On patterns, mirrors, and changing what you’re a match for.
A client asked me why she keeps attracting broke men, the kind who hide it well at first, charming and put together and seemingly stable, and then six months in, the truth starts leaking out around the edges and she’s left holding something she didn’t sign up for.
She wanted a real answer, not the comforting kind, so I gave her one.
The pattern you keep meeting outside of you is pointing to something inside of you.
The Question Underneath the Question
If deception keeps finding you, the question worth asking isn’t only about them, it’s where am I not being fully honest with myself.
That one stopped her for a second, and I watched it land.
Because it’s not about whether she’s a liar, she isn’t, it’s about the smaller ways we lie to ourselves before anyone else ever gets the chance to. The way we override a gut feeling because the person seems nice, the way we explain away the inconsistency because we want the story to be finally true, the way we know something on some level and choose not to know it because knowing would cost us the version of events we’re attached to.
That’s not dishonesty in the dramatic sense, it’s just the everyday kind, the kind that lives in the gap between what we sense and what we let ourselves see.
If you keep meeting people who don’t give, there’s a second question underneath that one, and it’s harder to sit with. Is your own generosity actually open, or is it conditional and closed.
Most of us think of ourselves as generous people, but generosity that’s actually open doesn’t keep score. It doesn’t give in order to receive a matching amount back, and a lot of what passes for generosity is actually a transaction wearing something else. If that’s the shape your giving takes, you’ll keep meeting people whose giving takes the same shape, not as punishment, as reflection.
Relationships as Mirrors
I’ve come to think of relationships as mirrors, unflattering ones sometimes, but mirrors.
Every difficult person who has come into my life, I’ve asked the same question, what is this person reflecting back to me. Not in a blaming way, toward myself or them, just genuinely curious, what part of this discomfort is information.
Sometimes the answer was obvious, sometimes it took months to see clearly, but every time there was something. A boundary I wasn’t holding. A need I wasn’t naming directly and was instead hoping someone would intuit. A fear I hadn’t looked at that was steering more of my choices than I wanted to admit.
I fixed what I could see, slowly, the way real change tends to happen, in increments too small to notice until you look back and realize you’re standing somewhere completely different than where you started.
What Actually Changed
The people I attract now are different, structurally different and this is not because I got lucky. Luck isn’t a pattern, and this was a pattern, consistent enough across years that I can’t call it chance.
It changed because I changed what I was a match for.
That’s the part that’s easy to skip past, because it sounds almost too simple, but it’s the whole mechanism. We don’t attract who we want, we attract who we’re a match for, energetically and behaviorally, in the unspoken places where two people size each other up before either of them has said anything true. In the unconscious trauma recognition. If you change what’s actually true about you, the matching changes, not because you tried harder to pick better, but because you became someone different to pick from.
This is hard to hear when you’re in the middle of the pattern, because it can sound like the conversation is blaming you for what happened to you. It isn’t. Someone else’s deception is still their choice, someone else’s withholding is still theirs to own, but your participation in the pattern, the part that keeps the door open to the same kind of person again and again, that part is yours to look at, and it’s the only part you actually have power over.
The Work, If You Want It
If this resonates, here’s where I’d start, not with the next person, but with the last several.
What did they have in common, not on the surface, but underneath. What did each of them ask of you that you kept giving even when it cost you. What did you sense early and override. What part of you needed them to be different than what they actually were, and why did that part need it so badly.
The answers won’t be comfortable, mirrors rarely are, but they’re accurate in a way that almost nothing else is, because they’re not coming from outside you telling you who you are. They’re coming from your own pattern, showing you exactly what you’ve been a match for.
Change what’s true about you, and the mirror has no choice but to show something else.
That’s the whole game, really.