Why Do I Mourn the Pattern I Am Trying to Break?
The Pattern
You finally see the pattern. You know how it formed. You know why it kept you. You are ready to leave it. And in the leaving you feel a grief you did not expect, a tenderness for the very thing that hurt you. The grief is not contradiction. The pattern was, for a long time, the closest thing you had to safety. Letting it go is a real loss, and the loss is asking, quietly, to be honored.
Origins & Context
John Bowlby's attachment work, extended by contemporary trauma theorists, describes how patterns of attachment, even painful ones, function as the original holding environment. The pattern is not just a behavior. It is the felt sense of being held by something familiar. Leaving the pattern is leaving the holding, even when the holding was harmful.
IFS founder Richard Schwartz writes about the protective parts of the self that organized the pattern. When the pattern is released, the protector who built it loses her function. She grieves. The grief shows up in the host as a tender, unexpected mourning for the very pattern she has worked so hard to leave. The mourning is not a sign that the leaving was wrong. It is the protector deserving her own funeral.
The pattern was, for a long time, the closest thing you had to safety. Letting it go is a real loss, and the loss is asking, quietly, to be honored.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You finally end the cycle of returning to the person who hurt you and you find yourself weeping for the version of yourself who used to return. You finally stop the overworking and you grieve the woman who used to feel safe inside the workload. You break the family pattern and feel a sadness for the lineage you are leaving behind, even though the lineage was hurting you.
It shows up most in the quiet days after the breakthrough. The drama of the change has passed. The new life is settling in. And underneath the settling is a soft grief that does not match the relief. The grief is for the old self who organized her whole life around the pattern, and who deserves to be mourned the way you would mourn anyone who was with you for a long time and is now, gently, gone.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature through John Bowlby's Attachment Theory, where patterns of attachment function as the felt sense of safety even when harmful. It is also named through IFS as the grief of protective parts (Richard Schwartz) whose function has been released. Contemporary therapists describe it through the language of the Grief of Adaptive Selves, the mourning for the version of you who lived inside the pattern.
Related entries in this library include Healing Is Direction Not Destination, the Adaptive Self versus Original Self, and Self-Abandonment.
Nikita's Note
I have mourned every pattern I have broken. The mourning surprised me each time. I expected celebration. I got grief. Eventually I stopped being surprised. The grief was the natural cost of letting go of something that had been with me a long time, even when the something was the very thing I had worked years to release.
The practice now is making room for the grief without using it as a reason to return. I let the old self be honored. I write her a letter. I thank her for the years she kept me alive. I tell her she does not have to come with me into the new life, and that I am grateful she did her job for as long as she needed to. The grief softens. The new life makes room.
From the work
The pattern was, for a long time, the closest thing you had to safety. Letting it go is a real loss, and the loss is asking, quietly, to be honored.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.