On familiar patterns, unconscious habits, and the curious things we do even when we know better.
There’s an old saying, frequently attributed to Albert Einstein, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Einstein almost certainly never said it.
Which is rather fitting, considering how readily human beings repeat things without questioning whether they’re true.
And that brings me to something I’ve been contemplating.
Why do we keep repeating patterns that no longer serve us, particularly when we recognize them?
You would think that once we understand what’s happening, we’d simply stop doing it.
Wouldn’t that be lovely?
Unfortunately, the human mind is not nearly as cooperative as we’d like to believe.
We return to familiar situations. We repeat familiar behaviors. We find ourselves confronting remarkably similar circumstances, sometimes with an entirely new cast of characters.
And occasionally, we look around and think, How the hell did I end up here again?
I’ve been giving this considerable thought, particularly as I reflect on a year that challenged some of my assumptions about work, relationships, loyalty, and what it means to have control over my own life.
But I keep returning to a larger question.
When does recognizing a recurring pattern become the opportunity to stop repeating it?
The Ouroboros: The Serpent That Consumes Itself
The image accompanying this essay is my interpretation of the ouroboros, the ancient serpent that consumes its own tail.
Its imagery dates back thousands of years to ancient Egypt, and it later became an important symbol in alchemy, representing cyclical transformation, destruction, renewal, and the relationship between beginnings and endings.
The symbolism is fascinating.
The serpent consumes itself, yet in doing so, perpetuates the cycle. It is simultaneously the creator and the destroyer, the beginning and the end.
And isn’t that an extraordinary metaphor for human behavior?
We repeat familiar patterns, sometimes participating in the very circumstances that cause us suffering. We return to what we know, even when what we know no longer serves us.
But I wanted something different from the traditional circular ouroboros.
My serpent forms an infinity symbol, suggesting the seemingly endless repetition of our unconscious patterns.
Look closely, however.
One side is beginning to unravel.
That detail is intentional.
Because while the ouroboros has long symbolized cyclical renewal, I wanted to introduce another possibility.
What happens when the serpent becomes conscious of its own behavior?
What happens when we recognize that the pattern we’ve been repeating isn’t necessarily the pattern we must continue?
Perhaps transformation doesn’t require destroying the serpent.
Perhaps it begins when we recognize that we’re the ones holding our own tails.
The cycle may be familiar. It doesn’t have to be eternal.
The Curious Business of Repetition
Carl Jung spent much of his career exploring the unconscious mind and the ways our unexamined psychological patterns influence our behavior.
One of his central ideas was that unconscious material can shape our choices, relationships, and interpretations of the world without our recognizing its influence.
And what we fail to recognize within ourselves can sometimes appear to us as fate.
I find that fascinating.
Because consider how easily we construct explanations for the things that keep happening in our lives.
Why do I always end up in this situation?
Why do I keep encountering this kind of person?
Why does this particular experience feel so familiar?
We may conclude that the universe is sending us another lesson, that we’re carrying some unresolved karmic obligation, or that certain experiences are simply destined to repeat until we’ve learned whatever we’re supposed to learn.
Perhaps.
But there’s another possibility.
What if we’re not repeatedly encountering the same lesson? What if we’re repeatedly responding to different circumstances in the same way?
That’s a considerably more uncomfortable question.
Because it redirects our attention from the circumstances themselves to our participation in them.
Not everything that happens to us is our responsibility. Other people have agency, circumstances can be unfair, and sometimes we’re simply caught in situations beyond our control.
But where our own responses are concerned, there may be patterns worth examining.
And that is where psychology becomes particularly interesting.
The Comfort of Familiar Discomfort
Not every pattern begins with us. Some are inherited, learned, or developed long before we’re old enough to recognize them.
We absorb ways of responding to conflict, disappointment, uncertainty, and emotional pain. We learn what brings comfort, what helps us avoid discomfort, and what makes an otherwise unpredictable world feel a little more manageable.
And sometimes those lessons stay with us long after the circumstances that created them have changed.
Psychology offers a fascinating explanation for this through a process called negative reinforcement.
When a behavior provides relief from something unpleasant, we’re more likely to repeat it.
We avoid a difficult conversation and experience immediate relief from anxiety. We seek reassurance from someone familiar and temporarily quiet our fear of rejection. We distract ourselves from an uncomfortable truth rather than confronting what needs to change.
And, in some circumstances, we turn to alcohol or other substances to escape feelings we’d rather not experience.
The relief can be real.
The solution, however, may be temporary.
And that’s where things become interesting.
We can become attached not necessarily to what makes us happy, but to what temporarily makes us less unhappy.
Over time, the behavior becomes familiar. Familiarity creates predictability. Predictability can feel like security, even when the behavior itself is contributing to our suffering.
And the more often we escape discomfort through a familiar response, the fewer opportunities we may give ourselves to develop a different one.
Consider the person who avoids confrontation because conflict once felt threatening. Or someone who learned early in life that keeping everyone else happy was the easiest way to preserve peace.
These responses may once have served an important purpose.
But circumstances change.
And a coping mechanism developed for one environment doesn’t necessarily serve us well in another.
Sometimes the very behavior that helped us survive our past prevents us from fully participating in our present.
This is particularly relevant to addiction, although addiction is considerably more complex than a learned coping mechanism. Alcohol may initially offer relaxation or relief, but repeated heavy use can contribute to tolerance, dependence, and an increasingly difficult cycle of consumption and consequence.
The same principle of temporary relief can also appear in everyday behaviors that have nothing to do with substance use.
We return to familiar relationships, familiar arguments, familiar expectations, and familiar ways of protecting ourselves from disappointment.
Not necessarily because we enjoy the consequences.
But because we know what to expect from the behavior itself.
And sometimes knowing what to expect feels safer than confronting something unfamiliar.
There’s a rather cruel irony in all of this.
We may continue doing something because it makes us feel better in the moment, even as it makes our lives more difficult over time.
Perhaps this is why recognizing a pattern doesn’t automatically change it.
Understanding why we developed a coping mechanism is one thing. Learning to tolerate the discomfort of responding differently is another.
And perhaps the real question isn’t simply why we keep returning to what is familiar.
Perhaps it’s this:
What discomfort are we trying to escape, and what would happen if we stopped running from it long enough to understand what actually needs to change?
The Patterns We Inherit
Of course, not every pattern begins with us.
Some are inherited long before we’re old enough to recognize them.
We inherit more than our mother’s eyes, our father’s stubbornness, or an unfortunate predisposition toward arguing with people who are demonstrably wrong.
We inherit ways of understanding the world.
We learn how love is expressed, how conflict is handled, whether emotions are welcomed or suppressed, and what we’re expected to tolerate in the name of loyalty, family, or keeping the peace.
And much of that learning happens without a single conscious decision on our part.
Psychology recognizes several ways patterns can travel across generations, including learned behavior, family dynamics, attachment experiences, and the effects of adversity. Genetic predispositions may also influence vulnerability to certain conditions, including addiction, although predisposition is not destiny.
A child who grows up around unpredictability may become exceptionally skilled at reading a room. Someone raised to believe that love requires sacrifice may struggle to recognize when generosity has become self-abandonment. A person who learned that conflict threatens belonging may spend adulthood avoiding difficult conversations, even when silence comes at an enormous personal cost.
And here’s what I find particularly fascinating.
A behavior that once helped us survive our circumstances may eventually become the very behavior that prevents us from moving beyond them.
What began as adaptation becomes habit. What once provided security becomes limitation.
But inherited patterns aren’t exclusively destructive. We also inherit resilience, humor, generosity, creativity, and the capacity to love.
The question isn’t whether we should reject everything we’ve inherited.
It’s whether we can distinguish what still serves us from what we’ve simply grown accustomed to carrying.
Perhaps that’s another way to understand karma—not as an ancestral debt we’re being punished for, but as an invitation to examine which patterns we continue reinforcing through our own actions.
We may not have chosen the patterns we inherited. But recognizing them can give us an opportunity to decide which ones we carry forward.
When the Lesson Gets Louder
There’s a popular spiritual notion that life will keep presenting us with the same lesson, often with increasing intensity, until we finally learn it.
I understand why people find that idea compelling.
We’ve all encountered moments when life seems determined to make a particular point.
Repeatedly.
Occasionally with the subtlety of a brick through a window.
But I’ve been reconsidering whether the universe is actually escalating the lesson.
Perhaps the lesson isn’t getting louder. Perhaps the consequences of repeating the same behavior are simply becoming harder to ignore.
Think about someone who consistently avoids conflict.
The first avoided conversation produces temporary relief.
The second allows resentment to accumulate.
The third creates distance.
Eventually, a relationship may deteriorate beyond repair.
It’s tempting to interpret the escalating consequences as some cosmic insistence that the person finally learn their lesson.
But perhaps there’s nothing supernatural about it.
Perhaps the same behavior, repeated over time, has simply produced an increasingly costly result.
That doesn’t eliminate the possibility of spiritual meaning.
It just suggests that we don’t necessarily need a cosmic explanation to understand cause and effect.
And nowhere is that distinction more apparent than when a recurring behavior becomes a dependency.
When the Pattern Becomes a Dependency
Alcoholism offers a particularly striking example of what happens when a familiar pattern becomes progressively more difficult to interrupt.
The cycle can look deceptively simple. Someone drinks. The drinking becomes excessive. Consequences follow. Eventually, the person stops, perhaps for weeks or months. Life settles down. Relationships begin to recover. Hope returns.
And then the drinking begins again.
But there’s a biological dimension that makes this especially complicated. With repeated heavy drinking, the body can develop tolerance, meaning that increasing amounts of alcohol may be needed to produce the same effect. Physical dependence can also develop, and stopping suddenly may cause withdrawal symptoms, sometimes dangerously severe ones. What initially provided pleasure or relief may eventually become something a person feels compelled to pursue simply to escape discomfort. The brain and body have adapted to the repetition.
And the consequences extend beyond the person drinking. Those around them may develop their own routines of anticipation, vigilance, reassurance, and disappointment. We recognize the signs, celebrate periods of sobriety, and hope that this time the change will last. When the cycle returns, so do the questions. How many times can we believe the same promises? When does compassion require a boundary rather than another opportunity? And how do we distinguish genuine recovery from temporary relief?
Alcohol use disorder is a medical condition, not simply a moral failing. Recovery is possible, and recurrence doesn’t mean recovery is hopeless. But neither does understanding addiction erase its consequences for the people affected by it. Compassion for someone’s struggle does not require us to become casualties of it.
Perhaps the universe isn’t turning up the volume. Perhaps the consequences of an unchanged pattern are simply becoming impossible to ignore. And perhaps the hardest realization is that we can recognize another person’s pattern without possessing the power to interrupt it. We can, however, begin examining the choices available to us.
Karma Is Not Punishment
In Part I, I explored the distinction between karma and fate.
In Buddhist philosophy, karma is fundamentally concerned with intentional action and its consequences.
That includes the habits we reinforce through repetition.
Every time we respond to a particular circumstance in a familiar way, we may strengthen the tendency to respond that way again.
Anger can reinforce anger.
Avoidance can reinforce avoidance.
Compassion can cultivate compassion.
And conscious restraint can gradually make different choices possible.
But Buddhism doesn’t teach that every misfortune is punishment for past behavior, nor that suffering is evidence of some spiritual assignment we’ve failed to complete.
The more interesting idea is that our intentions and actions help shape what follows.
We may not be able to change the circumstances that created a pattern, but we can sometimes change the conditions that allow it to continue.
That possibility is enormously important.
Because otherwise, karma becomes little more than another word for destiny.
And if everything is predetermined, what exactly are we supposed to do with our awareness?
Sit around waiting for the universe to finish making its point?
I’d rather not.
The Year I Learned That Loving Something Isn’t Enough
This year, I lost a job I genuinely loved.
Not simply a paycheck or a title, but work that engaged my creativity, challenged my abilities, and allowed me to contribute to something larger than myself.
I loved the pace. I loved the people. I loved the strange, wonderful, occasionally chaotic environment in which I worked.
I loved being useful.
And when that chapter ended unexpectedly, I found myself confronting more than the loss of employment.
I was confronting the loss of something that had become part of my identity.
I’d invested enormous time, energy, and care in that work. And naturally, I wanted to understand what had happened.
I wanted an explanation that made sense.
I wanted to believe that if I examined the circumstances closely enough, the pieces would eventually fit together.
Some did.
Others didn’t.
And I began thinking about how readily we connect our sense of worth to the things we contribute.
If we’re good at something, if we care deeply about it, if we give it everything we have, shouldn’t that be enough?
Shouldn’t our commitment guarantee that our contribution will be recognized?
Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.
We can love our work and still lose it.
We can contribute meaningfully to an organization without controlling the decisions made within it.
And we can be proud of what we’ve accomplished without receiving the acknowledgment we might have hoped for.
That realization isn’t an argument for tolerating unfairness or pretending disappointment doesn’t matter.
It’s an invitation to distinguish between our contributions and other people’s judgments about them.
Someone else’s failure to recognize our value does not erase what we’ve given.
And perhaps an unexpected ending can invite us to reconsider where we’ve placed our sense of identity.
Not because the ending was necessary.
Not because we somehow needed to lose something we loved.
But because once it happened, we still had choices about what came next.
I could continue allowing that experience to define my understanding of myself.
Or I could remember that the qualities I brought to the work—creativity, competence, compassion, curiosity, and a willingness to work my ass off—didn’t disappear when the job ended.
They were mine before I arrived.
And they remained mine when I left.
The Patterns We Recognize in Other People
Relationships offer another fascinating opportunity to examine recurring behavior.
And I’m not speaking exclusively about romance.
Families, friendships, professional relationships, and even brief encounters can reveal patterns in how we communicate, establish boundaries, interpret behavior, and respond to disappointment.
Sometimes we recognize those patterns immediately.
Other times, it takes years.
And occasionally, we’re so busy trying to understand someone else’s behavior that we overlook an important question about our own.
Why am I responding to this in such a familiar way?
I’ve spent a great deal of time considering human motivation.
I find people endlessly interesting. Their contradictions, their choices, the stories they tell themselves, the sometimes enormous distance between what they say and what they do.
I could happily analyze human behavior for hours.
And frequently do.
But there’s a distinction between understanding another person’s behavior and believing that understanding gives us any authority over it.
We can recognize someone’s patterns without being able to change them.
We can understand why someone makes a particular choice without agreeing with it.
We can care deeply about someone and still recognize that their decisions belong to them.
Understanding why someone behaves destructively does not require us to absorb the consequences of that behavior.
And it certainly doesn’t require remaining in circumstances that are unsafe or harmful.
Two people can profoundly influence each other’s stories without having the authority to determine each other’s endings.
And perhaps the real challenge isn’t always understanding why someone else continues repeating a particular pattern.
Perhaps it’s recognizing when our own response to that pattern has become familiar.
Are we trying to change the other person?
Are we waiting for an acknowledgment?
Are we hoping that understanding their behavior will somehow give us control over what happens next?
Or are we simply curious?
That last question matters more than we might think.
Thinking About Thinking
Which brings me to one of my favorite psychological concepts: metacognition.
It’s a rather clinical term for something extraordinary.
The ability to examine our own thinking.
We don’t merely have thoughts. We can become aware of those thoughts, question their accuracy, examine the assumptions behind them, and sometimes change our minds.
I find that remarkable.
Humans possess an especially elaborate capacity to reflect upon and articulate our own thought processes, although research suggests that some other animals demonstrate forms of metacognitive awareness as well.
And the implications are enormous.
Consider the difference between thinking:
This person doesn’t respect me.
And thinking:
I notice that I’m interpreting this person’s behavior as disrespect. What evidence supports that interpretation? Are there other explanations? And regardless of their motives, what does their behavior mean for the choices available to me?
The circumstances haven’t necessarily changed.
But our relationship to our interpretation has.
We’ve moved from treating a thought as an established fact to recognizing it as something we can examine.
And I think that distinction is fundamental to discernment.
Just because we think something doesn’t mean it’s true.
Nor does the intensity of a feeling establish the accuracy of the explanation we’ve attached to it.
We can feel something profoundly and still misunderstand its cause.
We can construct a coherent narrative from incomplete information.
And we can become so invested in that narrative that contradictory evidence begins to feel like a personal threat.
Which raises another question.
How often are we genuinely examining our beliefs, and how often are we simply searching for additional evidence that confirms them?
That’s not always an easy distinction to make.
Especially when we’re emotionally invested in the answer.
When Thinking Becomes Rumination
Now, I want to make something very clear.
I love knowledge.
I love learning how things work, examining connections, recognizing patterns, and discovering explanations.
Give me a Sudoku puzzle, a complicated philosophical argument, or a mystery involving human behavior, and I am perfectly capable of entertaining myself for hours.
My first words were “Tssat?”
Apparently, I’ve been asking questions for a very long time.
And I have absolutely no intention of stopping.
But I’ve also come to appreciate an important distinction.
Endlessly analyzing a situation isn’t necessarily metacognition. It can become rumination.
And the two can feel remarkably similar.
Both involve thinking.
Both can involve returning repeatedly to the same subject.
Both can create the impression that we’re working toward a solution.
But metacognition examines the thinking process itself.
Rumination can keep us circling the same uncertainty without gaining new understanding.
And sometimes the distinction comes down to the questions we’re asking.
Am I learning something?
Am I considering genuinely new information?
Am I challenging my assumptions?
Am I enjoying the intellectual exploration?
Or am I revisiting the same question because I believe that one more explanation will finally provide the certainty I’m looking for?
The answer may be a combination.
And that’s perfectly human.
Curiosity and the desire for emotional reassurance aren’t mutually exclusive.
We can genuinely enjoy solving a mystery while also hoping that its solution will bring us a little peace.
But I think metacognition asks us to notice when the balance begins to shift.
Thinking deeply and thinking clearly are not necessarily the same thing.
And perhaps one of the most important questions we can ask isn’t whether we’ve thought about something enough.
It’s whether the thinking is helping us understand, helping us act, or simply keeping us occupied.
Because sometimes, the most conscious thing we can do with a thought is recognize that it no longer requires our attention.
That’s not abandoning intellectual curiosity.
That’s discernment.
Knowledge Is Not the Same as Wisdom
I’ve always enjoyed the intersection of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality because each offers a different way to examine human experience.
Jung encourages us to consider unconscious patterns.
Freud raises questions about why we repeat experiences that cause distress.
Modern psychology examines the habits, beliefs, and behaviors that reinforce familiar responses.
Buddhism asks us to recognize the conditions that perpetuate suffering.
And the Kabbalistic idea of tikkun, spiritual repair, introduces another intriguing perspective on transformation and responsibility.
These traditions don’t share identical explanations, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise.
But there’s a question that connects them beautifully.
What do we do once we recognize the pattern?
Because recognition alone doesn’t guarantee change.
We can identify an unhealthy dynamic, explain its psychological origins, recognize every warning sign, and still participate in it.
We can understand why avoidance creates problems and continue avoiding.
We can understand why we seek external validation and continue making our happiness dependent upon receiving it.
We can know something intellectually without allowing that knowledge to change how we live.
And perhaps this is where discernment becomes essential.
Awareness allows us to recognize what is happening.
Metacognition allows us to examine how we’re interpreting it.
Discernment helps us distinguish what we know from what we assume, what matters from what merely occupies our attention.
Intention gives our choices direction.
And agency allows us to act.
Awareness shows us the pattern. Discernment reveals our choices. Intention gives those choices direction. Agency turns them into action.
That, to me, is where knowledge begins becoming wisdom.
Not simply in our ability to explain the world.
But in our willingness to reconsider how we’re participating in it.
And What If the Pattern Never Completely Disappears?
There’s another possibility worth considering.
Perhaps personal growth doesn’t mean that our familiar tendencies vanish.
Perhaps the desire for recognition never disappears entirely.
Perhaps we’re always going to want answers to certain questions.
Perhaps particular circumstances will continue awakening old fears, familiar emotional responses, or the impulse to return to what we know.
And perhaps that’s okay.
Maybe growth isn’t the complete elimination of a pattern.
Maybe it’s recognizing the pattern sooner.
Noticing the familiar impulse before following it.
Becoming aware of the story our minds are beginning to construct.
And allowing ourselves enough space to decide whether we want to participate in that story again.
That seems a much more compassionate understanding of personal development than imagining we’re supposed to achieve some permanent state of psychological perfection.
Good luck with that, by the way.
I have enough trouble remembering where I put my glasses.
And I don’t even need glasses to see the irony in believing that enlightenment means never making another mistake.
We are human.
We learn. We forget. We repeat ourselves. We discover something important and occasionally behave as though we’d never discovered it at all.
Then we have another opportunity to respond differently.
But I don’t think those opportunities should be interpreted as evidence that the universe is deliberately punishing us until we get something right.
We can learn from suffering without believing that suffering was assigned to us for educational purposes.
And perhaps awakening isn’t the inevitable reward for living enough lifetimes.
Perhaps every lifetime, every experience, and every conscious moment simply offers another possibility.
The possibility of becoming aware.
The possibility of reconsidering.
The possibility of choosing differently.
The Question Beneath the Question
As I look back on this year, I realize that some of the most important questions I’ve asked have gradually changed.
I began with questions about circumstances and other people.
Why did this happen?
Why did someone make that choice?
Why did something I loved come to an end?
And those remain legitimate questions.
But lately, I’ve found myself increasingly interested in something else.
What assumptions am I bringing to the experience?
What am I expecting an explanation to provide?
What part of the situation belongs to me, and what part belongs to someone else?
And perhaps most importantly:
What can I choose to do differently, even if nothing else changes?
That last question returns us to the very heart of karma.
We cannot undo yesterday.
We cannot force another person to become more self-aware.
We cannot guarantee that the people we love will recognize their patterns, make different choices, or arrive at the same conclusions we have.
But we can examine our own responses.
We can practice discernment.
We can recognize when our thinking is no longer helping us.
We can seek support, establish boundaries, and decide what we will and will not participate in.
And we can begin making choices that reflect who we want to become rather than simply repeating who we’ve always been.
Perhaps the greatest lesson isn’t discovering what the universe intended for us.
It’s recognizing that we still have the freedom to decide what we intend for ourselves.
And that brings me to the question I want to leave you with.
What if the moment we stop needing to understand why someone else repeats their patterns is the very moment we become free to stop repeating our own?
Of course, this raises another rather inconvenient question.
What happens when we recognize the pattern, understand the consequences, know what we need to do—and still find ourselves unable to let go?
That’s where things get really interesting.
Because recognizing a pattern is one thing.
Releasing our attachment to it is something else entirely.
And that, my friends, is where we’re going next.
Next in the series: Karma, Part III — The Art of Letting Go.
