Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns in Relationships

Therapist Sheilah Murphy joins Phil Phails to explore shame, attachment wounds, relationship patterns, and why healing starts with self-awareness.

Have you ever looked back at a relationship — a friendship, a romantic partnership, a family dynamic — and thought: why do I keep ending up here? Why does the same fight happen? Why do I shut down, or overshare, or disappear, or chase?

I asked those questions a lot before I started the show. And sitting down with Sheilah Murphy, a psychotherapist here in Austin who specializes in relationship patterns and healing through a body-brain lens, was one of the most clarifying conversations I’ve had on Phil Phails. Not because she handed me answers, but because she gave me a better set of questions.

This one ran long — nearly three hours. And I don’t regret a single minute of it.

We’re Not Broken — We’re Just Running Old Programming

One of the things Sheilah said early in our conversation that I keep coming back to is this: most people, most of the time, are operating on autopilot. The technical term she used is “default mode” — essentially, you’re acting from your wiring, the internal working model shaped by your early relationships and environment.

The wiring isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival system. When you were young, the way you adapted to your family — whether you learned to make yourself small, or chase attention, or shut down emotionally, or people-please — those were smart responses to the environment you were in. The problem is that you carry those same strategies into adulthood, often long after the original danger has passed.

Sheilah drew on Robert Sapolsky’s work to make a point I found both liberating and humbling: we’re far more determined by our biology, early relationships, and environment than we typically want to believe. That’s not fatalism — it’s an invitation to stop beating yourself up for the patterns you developed and start getting curious about where they came from.

Shame, she said, is the single biggest obstacle to change. And you can’t create new neural pathways when you’re locked in self-judgment.

The Rupture and Repair Cycle That Makes or Breaks Relationships

This was the part of our conversation I’ll be thinking about for a long time. Sheilah introduced the concept of rupture and repair — and it reframed how I think about conflict entirely.

Here’s the core idea: secure attachment isn’t built in moments of perfect harmony. It’s built through rupture — the inevitable moments of disconnection, misattunement, or hurt — followed by repair. The repair is what does the work.

She used the example of an infant and a caregiver. The baby is in distress. The parent is briefly unavailable. That’s a rupture. Then the parent comes back, makes eye contact, attunes to the child’s state, and soothes. That’s the repair. And it’s that back-and-forth — not perfection — that creates a strong, secure bond. Daniel Winnicott called the ideal parent the “good enough mother.” Not the perfect one. The good enough one, who ruptures and repairs.

The same dynamic plays out in adult relationships. Every couple has fights. Every friendship has moments of disconnection. What matters isn’t whether the rupture happens — it will — but whether both people know how to find their way back.

The tragedy, Sheilah said, is that a lot of us weren’t modeled this. Our families didn’t know how to repair. So we either stonewall, wait it out, or sweep things under the rug. And every unrepaired rupture is a small injury to the relationship — and relationships can only sustain so many of those before something gives.

I thought about my own history with that. I’ve had plenty of ruptures. The repair part — honestly naming what happened, being willing to go first, staying regulated enough to reconnect — that’s the muscle I’m still building.

What Your Childhood Taught You About Emotional Safety

Sheilah works within three primary frameworks: family systems, attachment theory, and interpersonal neurobiology. She described how, in those early years of life, we develop an internal working model — essentially, a map of what relationships look like, whether people can be trusted, and what we’re allowed to feel.

If a child grew up with consistent, attuned caregiving, that map says: people are generally safe, my emotions are valid, I can reach out when I’m struggling. If the caregiving was inconsistent, unavailable, or overwhelming, that map gets shaped differently — and it follows us everywhere.

She was careful not to frame this as blame. Most parents, she said, are doing the best they can with their own wiring. But even in loving, well-intentioned families, there’s a gap between what the child needed and what the parent could give. That gap shows up later.

One of the examples she gave that stuck with me: a child runs to a parent, excited about something. The parent — stressed, distracted, on their phone — doesn’t respond. The child feels a flash of shame. That’s not a dramatic event. It doesn’t leave visible marks. But repeated often enough, it teaches the child to mute their excitement, to stop reaching, to manage their emotional world alone.

Sheilah said that learning to tend to your own inner states — what she calls inner child work — is essentially the practice of becoming the attuned parent to yourself that you may not have had.

The Second Arrow: Why Shame Keeps You Stuck

At one point, I brought up a Buddhist concept that seemed to fit perfectly: the second arrow. The first arrow is the painful event — something hard that happens to you. The second arrow is the one you shoot yourself with in response. The self-judgment. The shame spiral. The “why am I like this?”

The first arrow is often unavoidable. But the second arrow is optional.

Earlier in our conversation, I shared something personal about feeling insecure watching my girlfriend talk to someone at the gym, sending her an emoji that didn’t get a response, and then spiraling for the rest of the evening. When she called me back, I didn’t answer. I was too flooded with shame — not about the jealousy itself, but about having been vulnerable enough to express it.

Sheilah gently walked me through what had actually happened. I’d had a normal human response: some anxiety around my attachment, a bid for connection, a reach toward the person I care about. That was healthy. What became unhealthy was the shame that followed — the self-judgment that said I shouldn’t feel that, that something was wrong with me for feeling it.

Shame, she reminded me, keeps the neural network locked down. You literally cannot build new, healthier patterns when you’re deep in self-criticism. The first step to change is always addressing the shame — normalizing the response, understanding where it came from, and choosing self-compassion over self-flagellation.

She also normalized jealousy for me in a way that surprised me: humans are evolutionarily wired for some degree of hypervigilance around their attachment relationships. It’s survival, not pathology. The goal isn’t to feel nothing — it’s to stay regulated enough to respond thoughtfully rather than react from that old wiring.

Awareness Is the Door — But It’s Not the Whole House

One thing Sheilah was clear about: intellectual awareness of your patterns is a starting point, not a destination. A lot of people go to therapy and become very fluent in understanding their issues — they can analyze the family system, name the attachment style, identify the wound. But staying purely in the intellect doesn’t change the nervous system.

The body holds what the mind narrates.

This is why she works with what she calls body-brain approaches — EMDR, somatic work, inner child work, parts work. These aren’t intellectual exercises. They engage the full neural network: body sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, action impulses. That’s where real change can happen.

She IBM described her own inner child practice in a way I found unexpectedly moving. While hiking, if she notices her mood has shifted or something feels off, she’ll bring to mind her younger self — maybe her six-year-old self — and imagine she’s on the hike with her. She’ll talk to her. She might invent a little picnic with chocolate chip cookies. Not because it’s magic, but because she’s giving that younger part of herself what it didn’t get enough of: attention, care, presence.

The brain, she said, doesn’t distinguish clearly between imagination and lived experience. You can literally create a new memory — one where the child wasn’t alone, wasn’t dismissed, did get the attunement she needed. And that matters.

Personal Reflection: What This Conversation Did to Me

There were several moments in this conversation where I felt something shift — not just intellectually, but in my chest. One was when Sheilah described the shame of vulnerability. She was describing other people, but she was also describing me, pretty specifically.

I’ve spent a lot of my life moving between two modes: either reaching out too quickly, too openly, without checking whether the connection was safe — or shutting down completely when I felt exposed. What she called epistemic trust — the internalized sense of when it’s safe to be vulnerable with someone — that’s something I’m still calibrating.

The part that surprised me most was her point about the otravert — someone who can be deeply social, even warm, but doesn’t develop strong bonds with groups. I’d never heard the term before. But as she described it, something clicked. I’ve spent years wondering why I never quite felt the pull of group identity that other people seem to feel. Now I have at least a better frame for it.

What challenged me was the discussion about the man in my men’s group. Someone said something cruel to me in front of others. There hasn’t been a meaningful repair. And Sheilah, without being preachy about it, pointed out something I didn’t want to see: that by withholding my energy, not looking at him, quietly punishing him through absence — there might be something protective in that, but there’s also something that isn’t serving me. The suffering I feel when he’s in the room is information. Unprocessed information.

That’s the thing about sitting with a good therapist — even on a podcast. You don’t always get the answers you came for. You get better questions instead.

Practical Takeaways

  • Your patterns aren’t character flaws — they’re adaptations. The way you learned to navigate relationships as a child made sense then. Becoming curious about them, rather than ashamed of them, is where change begins.
  • Repair matters more than avoiding ruptures. Conflict isn’t the enemy of connection — unrepaired conflict is. Learning to find your way back after a hard moment is the relationship skill worth developing.
  • Shame locks the brain. You cannot build new neural pathways when you’re deep in self-judgment. Addressing shame — through normalization, self-compassion, and understanding — isn’t soft. It’s neurologically necessary.
  • Intellectual insight is step one, not the whole journey. Knowing your patterns intellectually doesn’t change them. Body-brain approaches — somatic work, inner child practice, EMDR — engage the nervous system where the old wiring actually lives.
  • Start a small inner child practice. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. A few minutes of checking in with yourself — what am I feeling, where do I feel it, what does this part of me need — is a beginning. Journaling with the prompt “how was your day, sweetheart?” is one place to start.
  • When the response is bigger than the event, look backward. If a minor slight, a delayed text, or a passing comment sends you into a spiral, that’s often information about the past, not the present. The intensity is the signal.

Conclusion

I went into this conversation thinking we’d talk about therapy techniques. I left thinking about my grandmother, my kids, a man in a men’s group who scared me once, and a kiss emoji that didn’t get a response.

Sheilah Murphy has one of those minds that makes you feel held and challenged at the same time. She’s not telling you what’s wrong with you. She’s helping you understand how you got here — and handing you a compass for the next part.

The Rumi poem I read near the end is a powerful reminder.

There’s a field beyond ideas of right and wrong. > The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. > Don’t go back to sleep. I think that’s the whole invitation, isn’t it? Wake up. Stay awake. And when you fall asleep again — because you will, we all do — find your way back. That’s the repair.

About Sheilah Murphy

Sheilah Murphy is a psychotherapist in Austin, Texas who specializes in relationships and developmental trauma, working with both couples and individual adults. She uses an integrative body-brain approach based in family systems, attachment, and interpersonal neurobiology.

Her trauma modalities include:

  • Inner child work
  • Somatic awareness
  • EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
  • Parts work
  • Idealized parent figure protocol
  • Mindfulness-based meditation
  • Sand tray therapy

Find Sheilah Murphy: