The Pattern That Keeps Them Safe

A client once asked me a question I've never really forgotten

"How do I deal with an abandonment wound before it actually happens?"

She wanted to get ahead of it. Prepare for it. Build something in herself that could survive the moment she was already sure was coming.

And it was a fair question... except it was the wrong one.

Because the reason she kept needing to prepare for abandonment was that she kept choosing people who were very likely to abandon her.

She held on tightly. Everyone around her felt it. Friends found her a little suffocating, partners felt the grip before they felt the closeness, and she knew it about herself, which only made her hold on harder.

So the obvious clinical move is to work on the holding on.

I didn't.

I worked with the part of her that had learned, somewhere very early, that holding on was the only way connection ever happened. Her body just didn't know there was another option available.

Because here's the thing I keep coming back to...

The pattern a client overuses is almost never the pattern to treat.

It's usually the one keeping them upright.

And if you take it away before something else exists underneath it, you haven't given them freedom... you've just taken away the only thing that was working.

That idea ended up shaping a big part of the masterclass.

From there we got into things like...

Why the pattern sitting right in front of you is usually compensating for a completely different one you can't see yet.

Why "stop doing that" quietly fails, and what changes when the goal becomes giving someone a second option instead.

Why the same movement can be a strength in one client and the exact thing keeping another one stuck.

How to tell whether a client is under-using something or over-using it... because they look almost nothing alike, and they need entirely different treatment.

And why one client can be doing exactly the right thing, and still be getting worse at it.

We kept coming back to real cases. Real moments where a therapist had been working faithfully on the visible pattern for months, and the whole thing loosened once they started looking underneath it instead.

If you were with us live, it's really worth watching again. This is one of the sections people told me they had to rewind.

And if you couldn't make it... the replay is available now.

You can get the replay here for $147

Esther