Repatterning: Understanding the Roots of Your Mental Health and Changing the Story

Have you ever noticed yourself stuck in the same emotional loops, repeating the same behaviours — even when they don’t serve you anymore?

You’re not alone.

Many of the patterns we experience in adulthood — anxiety, low mood, self-criticism, perfectionism, people-pleasing — have deep roots. They’re not random. In fact, they often make perfect sense once we begin to understand where they came from.

Mental health conditions often follow patterns

When we think about mental health through the lens of diagnosis (like anxiety, depression, OCD, or trauma), it can feel clinical — as though there’s something wrong with us. But another way to look at it is through the idea of patterns: how we learned to feel safe, get our needs met, or avoid pain growing up.

Our minds and bodies adapt to our environments. As children, we learn behaviours and internal narratives based on the people around us. If love felt conditional, we might have learned to perform or achieve. If emotion wasn’t welcomed, we might have learned to suppress it. If things were chaotic, we may have become hypervigilant or overly responsible.

These adaptations can become so ingrained that we don’t even realise they’re patterns — they just feel like “who I am.”

But here’s the truth:They’re not fixed. They were formed. And anything that was formed can be reformed.

Understanding is the first step to change

When we begin to look at our mental health symptoms as expressions of learned patterns, we create space for compassion. Instead of beating ourselves up for feeling anxious or stuck, we can ask:“When did I first learn to feel this way?”“What was I trying to protect myself from?”“What need was I trying to meet?”

This kind of reflection is powerful — especially in a therapeutic relationship where there’s space to explore your history and how it shows up in the present.

Because here’s the thing: your past is influencing your present, but it doesn’t have to define your future.

Repatterning is about choice

Once you understand the story behind your patterns, you can begin to gently repattern — to create new ways of relating to yourself, others, and the world.

This doesn’t mean pretending everything’s fine or forcing positivity. It means becoming aware of your defaults and learning to choose differently, moment by moment. It means practicing self-support, setting boundaries, allowing emotion, and reconnecting with the parts of you that got left behind along the way.

Change is possible — not by fixing yourself, but by understanding yourself more deeply and choosing to grow in a new direction.

If this resonates with you, and you’re curious about exploring your own patterns and what they’re trying to show you, you’re not alone. This is the work I do every day with clients — and I’d love to walk alongside you as you explore yours.