Relationship Patterns: Only the Faces Change

Are you seeing reoccurring patterns in your relationships with others?  Are you noticing that you are encountering similar issues with even different people?  If you answered yes to either one of these questions then chances are you have a relationship pattern.  A relationship pattern is when we seek the same characteristics in a relationship over and over.  We may wonder why our relationships fail time after time when the people we choose are in fact different.  The reason they fail is because we keep assuming the same role and seeking the same characteristics in a person that will play along with us.

In order to correct this behavior we need to dissect our roles in relationships beginning with the roles we play in family, friendships, and love relationships.  Whether we want to realize it or not our relationships with our family carry over to our wants and needs with love relationships.  So if anything is damaged or lacking without correction we carry this baggage over to love relationships.  If we assume an "enabler" role with our family, we will likely seek a person that we can enable in our love life.  If we were abused in any way, we will seek a person that abuses us.  If we had a family that did not show us an abundance of love, we will seek a relationship that is not very affectionate.  Why do we do this?  We take on the same role because we have established a familiarity with this behavior.  The same behavior becomes a comfort zone and one we are quite familiar with playing.  To do anything different would be overwhelming and foreign.

If we want to change the pattern, we have to identify which relationships in our life were unhealthy.  We have to assess the roles that we played and bring them into awareness so that we can actually make a change.  We can't change something if we don't know a change is needed.  We can't show love to others if we don't feel we know what healthy love is.  We take what we were shown initially and raised by and identify this as "healthy" love when in reality it may not be.  We have to decipher illusions from reality if we want to seek an easier and softer way of life without going in circles.
Albert Einstein's definition of insanity is when we do the same thing over and over and expect different results.  Until we uncover our own behaviors in relationships we will seek the same roles and expect different results.