.
We learn from our experiences. We attach meaning to them. When something similar happens again, our mind and body use what we previously learned to help determine how we respond today.
Sometimes that response is useful and necessary, but often we keep responding the same way because our past experiences taught us it was the safest or most effective way to handle similar situations.
Are you being yourself or repeating what you learned?
Your need to keep everyone happy. Your avoidance of conflict. Your difficulty saying no. Your need to prove yourself. Your fear of rejection or judgement.
You might describe these qualities as your personality, but what if some of them are responses you learned? This became confronting for me when I started looking at my own history.
I was bullied in primary school. I had big ears that stuck out, and two kids regularly picked on me. They would hassle me and try to fight with me, and I would often run away. At the time, I couldn’t understand why they kept coming after me.
When my family moved to Australia in 1996, I had my ears pinned back. I thought this would mark a new chapter. The thing I believed made me a target was gone, but the pattern wasn’t.
When I was 17, I strongly expressed why I didn’t want to attend a party with my friends. I was subsequently ostracised from my year group for three weeks. Something similar happened again at university.
Different people. Different circumstances. Same underlying association. When I fully express myself, I risk rejection, conflict and losing connection. So I adapted, and I became a people pleaser.
I became good at considering what everyone else wanted and how they might respond. I learned that the best way to stay connected to someone was by compromising parts of myself.
Eventually, I became angry and swung in the opposite direction. I decided to prioritise myself, regardless of what anyone else thought.
Why you keep responding the same way
This is where I believe we often misunderstand human behaviour. We label ourselves as self-sabotaging, avoidant, anxious, controlling or unmotivated without asking how these behaviours help us or why we continue to behave this way.
These behaviours develop for a reason. At some point in your life, they helped you cope with, adapt to or avoid something you found difficult.
Someone who avoids conflict might have learned that disagreement threatens connection. Someone who constantly achieves might genuinely value growth while also associating achievement with recognition or worth. Someone who prioritises everyone else might deeply value relationships while also believing that maintaining them requires self-sacrifice.
Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” I prefer asking, “What is this action helping me protect, avoid or fulfil?”
The body is part of the conversation
This is where my Human Integration Model becomes important. I look at a human being through three interconnected areas: structure, biochemistry and emotions. They don’t operate independently.
Your emotional experiences influence your body. Your biochemical state influences your capacity to adapt to physical and emotional stress. Your physical state influences your energy, mood and how you respond to your environment.
Your body often gives you feedback after you’ve ignored your intuition and before you consciously recognise what’s actually happening.
Your jaw tightens around certain people. Your breathing changes when conflict appears. Your shoulders tense when you feel responsible for everyone. Your digestion changes during particular periods of pressure.
None of these responses necessarily proves an emotional cause, but repetition helps create clarity.
When the same physical, emotional or behavioural response repeatedly appears within a similar context, I become curious about what’s going on.
What was happening when this started? What happens when it returns? What does my body do? What am I trying to protect or avoid? What do I believe might happen if I respond differently? And most importantly, “Does this response align with what I consciously value?”
Awareness alone doesn’t change the pattern
Recognising a pattern matters, but awareness isn’t resolution.
You might understand exactly why you became a people pleaser and still say yes when you want to say no. You might know why conflict feels threatening and still feel your entire body change when someone challenges you.
Your conscious mind knows you’re living in the present. Your unconscious and subconscious minds are still connected to the past.
For me, recognising the connection between bullying, rejection and people-pleasing was only part of the work. I also had to understand my upbringing, including how having an overprotective mother affected my capacity to handle conflict and challenges for myself. Then I had to work on resolving the conditioned responses associated with those experiences.
I started seeing the bullying differently, too. I had spent years focusing on what those experiences took from me. Eventually, I recognised what I had developed through and from them.
They contributed to my fascination with human behaviour. They challenged me to understand why people behave as they do. They forced me to stand up for myself and honour and respect my values, even when someone else disagrees.
That doesn’t make bullying right, but it certainly changed my relationship with what happened and how I viewed it.
How resolving your past helps you choose differently
Become aware of the pattern. Resolve the underlying conditioned response keeping it active. Then take conscious action to change the outcome.
Recognising the pattern was only the beginning. I needed to understand why I had become a people pleaser and resolve the conditioned responses that kept driving that behaviour.
Caring about people matters deeply to me. The problem was never caring too much. It was believing I needed to sacrifice myself to maintain connection.
For a while, I swung the other way and prioritised myself regardless of everyone else. Eventually, I recognised that wasn’t where I wanted to be either. I needed to find a middle ground.
I could consider your needs without abandoning mine. I could listen to your opinion without subordinating myself to it. I could disagree with you without experiencing disagreement as rejection. I could face conflict without needing to run away, please you or fight back.
Resolving the conditioned response gave me an opportunity to choose differently. Then I had to act on that choice. I had to speak when somebody might disagree. I had to say no when something didn’t align with me. I had to make choices other people might not understand.
That’s where change became something I was consciously creating, rather than something I simply understood.
How to stop letting your past shape your choices
You don’t need to analyse every moment of your childhood or search endlessly for patterns. Pay attention to repetition.
Where does the same response keep appearing? Where do you keep creating an outcome you consciously say you don’t want? Where does your body repeatedly respond to a particular type of situation? Where do your actions conflict with what you say you value?
Then ask yourself, “Is this what I consciously choose, or is this what I learned to do?” Your history matters. Your conditioning matters. Your values matter. Your physiology matters. They all influence how you think, feel and respond, but influence is not the same as destiny.
For me, meaningful change begins when you become aware of the pattern, resolve the underlying conditioned response and take conscious action to change the outcome.
I spent years running from conflict. Then I tried preventing it by keeping everyone happy. Then I swung towards prioritising myself regardless of everyone else.
Today, I don’t need any of those extremes. I’m willing to listen to what someone else believes is right for me, but I give myself permission to choose what happens next.
That is the difference. Your past tells you how you became who you are. Conscious choice gives you the opportunity to decide who you become next.
Read more from Dr. Greg Schreeuwer
Dr. Greg Schreeuwer, Human Behaviour and Health Expert
Dr Greg Schreeuwer is a Human Behaviour and Health Pattern Specialist with over 20 years of experience helping people create lasting change. After facing years of bullying as a child, he became fascinated by the forces that shape human behaviour, confidence, and self-expression. That journey inspired a career dedicated to helping people break free from limiting patterns, trust their own voice, and live more authentically. Drawing on expertise in health, behaviour, and personal development, Greg writes and speaks about the hidden patterns that influence our lives and how greater awareness creates greater freedom.
