You keep having the same relationship with different people
You leave a job because your boss micromanaged you. The next boss seems different at first — collaborative, trusting. Six months in, you feel micromanaged again. You leave a friendship because they took more than they gave. The next friend seems generous at first. A year later, you're resentful about the same imbalance.
The names change. The faces change. The dynamic doesn't.
This is not bad luck. It is not a coincidence that you keep finding the same kind of person. It is a pattern — one you carry with you into every relationship, replaying a template that was written long before you chose any of these people. Until you can see the template itself, you will keep casting new actors in the same old script.
Attachment: the template factory
The most robust research on relational templates comes from attachment theory. John Bowlby proposed in the 1950s and 1960s that early interactions with primary caregivers form what he called "internal working models" — mental representations of what relationships are, how they function, and what you can expect from the people closest to you. These models, once formed, operate largely outside conscious awareness. They don't describe what you think about relationships. They describe what you assume before thinking even begins.
Mary Ainsworth operationalized this in the 1970s through the Strange Situation Procedure, observing how infants responded when their caregiver left and returned. The results produced three primary attachment patterns: secure (about 60% of children), anxious-resistant (about 20%), and avoidant (about 20%). A fourth category, disorganized attachment, was added later by Main and Solomon.
The breakthrough came in 1987, when Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver demonstrated that these same patterns appear in adult romantic relationships with roughly the same distribution: 56% secure, 25% avoidant, 19% anxious. Adults who classified as secure reported relationships characterized by trust, comfort with intimacy, and ability to depend on others. Anxious adults reported emotional volatility, jealousy, and preoccupation with their partner's availability. Avoidant adults described discomfort with closeness and a preference for emotional distance.
The critical insight is not just that these styles exist. It is that they persist. Your attachment pattern, formed in the first years of life, becomes a self-reinforcing filter on every subsequent relationship. The anxious person, hypervigilant for signs of abandonment, behaves in ways — constant reassurance-seeking, jealous monitoring, emotional intensity — that push partners away, confirming the belief that people leave. The avoidant person, uncomfortable with dependence, withdraws at the first sign of emotional demand, creating exactly the distance they expected to find. The template generates the evidence that justifies the template.
This is not destiny. Attachment research shows that styles can shift — particularly through what's called "earned security," where sustained experience in a relationship with a securely attached partner or a skilled therapist gradually rewrites the internal working model. But you cannot rewrite what you have not identified. The first step is always pattern recognition.
Scripts, games, and the roles you keep playing
Attachment theory explains the emotional template. But relationships also run on behavioral scripts — predictable sequences of interaction that repeat regardless of who's involved.
Eric Berne, in his 1964 book Games People Play, proposed that people carry three ego states — Parent, Adult, and Child — and that dysfunctional interactions arise when transactions cross these states in patterned, predictable ways. A "game," in Berne's framework, is not playful. It is a recurring set of transactions with a concealed motivation and a predictable outcome. The person initiating the game gets a psychological payoff — often a familiar negative feeling that confirms an existing belief about themselves or others.
Consider the game Berne called "Why Don't You — Yes But." One person presents a problem. Others suggest solutions. Each suggestion is rejected: "Yes, but that won't work because..." The surface transaction looks like a request for help. The underlying transaction is a demonstration that no one can help — confirming the initiator's belief that they must handle everything alone. The game can play out with any cast of characters. The script is portable.
Stephen Karpman, one of Berne's students, distilled these dynamics into the Drama Triangle: three roles — Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor — that rotate between participants in conflict. The Rescuer who helps compulsively eventually feels exploited and becomes the Persecutor. The Victim who receives help feels patronized and attacks back. The roles shuffle, but the triangle holds. You can trace this pattern in workplace conflicts, family arguments, and political discourse with equal clarity.
What makes these frameworks useful for pattern recognition is not their clinical precision — transactional analysis lacks the empirical rigor of attachment research. What makes them useful is their naming power. Once you can identify that you default to Rescuer in every team conflict, or that you play "Yes But" in every feedback conversation, the pattern becomes an object you can examine rather than a script you unconsciously perform.
You train people to treat you the way you expect to be treated
One of the most underappreciated findings in interpersonal psychology is the principle of complementarity: your behavior systematically pulls specific responses from the people around you. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable dynamic.
The interpersonal circumplex, developed by researchers including Timothy Leary and refined by Donald Kiesler, maps interpersonal behavior along two axes: affiliation (warmth to hostility) and control (dominance to submission). The principle of complementarity predicts that dominance tends to pull submission from others, submission tends to pull dominance, warmth tends to pull warmth, and hostility tends to pull hostility. Research has consistently confirmed the affiliation dimension — friendliness begets friendliness, hostility begets hostility — while the control dimension shows more variability.
The practical implication is that your interpersonal patterns are not just internal experiences. They are invitations that shape how others respond. If you consistently adopt a deferential posture in meetings, you train your colleagues to make decisions without consulting you — and then you resent being excluded. If you habitually lead with criticism, you train the people around you to become defensive or to avoid bringing you information — and then you wonder why no one tells you the truth.
John Gottman's research on married couples demonstrates where this leads when patterns calcify. His team found they could predict divorce with 93.6% accuracy by observing just fifteen minutes of a couple's conflict discussion. The predictors were not the content of the disagreement but the pattern of interaction: four recurring dynamics Gottman called the "Four Horsemen" — criticism (attacking character rather than behavior), contempt (communicating superiority or disgust), defensiveness (deflecting responsibility), and stonewalling (withdrawing entirely). These are not one-time events. They are templates that repeat, escalate, and ultimately erode the relationship's foundation.
The pattern, not the topic, determines the outcome.
Internalized relationships replay in adult life
Object relations theory, developed by psychoanalysts including Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, provides another lens on why relational patterns persist. The core claim is that we do not just internalize people from our early life. We internalize relationships — entire dyadic patterns, including both roles. Klein proposed that infants create internal representations of their caregivers that may not accurately reflect the actual person but powerfully shape how they relate to others. Winnicott emphasized that healthy development requires a "good enough" caregiver — not a perfect one, but one whose consistency allows the child to develop a stable internal model.
The key insight for pattern recognition is that because you internalized the whole relationship — not just your role in it — you can unconsciously replay either side. The child of a controlling parent might become controlling themselves, or might seek out controlling partners and assume the compliant role. Either way, the relational template is running. David Berkowitz's research on couples found that partners unconsciously reenact internalized object relations through self-protective strategies formed in early life, and that these strategies frequently clash, creating the same conflict patterns across different relationships.
This explains something that puzzles people who do surface-level relationship analysis: why changing your behavior often isn't enough. You can learn assertiveness techniques, practice "I statements," and read every communication book published. But if the underlying template — the internalized relational model — remains unexamined, you will find new, sophisticated ways to reproduce the same dynamic. The template is deeper than the behavior. It's the operating system the behavior runs on.
Teams repeat patterns too
Interpersonal patterns are not limited to intimate relationships. They show up wherever people form groups.
Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model of group development — forming, storming, norming, performing — describes a predictable sequence that teams move through. But the more useful observation is that teams do not progress linearly through these stages. They regress. A team that reached "performing" can be knocked back to "storming" by a new member, a leadership change, or a shift in objectives. And the way a particular team storms — the specific conflict patterns, the roles people assume, the avoidance strategies they deploy — tends to repeat each time they regress.
Patrick Lencioni's model of the five dysfunctions of a team maps directly onto this: absence of trust leads to fear of conflict, which leads to lack of commitment, which leads to avoidance of accountability, which leads to inattention to results. These dysfunctions are not independent failures. They are a cascading pattern, and they tend to follow the same person from team to team.
If you have been on three teams and all three had the same problem — "nobody speaks up in meetings," "decisions get relitigated endlessly," "one person dominates every discussion" — the common variable might be you. Not because you are doing something wrong, but because you bring a relational template into group settings that shapes the dynamics around you. The same complementarity principle applies: your default posture in teams pulls specific behaviors from others, creating the team environment you then experience as "just how teams work."
Your Third Brain as a relational pattern detector
The patterns described above are difficult to see in real time because you are inside them. You experience each interaction as unique, each relationship as its own story. The recurring template operates below conscious awareness, which is precisely why it persists.
This is where externalized pattern tracking becomes essential. AI tools can now analyze communication data — email threads, messaging histories, meeting transcripts — and surface patterns that are invisible to the participants. Research in 2025 demonstrated that AI can detect personality traits from text with up to 86.9% accuracy and identify attachment-related communication markers from chat histories. The value is not in the AI's judgment but in its ability to aggregate across hundreds of interactions and reflect the pattern back to you.
But you do not need sophisticated tools to start. A simple log is enough. For any relationship that generates recurring frustration, track three things after each significant interaction: (1) what happened, (2) what you felt, (3) what you did. After ten entries, read them in sequence. The pattern will be obvious — not because it was hidden, but because you had never laid the data points side by side.
The goal is to move relational patterns from the category of "things that happen to me" into the category of "templates I carry and can modify." An interpersonal pattern, once named, becomes an object — just like a thought-object from L-0001. You can version it, challenge it, experiment with alternatives, and track whether the new version produces different results.
Protocol: Map your relational templates
Step 1 — Identify repeating dynamics. List five significant relationships from your life (mix personal and professional). For each, note the core tension: what was the recurring source of friction? Look for the overlap. If three of five share a similar tension, you have found a template.
Step 2 — Name your default role. Using the Drama Triangle as a rough map: in conflict, do you default to Rescuer (fixing, advising, taking responsibility for others' emotions), Victim (feeling powerless, blaming circumstances, seeking help you then reject), or Persecutor (criticizing, controlling, asserting dominance)? Most people rotate between two. Identify your home base.
Step 3 — Trace the complementarity. For your most frustrating recurring dynamic, ask: what behavior of mine might be inviting the response I keep getting? If people keep withdrawing from you, are you pursuing too aggressively? If people keep overriding you, are you signaling that your position is negotiable? The pattern is a dance, and you are half of it.
Step 4 — Run one experiment. In your next interaction within a recurring pattern, change one variable. If you normally defend, ask a question instead. If you normally explain, listen instead. If you normally withdraw, state what you need. Log what happens. You are not trying to fix the relationship in a single move. You are testing whether the template is as rigid as it feels.
Step 5 — Track over time. Create a simple entry in your capture system for relational patterns. Each time a recurring dynamic plays out, log it: date, relationship, what happened, your role, the outcome. Over weeks, this log becomes a map of your relational operating system — the templates you run, the roles you default to, and the experiments that start to produce different results.
Interpersonal patterns are among the most consequential patterns you carry, and among the most resistant to change — because you never experience them as patterns. You experience them as other people being difficult. The shift from "people keep disappointing me" to "I keep recreating the conditions for disappointment" is not self-blame. It is the recognition that you are running code you did not write, and you now have permission to refactor it.
In the next lesson, we turn from relational patterns to a different kind of recurring signal: the energy patterns that structure your day. Where interpersonal patterns reveal your relational templates, energy patterns reveal your biological ones — and they are equally invisible until you start tracking them.