Robyn on Purpose
Discover Your True Purpose
Working Through Patterns
A STEP BY STEP APPROACH TO MEANINGFUL CHANGE
Sometimes the situations change, but the feelings don't.
Different people. Different circumstances. Different seasons of life.
Yet the same fears, reactions, assumptions, or frustrations continue to surface.
Patterns don't develop by accident. They often begin as responses to real experiences, protecting something important or providing something you've come to depend on. But over time, the circumstances may change while the perspective remains.
When that happens, the perspective you've developed can continue shaping how you experience yourself, other people, and the world around you.
Working through a pattern begins by looking beneath it. By exploring the experiences, emotions, beliefs, and assumptions that shaped it, you create the opportunity to heal the perspective behind the pattern—and decide whether it's still the lens you want to carry forward.
The defences that keep pain out are the same ones that keep joy from coming in.
What’s closed for protection is also closed to possibility.
Trace The Pattern
If you've avoided looking at your patterns up close, there's usually a reason — maybe even a few:
You don't want to feel bad about yourself
You're avoiding feeling vulnerable
You're scared to challenge the story you've told yourself
You don't want to lose the certainty, the control, the approval, the protection or the "belonging" the pattern provides
Or maybe you are simply afraid of what you might uncover
When a pattern becomes visible, the temptation is to judge yourself for having it rather than become curious about where it came from.
But the point of tracing the pattern back isn’t to judge it.
It’s to understand how it formed.
Instead of asking, “Why do I do this?”
you’re opening the door to, “Where did this begin?”
This kind of reflection helps you step outside the loop — so you can see the pattern, not just live inside it.
An examined past creates freedom.
An unexamined past keeps you in the pattern.
Tracing Where The Pattern Began
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What is it that I am resisting in these moments?
Resistance often points toward something that feels vulnerable, uncertain, or important.
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What does this remind me of — even if it doesn’t seem directly related?
Patterns often echo earlier experiences, even when the circumstances look completely different.
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When have I felt this same reaction or intensity before?
Pay attention to recurring emotions, themes, or situations rather than exact events.
As you sit with these questions, you may start to notice something:
The reaction you’re having now isn’t only about what’s happening in the present.
It’s connected to something earlier — a time when responding this way made sense.
Looking a Little Deeper
Once you begin to see the pattern, you can gently ask:
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What did I learn would happen if I didn’t respond this way?
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What part of me still believes this is necessary?
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What am I trying to avoid, manage, or protect by reacting like this?
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If I responded differently, what would that mean about me?
You might discover a belief about what’s required to be accepted.
Or a fear of what could happen if you showed up differently.
Or the sense that this response has been the safest option — protecting you from uncertainty or vulnerability.
This pattern didn’t form without a reason. At some point, it helped you navigate something in a way that felt necessary.
Reflection helps you see that clearly — so you can decide whether you still need to carry it in the same way.
Thinking can help you understand, learn from, and work through an experience—but only when it has somewhere useful to go. Learn how to give your thinking a purpose, a process, and a finish line.
Your emotional reactions can help you understand what a pattern is connected to. Learn how to look beneath what you're feeling to recognize the needs, fears, beliefs, or experiences that may be contributing to it.
Meet Yourself with Compassion
It’s easy to take what you’re starting to see and turn it against yourself.
To look at your reactions, your patterns, your past — and make it mean something about who you are.
The times you didn’t handle things the way you wish you had.
The reactions you can see more clearly now.
And from there, it can quickly become:
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This is just who I am
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This says something about me
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I should have known better
But you are not those moments.
You are not the version of you who didn’t yet have the tools.
You are not the seasons where you were overwhelmed.
You are a whole, evolving person — one who is still learning.
You’re not meant to punish the parts of you that struggled — you’re meant to understand them, to learn from them.
Growth doesn’t come from guilt.
Regret doesn’t move you closer to alignment.
When someone you care about is struggling, you don’t respond by judging them at their worst.
You soften.
You stay present.
You hold space for what they’re going through.
That same response is available to you.
Self-compassion isn’t about ignoring what happened.
It’s about seeing it clearly— without turning it into evidence against yourself.
Because judgement doesn’t create change.
It creates pressure. And pressure is what keeps patterns in place.
Compassion does something different.
It allows you to look at your behaviour and ask:
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What was I needing in those moments?
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Where was I overwhelmed or stretched too far?
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What fear was influencing how I responded?
This isn’t about excusing what happened. The fact that you feel regret or remorse already shows growth.
Holding your past against yourself doesn’t move you forward. Compassion and forgiveness do.
It's human nature to seek what feels safe, meaningful, or necessary. Patterns develop because they consistently protect something important or provide something we've come to depend on. That's why these recurring— very human responses are so prevalent in our society. It's also why many people are "stuck" in their ways — they equate digging deeper into their reactions with producing feelings of shame, fear, vulnerability.
What they don't know?
Compassion dissolves shame
Compassion softens fear
Compassion makes vulnerability safe
Can you offer compassion to the version of yourself who was doing the best they could with the perspective they had?
The version who was just trying to survive, making choices from instinct rather than clarity?
The version who got you here, reading this, ready for something different?
Compassion softens the structure the pattern has been holding in place — so it no longer runs automatically.
And once that structure is softened, the emotion underneath it can be released — instead of being something you carry with you.
When You’re Still Judging Yourself
Sometimes the hardest person to forgive is yourself.
You look back at something you said, something you did, or a situation you wish you'd handled differently.
Maybe you didn't understand the impact of your behaviour at the time. Maybe you didn't have the awareness, perspective, emotional capacity, or skills you have now.
Or maybe you did know better.
Maybe you recognized the pattern. You knew how you wanted to respond. You knew you would regret it later.
And you did it anyway.
It can be especially difficult to offer yourself compassion when you believe you should have known better.
But recognizing a pattern and being able to consistently respond differently are not the same thing.
Awareness is part of change. So is practice.
You may recognize the pattern sooner than you used to. Catch yourself halfway through. Respond differently one time and fall back into the old behaviour the next. You may understand exactly where something comes from and still struggle to change what happens when you're triggered, afraid, hurt, overwhelmed, or trying to protect yourself.
You can be growing and still get it wrong.
That doesn't mean you excuse behaviour that has hurt you or someone else. You can acknowledge what you did. Take responsibility for your part. Make amends where possible. Repair what you can. Learn from what happened and continue working toward responding differently.
And you can do all of that without using what happened as evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with you.
If guilt or shame continues to follow you, consider what it is asking of you.
Is there something you still need to take responsibility for?
Is there something you can repair?
Is there something you haven't been willing to acknowledge?
Is there something here you still need to learn?
And if you've done those things — what is continuing to punish yourself accomplishing?
There may come a point when the work is no longer understanding what happened or proving that you're sorry.
The work may be allowing yourself grace.
Grace for the person who didn't know better.
Grace for the person who didn't yet have the capacity to do better.
Grace for the person who knew better and still got it wrong.
Grace for the person who is trying to change and hasn't figured out how to do it consistently yet.
You are allowed to hold yourself accountable without condemning yourself.
You are allowed to regret something without making it a permanent judgement of who you are.
And you are allowed to continue loving yourself while you learn how to become the person you want to be.
Your reactions are signs that something needs to change — but you can't change the present if you are judging yourself through who you were yesterday.
If offering yourself that kind of understanding doesn't come easily, The Practice of Self-Compassion can help you begin changing the way you respond to yourself when you're struggling with guilt, shame, mistakes, or the parts of yourself you wish were different.
Understanding your part doesn't require punishing yourself for it. Learn to separate responsibility from self-blame so the past can become something you learn from rather than something you continue to hold against yourself.
Release and Let Go
At some point in your life, you've likely experienced emotion so strong, tears flowed from your eyes and you could do nothing to stop it. Whether they were brought on from laughter or grief — those tears were a build up of energy and your body needed to release it.
Or maybe you’ve experienced an anxious feeling in your stomach, a sudden sadness, or a worry you just couldn’t explain — your thinking mind unable to connect the emotion to an event. The feeling was just there, beneath the surface, with no discernable cause.
This is stored emotion.
Stored emotion doesn't stay contained.
It:
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keeps the body slightly activated
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lowers the baseline of calm
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creates a feeling of:
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unease
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tension
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unpredictability
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So instead of feeling steady, grounded and secure,
you feel on edge, unsettled, and unclear why.
Even if you’ve mentally traced your pattern to its source, if the emotion underneath isn’t addressed, it will continue to show up — often in reactions that feel bigger than the moment.
So when clarity arrives, don’t move past it.
Stay with what comes up. Anger. Vulnerability. Grief.
When you finally drop your guard, you may find yourself in tears.
Tears for the child in you who learned to stay small.
Tears for the version of you who believed your worth depended on how much you gave.
Tears for all the moments you reacted bigger than the situation—when it was never really about the present, but about an old wound you had been carrying.
These tears aren’t weakness.
They are release.
They are truth leaving the body.
Another Way to Release
Sometimes emotions need somewhere to go.
Instead of trying to organize your thoughts or make sense of what you're feeling, give yourself permission to write without editing, filtering, or judging.
Write the anger.
Write the hurt.
Write the resentment.
Write the grief.
Write the things you would never say out loud.
Write the thoughts you keep pushing away.
Write until there is nothing left to hold.
The goal isn't insight. The goal is release.
When you're finished, you don't need to keep what you've written. Tear it up. Throw it away. Burn it safely if that feels meaningful to you.
What matters isn't what you wrote.
What matters is that you no longer have to carry it.
Shift Your Gaze
Truth or Interpretation?
Part of what keeps patterns in place is how quickly your thinking reinforces it.
You interpret → you decide what it means → and that meaning justifies your response.
Over time, that process feels automatic. It feels true.
But it’s still an assumption — not just about the situation, but the intent of the people involved.
What they meant.
Why they said it.
What it says about you.
The problem is, you don’t actually know if that interpretation is true.
You’ve filled in the gaps.
And those gaps are often filled in by the same pattern you’re working to shift.
Questioning the Story
What if your initial interpretation isn’t the full picture?
What if there’s another explanation — one that doesn’t require you to react in the same way?
What if you assumed that their words or behaviour have nothing to do with you?
What if, like you, they have their own patterns?
Their own reactions.
Their own internal pressure.
Making an effort to look past your automatic assumptions can have an enormous impact on your relationships with others. This shift allows you to view others through a more compassionate lens. Just like when you offer compassion to yourself, when it is extended to others — even silently — it changes how you show up. The other person may still be in conflict, but you don’t have to be.
When you stop to question your automatic assumptions, you can start to change your automatic response.
Looking for Evidence
What you focus on can either reinforce or weaken your patterned responses.
Your pattern isn't just shaped by what happens to you. It's shaped by what you notice, remember, and give significance to. Over time, your attention naturally gravitates toward the experiences that support what you already believe, making the pattern feel increasingly true.
If you believe people will let you down, you'll remember the times they did. If you believe your needs don't matter, you'll notice the moments they weren't considered. If you believe you have to do everything yourself, you'll pay attention to the times others failed to help.
What often goes unnoticed are the experiences that don't support the pattern.
There have likely been moments when someone showed up for you, respected a boundary, listened, supported you, appreciated you, or responded differently than you expected. Those moments often pass by unnoticed because they don't fit the existing story.
Looking for evidence isn't about denying your experiences or convincing yourself that everything is positive. It's about recognizing that the pattern may not be telling the whole story. The more willing you are to notice the evidence that doesn't fit, the more flexibility you create in how you see yourself, others, and the situations you encounter.
If you want to go deeper into how your perspective shapes what you see and how you respond, it may help to explore it more directly.
Relating differently to what’s in front of you starts with how you choose to see it.
Moving Forward
Give Yourself a Direction
It's natural to focus on what you no longer want.
The reaction you want to stop having.
The behaviour you want to change.
The pattern you're trying to break.
But knowing what you want to leave behind doesn't tell you where you are going. It doesn't tell you what to do instead.
To create a direction, start by asking yourself:
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What qualities do I want my choices to reflect?
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What behaviour would I like to normalize?
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What way of being would I like to practice more often?
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When this pattern appears, what would a healthier response look like?
As you answer these questions, look for common themes.
Perhaps you want to be more honest.
More patient.
More self-respecting.
More connected.
More courageous.
More compassionate.
More present.
These qualities tell you what you value. They become your direction.
They provide a clear reference point for the choices you make and the person you are working to become.
Let Your Values Guide the Way
Patterns tell you what you habitually do.
Values tell you what you want to do.
Values are the principles that reflect who you want to be, regardless of how you feel in a given moment. Acting from your values means allowing those principles to guide your choices rather than letting your reactions make them for you.
Living your values means becoming the person who does what matters to you, even when no one else joins you or even notices.
It means taking responsibility for the qualities you want to bring into the world rather than waiting for other people to create them first.
Patterns often persist because our choices become tied to circumstances, emotions, or the behaviour of other people. We react to what is happening around us rather than consciously choosing how we want to show up within it.
When your choices depend entirely on what other people do, your direction is constantly changing. You are reacting to circumstances rather than actively participating in them.
Values give that responsibility back to you.
They allow you to choose who you want to be regardless of how other people behave.
Recognizing how you want to respond differently is one thing. Living it can feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and uncertain. Learn how to measure your choices differently as you practice becoming someone new.
