Breaking Relationship Patterns: Steps to Healthier Connections

By Dr. Andrew Smith, Clinical Psychologist, Professor, and Pat Tillman Scholar. To learn the skills to break unhealthy relationship patterns, download our free guide and checkout the REWIRE app

In 2016, my family and I backpacked in a truly otherworldly place- the Lost Coast Trail on the Northern California coast. By day we walked and explored tide pools, filled with all manner of crustaceans and aquatic life. By night, we slept on lonesome beaches above snoozing elephant seals.

This trip had a knuckle-biting wrinkle: In order to walk through certain sections, we had to use a tide chart to time when it was safe to cross under a long series of cliffs. Should we mis-time the tides, we’d be stranded with no escape and the consequences would be disastrous. 

Tides are a good example of natural cycles that reliably occur and manifest. The seasons change, trees bud in the spring, leaves turn in the fall, human gestation lasts 9 months, cells differentiate themselves in fetal development to become limbs, organs, eyeballs. Incredible, ongoing, automatic processes that are happening all around us. These things happened before I was here, and they will be happening long after I’m gone. We live, we die, the world keeps turning. As the great Robert Hunter penned “Lovers come and go but the river will roll, roll, roll.”

These automatic complex processes manifest themselves into our awareness whether or not we know anything about them. We awe and marvel at changing leaves, whether  or not we understand photoperiodism. We can see tides rising and fall, manifesting when we have to move our beach chairs to keep from getting swamped, whether we understand the math or science behind tidal forces. Who doesn’t love the emergence of fragrant lilacs in May, even if you don’t know anything about them.

Our relationships also operate in natural rhythms and patterns. These patterns occur most often beneath our awareness, and they can manifest in healthy or unhealthy ways. They tend to change with age, but they also tend to get us stuck in ruts.

This is what we need to focus on—how to notice, understand, and change patterns that are holding back your sense of connection and relationship health.

Lets ground this in an example. My 6 year old son wakes up every morning, at 6:00 am on the dot (which is an improvement from 5:00 or 5:30 am when he was 3). When he wakes up, his natural rhythm is to get out his legos to play. Cool- we know this guy is motivated and excited to get his day started building Star Wars creations. We love his curiosity and energy around play.

But we are also working with him on independence and getting into a healthy self-care pattern that helps him to take the next step in his growth. Step 1, get dressed. Step 2, brush teeth. Step 3, wash face. Step 4, dirty clothes in the hamper. Step 5, make your bed. Step 6, come downstairs and get breakfast worked out. Be ready for your day by 7:30 am.

Whereas these sound like reasonable demands to me (they take me less than 5 minutes total), they are deviations from my son’s natural inertia and preferences. His gut reaction, or “FAST THINKING” stems from an emotion that says “you are taking away my fun and making me do something I don’t want to do Dad.”  He has a burst of emotion in response to the suggested change in pattern. 

And my gut reaction or “FAST THINKING” response is to get frustrated and start to reflect his emotion back. “Why are we having this argument again son? Why can’t you just do these tasks? You know how to do each of them.”

For this singular moment, this is our daily pattern right now. Both responding automatically out of our natural emotions with our own bodily goals: to return back to the way it was. My son wants to be able to continue to play. And I am drawn to conserve my energy for other things (not the painful step by step process of walking through each step with him for the nth time).

Staying stuck requires no effort: I can simply ignore the fact that we are locked in a pattern. Change requires effort: noticing my role to start to take bite sized changes.  Although it is exceedingly numbing and inefficient, if I want to help build a healthier pattern with my son, I have to step back from my FAST THINKING gut response (emotion and thinking driven) and step into SLOW THINKING (values and goal driven).

In this pattern, here are a few ways I can begin to shift. Foremost, I need to know myself, and take honest account of my risk for getting drawn into emotional reactions. To this end, I choose a practical remedy that is waking up 30 minutes before my son, having my coffee and quiet time, and being ready for him.  Second, I can begin the numbing and painstaking process of breaking his Step 1 (get dressed) into 4 smaller steps: take dirty clothes off, pick out new ones, put on new ones, discard dirty ones).

As adults, we also get drawn into relational patterns with our romantic partners, friends, siblings, parents, and ourselves (especially if trapped in a pattern of social withdrawal and isolation). And just like the example with my son, whether we are willing to slow down and notice the pattern as it naturally repeats can make all the difference in whether our patterns begin to shift in healthy directions, or whether they stay stuck in the rut.

Our bodies do not naturally differentiate higher minded ideas such as “is this healthy or not.” Rather, without careful thought, our patterns form based on natural, primitive, biological calculations that occur ‘under the hood’ or outside of our awareness. The calculation for us really has two primary components.

• Predictability. We are biologically drawn towards “homeostasis,” or keeping things as they are.^1,2  This determination is not automatically determined on higher minded ideas such as “is this good” or “is this healthy,” but are rather made most often at the level of gut reaction to maintain things as they are, whether aligned with our goals and values or not. See previous posts for more on this about the challenge and call to build empathy (https://wordpress.com/post/rewirerx.com/176)
• Efficiency. This question is really about the expenditure of resources. We have internal biological energy, and it is exceedingly effortful to slow down and do something that breaks a pattern. It takes actual cognitive emotional resources and time (having longer conversations, taking time to hear all sides, taking time to reflect empathically about what my spouse is going through).

The case for fast vs. slow thinking is laid out in the work of nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman.³  To clarify, fast thinking is helpful and efficient depending on the context. For example, in the midst of a firefight in combat, it’s exceedingly ineffective and dangerous for soldiers to step back and ask “what is the meaning of war anyways.”^{4, 5} Rather, fast choices need to be made, good vs. bad, to enable a quick response capacity that prioritizes action over reflection.

For the same reasons, to extend the examples, fast thinking is also helpful for ICU nurses in a crisis, physicians triaging care in an emergency room, and EMTs on the roadside in a motor vehicle accident. In less traumatically urgent settings, fast thinking is a superhuman power that allows you to focus your resources day-to-day. Fast thinking blocks out the noise, allowing us to automate and make quick judgment calls all day long, in ways that allow us to direct our cognitive resources in an exacting manner.

However, fast thinking has less than ideal consequences when used in situations that call for more reflective, dyadic (between two people), and thoughtful approaches. Relationships need something other than the fast thinking efficiency mindset. We have to learn the skill of pushing back against our default automation to inhabit SLOW THINKING states in order to interact well in relationships and build healthy patterns. 

The goals of slow thinking are not efficiency and productivity. Rather, they are connection, caution, openness, and flexibility. Slow thinking moves us from fast black and white decisions (I’m right and she’s wrong; he’s bad, she’s good). Slow thinking is art, and the kind of being that gives our lives music and melody. Slow thinking gives us the perspective to solve complex problems, beyond mere transactional, efficient, and productivity based goals.  

Here is how fast thinking works out in a conflict in a marriage, wherein we are trying to close the conversation as quickly as we can based on our gut or automatic reaction that prioritize predictability (maintaining homeostasis) and efficiency.

• He always disrespects me by leaving dishes in the sink (…so I’ll just clean them and stay resentful)
• She never says yes to my requests and needs (…so I just won’t ask and stay distant)
• He’ll just blow up (…so its not worth the trouble)
• She’ll never forgive me for this (…so I won’t apologize even though I know I did wrong)
• He’ll just make me feel invalidated (…so disclosing my hurt isn’t worth the cost)

The pain of hurt and unpredictability, and the cost of inefficiency leads us to make automatic predictions, and to maintain patterns whether they are healthy or not.

Here are the steps to start changing this.

• Step 0. Know yourself. Start with a basic skepticism of your ‘fast thinking’ or gut reaction. Your fast thinking is really helpful, functional, and adaptive in some environments (e.g., at work), and unhelpful, dysfunctional, and maladaptive for your relationships and social goals.
• Step 1. Notice the pattern mindfully, honestly, and non-judgmentally. Since patterns are universal, and they form based on similar internal processes for all people, you can work towards “observation” of the pattern by removing blame (from self or other). You move towards noticing, observing, and understanding patterns.
• Step 2. Hone in on your specific role in the pattern. That is what you can change.
• Step 3. Change something about your role.
• Step 4. Expect some chaos in response. Remember, our bodies love predictable and efficient patterns— to stay in homeostasis and conserve internal resources. Breaking and forming new patterns causes a burst of emotion from the other person or people in the pattern.

I want to get specific here about something in particular. Smart phones and TV binging have become ubiquitous in our households and culture, and function as “‘experience blockers”⁶ that simultaneously move us towards numbness, indifference, loss of ‘reward’ in social interactions, and atrophy of our social musculature.  Breaking patterns absolutely requires a reckoning with these realities in the lives of many of us.

To break out of this, start with subtle, easy to master rules about phone use and expectations for yourself first, choosing time boundaries and limits during the day. You can test the value of these changes with short-term commitments (minimum of 21 days), wherein you can see for yourself if changes in your use of devices or numbing through technologies makes a difference for you and your relationships over time.  

In addition to the removal of phones and binging, try replacement with some different activities, however small they may be. For example, a rhythm of gratitude, hope, and support can be easy to fold in with the simple ‘Rose, Bud, Thorn’ exercise. (1) Rose- what was the best part of your day? (2) Bud- what are you looking forward to in the coming week or weeks? (3) Thorn- what was something hard today? Articulate this at the end of a day, to yourself (journal) or together. Expect push back if you are changing a pattern- remember that we don’t like change! This kind of minor tweak is not a panacea, but the goal is to build inertia towards new patterns over time.

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1 Minuchin, S., & Fishman, H. C. (1981). Family therapy techniques. Harvard University Press.

2 Minuchin, P. (1985). Families and individual development: Provocations from the field of family therapy. Child development, 289-302.

3 Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. macmillan.        

4 Smith, A. J., Weisenbach, S. L., & Jones, R. T. (2018). Cynicism among veterans who struggle to adapt to life after combat: Towards an understanding of adaptive functions and maladaptive consequences. Traumatology, 24(1), 17.

5 Grossman, D. (2018). On killing: The psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society. In The Political Self (pp. 141-155). Routledge.

6 Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Random House.