Letter 20: When Patterns Collide - The Invisible Filters in Every Conversation

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

—Aristotle

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Dear Future Human,

We live in patterns. We were formed inside of patterns of interaction, expectation, and response; our brain is quite literally shaped to anticipate and reflect only the patterns already familiar to us. What we perceive as “reality” is often filtered through these inherited expectations. In this sense, the brain becomes a kind of false mirror, or a holographic lens, writing our own predictions onto what we perceive, and what we are capable of perceiving.¹

By now, this will sound familiar. The patterns we developed in our earliest relationships stay with us into adulthood. As we’ve explored in earlier letters, the ways we were spoken to, or not spoken to, the moments we felt seen, dismissed, or misread, shaped how our nervous systems learned to connect. And here’s what makes this so difficult to change: these patterns were formed through right-brain-to-right-brain communication in the first two years of life, before language, before conscious memory, before the left hemisphere even came online.² Everything about attachment—how we learned to regulate emotion, how we experience safety or threat—happened in that wordless, implicit realm. Gradually, those experiences became default wiring.

Alison Gopnik’s research reveals something crucial about this process: young children aren’t just passively absorbing their environment—they’re running remarkably sophisticated learning algorithms, constantly building predictive models based on what they observe.³ The problem is that a child’s data set is limited to their immediate caregivers. If those caregivers are angry, dismissive, or unpredictable, the child’s brain builds accurate predictions for that specific environment—predictions that become catastrophically mismatched when applied to the wider world. Anna’s brain became expert at predicting her father’s anger. Will’s brain became expert at predicting his mother’s need for reassurance. Both systems worked perfectly in childhood and now fail them constantly as adults.

In many of our interactions, we are not actually choosing how we respond. We are running well-rehearsed programs. Our nervous system responds from habit, using patterns learned early on, when safety and connection were everything. When it comes to the basic motivations of why we do what we do, neuroscientist Allan Schore estimates that 90-95% of it is unconscious. This is why reactions sometimes feel disproportionate to the situation and somewhat familiar. The intensity doesn’t belong to the present moment. It belongs to the past. We are not responding to what is being said now, rather to the habits our body remembers, though our conscious mind does not.⁴

The questions then become: what are we missing? What are we failing to see? And what do these blind spots cost us—internally, relationally, and collectively?

The danger of patterns is that patterns perpetuate. They proliferate. They spread. From a pattern of learned perception comes a pattern of adaptive behavior; from a pattern of learned behavior comes a cycle of interpersonal interaction, a relational pattern that can disrupt and decay our most intimate connections. As these patterns get passed along, their impact spreads too—from individuals to relationships, to families, and eventually into culture and institutions. Put simply, we’re all trying to connect across gaps shaped by our childhoods. We each learned something different about being heard, valued, or safe. So in everyday conversations, we’re often trying to meet each other across those differences, needing to build bridges between our inner worlds that formed early on.

Let’s look at a simple example. Anna is in her mid-forties and has been married to Will for fifteen years. As a child, Anna was raised by a strictly domineering father, and a mother who tried unsuccessfully to appease him.

Anna learned to fear her father’s temper and to avert it at all costs. She learned to stay on high alert, always watching for any hint that her father might be displeased. His anger could flare over the smallest things—a toy left out, a spilled glass of water. As a child, Anna had no way to make sense of it. She didn’t know why he was so angry or what she could do to stop it. So she did what many children do to survive: she shut down. She numbed herself and pulled away from feelings that were simply too much to handle. To protect herself, Anna learned to go numb. When the feelings got too big, she shut them down. At the same time, she learned to be extremely critical of herself. She held herself to higher standards than even her father’s, so she could catch her mistakes before he did. It gave her a sense of control, though it came at a cost of self-compassion.

That voice didn’t go away when she grew up. It’s still there, shaping how she sees herself and how she relates to other people. She maintains distance. She notices flaws quickly. She takes pride in being successful, attractive, capable—the one who always seems to have it together.

But underneath that is fear. From very early on, her system learned that getting things wrong was dangerous. As a child, she couldn’t understand that her father’s silences and criticism came from his own struggles. She only knew how it landed in her body. And so she assumed that the problem was her.

As a result, Anna is deeply sensitive to criticism, which she perceives as a direct assault or threat to her very well-being. In a way, it actually is. Criticism attacks the self-image Anna has built to protect herself from the Flailing Child still living inside her.⁵ Thus, when criticized, Anna will counter-attack with fury or detach into a punishing silence eerily similar to her father’s cold rages.

Her husband, Will, on the other hand, grew up in a family structured around the frequent hospitalizations of his older brother, who ultimately died when Will was four. Will, a naturally good-natured child, absorbed early on that he could not be the source of additional distress to his parents, particularly his mother, who served as his brother’s primary caretaker and was nearly undone by grief. In fact, after Will became an only child, Will’s mother developed a paralyzing fear of losing her young son, too, and clung tightly to him for reassurance and support.

Like Anna, Will dissociated from this frightened and conflicted part of himself. He adapted by becoming the entertainer, the peacemaker, the endlessly agreeable son. Will sees himself as easygoing and loving. What he doesn’t recognize is the fear and resentment he still carries—toward his mother and, by extension, toward women in intimate relationships. His nervous system learned to equate closeness with being trapped, leaving him torn between longing for intimacy and fearing it.

Anna and Will are tuned to different threats: Anna’s scanning for criticism; Will’s scanning for control. They built their adult selves on top of their childhood terror and helplessness. Both are still perceiving the present through what they understood as powerless kids. This is what we all do, we carry invisible templates from our most vulnerable years, each scanning for the particular dangers that once threatened our young sense of safety and belonging.

They unconsciously scan for the same danger cues that once signaled threat in childhood.⁶ When these cues are perceived, they trigger the same childhood fear. By now, that fear becomes buffered by numbness and reactive defenses that keep it out of awareness.

Anna’s defenses are about control and perfectionism. Her Fraudulent Adult looks like it has it all together: a six-figure job, perfect hair, a home that must be just meticulously ordered. Anna must be perfect, never do anything wrong, or she will be left floundering like the vulnerable child in front of her father anger.

To be Anna is to be exhausted.

Will’s defenses are built around affability and appeasement. On the surface, he seems easygoing, charming, agreeable. But underneath he is hiding. Disconnected from his core, Will cannot take a stand or draw his boundaries. He cannot say “no.” He cannot disappoint. He aligns himself with others not because he agrees, but because to do so would leave him alone, like a child without a mother.

To be Will is to be suppressed.

Both are at the mercy of their own wiring, with reactions conditioned by childhood experiences. Neither can safely be in touch with their true emotions. Anna doesn’t know she is near despair compulsively cycling from task to task, performance to performance. Will, too, performs constantly without realizing it—and without recognizing the mounting repressed rage and desperate desire to be free.

Deep down, all of us want to be freed from habits that we know don’t serve us, but that control us. Until we can identify them, the impulse toward freedom will be distorted and continue to recreate the pattern in relationships.

Here’s what makes patterns so insidious in relationships: they’re operating at the right-brain level, beneath conscious awareness, faster than words.⁷ When Anna and Will interact, their nervous systems respond to each other in real time, scanning for threat before conscious thought kicks in. As we explored in earlier letters, this is System 1—fast, automatic, emotional, operating beneath conscious awareness. Their left brains are trying to engage System 2—slow, deliberate, rational thought—to have a conversation about dishes, but their right brains are having an entirely different System 1 conversation about childhood survival. And System 1 always wins when it detects threat.

So now let’s see what happens when Will and Anna engage around a very simple issue: how the dishwasher has been loaded. The dialogue below is just an example—and we can assume, for the sake of this exercise, that on the day this exchange occurs, both Will and Anna are for entirely different reasons feeling slightly on-edge. Maybe Will has just gotten off another two-hour phone call with his mother, who as usual is using him as a sounding-board to vent her complaints about her marriage. Maybe Anna had a less-than-perfect review at work, which has left her on-edge, feeling offended, under-appreciated, and even unfairly persecuted by her boss.

Anna walks through the door, keys jangling as she sets them on the counter. She walks to the kitchen, glances at the sink, then over at Will, who’s standing at the open dishwasher with a furrowed brow.

Will: “Are these dishes clean, or dirty?”

Anna hears through FEAR FILTER: Criticism—”You forgot again, didn’t you?”

Anna DEFENSIVE: “How should I know? I’ve been working all day.”

Will hears through FEAR FILTER: Domination—”Unlike you, I have a real job.”

Will DEFENSIVE: “Too bad they don’t teach you how to load dishwashers in business school.”

Anna hears: Criticism—”No matter your job, you will never be enough.”

Anna DEFENSIVE: “If you’re so concerned, did it occur to you to run them again?”

Will hears: Domination—”You’re incompetent, I don’t respect you.”

Will DEFENSIVE: “Wow. Brilliant idea. Now that makes your college debt worth it.”

At this point, Will and Anna’s conversation explodes into a familiar argument about finances and household contributions.

So what just happened? Their unconscious emotional brains took over the conversation. Neither was responding to what was actually being said. They were responding to their nervous systems’ detection of threat based on childhood wiring. This is what Schore calls “dysregulation”—when the autonomic nervous system gets activated and overwhelms the capacity for conscious reflection.

Now imagine how the conversation might have gone without those filters and automatic reactions.

Most minimal:

Will: “Are these dishes clean, or dirty?”

Anna HEARS: “Are these dishes clean, or dirty?”

Anna: “Hmmm. I can’t remember. Maybe run them again?”

Will: “Okay.”

In other words, what each hears matches what is said—a simple exchange between two people navigating a shared household task, rather than two wounded children defending against threats that exist primarily in memory.

Here’s the key thing to understand: insight alone doesn’t change this. Anna and Will could read all the books, understand their patterns, even talk about them thoughtfully. But the moment their nervous systems sense threat, that knowledge goes offline. Real change doesn’t come from knowing more—it comes from learning how to stay with an activated state long enough for the system to settle. And most of the time, that means having another person who can stay present and attuned with you, helping your nervous system find its way back to balance.

This may strike you as a mundane example. But in fact, that’s the point. Without intervention, these distorted patterns undermine connection and strain relationships.⁸ Ironically, this brings us into contact with the central fear we are trying to avoid: that we are all alone.

This is the Noise: the global human pattern starting with “I am all alone,” looping each of us through fear, pain, and defense, back to fear. Each person’s Noise has a slightly different tone. Noise is not individual; it is evolutionary. It is human. It is where we are in our evolutionary history as we all try to connect across the gaps created by our different early experiences of safety, love, and belonging.

Yet there is profound hope in this recognition. Simply becoming aware of these patterns can actually deepen our connections. When we see them as part of the shared human condition, rather than personal failure, new ways of being emerge.

Before I can explore what lies beyond this door, we need to look more deeply at how these patterns shape our lives, not just personally, but collectively. The same patterns show up everywhere—from our inner conversations to the systems we build together. To truly understand what transformation requires, we must first illuminate how these unconscious adaptations have become the blueprint for how we relate, organize, create, and respond as a species.

Lovingly,

Ronit

1. Anil Ananthaswamy, “To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions,” Quanta Magazine, November 2021.

2. Allan N. Schore, “Right Brain-to-Right Brain Psychotherapy: Recent Scientific and Clinical Advances,” Annals of General Psychiatry, 2022.

3. Alison Gopnik et al, “A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets,” Psychological Review, 2004.

4. Dylan G. Gee & Emily M. Cohodes, “Caregiving Influences on Development: A Sensitive Period for Biological Embedding of Predictability and Safety Cues,” National Library of Medicine, August 2021.

5. Kirsten Weir, “The Pain of Social Rejection.” American Psychological Association, April 2012.

6. N.Tottenham & L.J. Gabard-Durnam, “The Developing Amygdala: A Student of the World,” Science Direct, October 2018.

7. Allan N. Schore, “The Right Brain Is Dominant in Psychotherapy,” American Psychological Association, 2014.

8. Randi Gunther, “How Triggered Immaturity Destroys Intimacy,” Psychology Today, December 2024.

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