Patterns, Energy, and Love: Breaking Generational Cycles
The Familiar Vibe
When I first met Matt, there was something about his energy that felt deeply familiar. He was calm, composed, steady, and almost impossible to rattle. He wasn’t overly emotional, and that gave me a sense of security. At the time, I couldn’t quite place what it was — only that the vibe felt like home.
Years later, with therapy, parenting, and my own inner work, I realized what I was actually sensing: he carried the same kind of energy I had grown up around with my dad. Not in every way, of course, but in the way emotional avoidance can feel deceptively safe. It looks like strength, control, or steadiness on the surface — but underneath, it’s a mask.
I didn’t realize how much emotional avoidance in marriage could mirror generational cycles until I saw it in real time, in my own relationship.
The Energy of Emotional Avoidance as a Family Pattern
I grew up in a household where silence often carried more weight than words. My dad, authoritarian by nature, could go a month without speaking to me if I had crossed a line as a teenager. The punishment wasn’t physical in those moments — it was absence. Withdrawal. A wall of silence that spoke louder than yelling ever could.
My mom eventually forced us to sit at the dinner table to “make peace,” but I learned early that emotions were to be suppressed, redirected, or ignored. That was the energetic blueprint.
Matt carried a different version of the same thing. While my dad’s avoidance could be aggressive, Matt’s energy was composed, seemingly calm. He was steady, never angry, never reactive. But steadiness is not the same thing as emotional safety. What I eventually saw was that both men had been taught that vulnerability equaled weakness, that empathy was optional, and that silence was safer than confrontation.
The Mask vs. The Man
For years, I thought I’d found something different in Matt. I admired his success, his ability to keep it together, his composure. I thought he was genuinely unshakable. But as the years went on, I saw the mask for what it was: a learned survival skill.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t strong or composed — but like my dad, he had never been shown how to safely process or express emotions. Instead, he had been modeled avoidance. He learned to turn off empathy, to armor himself, to project outwards a version of control.
And I get it now: that’s not about deficiency, it’s about survival energy. But when you marry someone’s mask, you eventually run into the pain hiding underneath.
Parenting: The Spotlight That Reveals Everything
If marriage was a mirror, parenting was a spotlight.
Raising kids together magnified every hidden crack. For me, my perfectionism, people-pleasing, and OCD tendencies went into overdrive. I overfunctioned, planned, and managed every detail – draining every bit of my own energy. In doing so, I unintentionally trained Matt to stay in the background — to minimize, to disengage, to let me carry the weight. And then, of course, I grew resentful of his lack of engagement.
This was our cycle: my overfunctioning paired with his avoidance. The more I leaned in, the more he leaned back. The more I pushed, the more he stayed quiet.
And yet, this wasn’t the end of the story — because therapy gave us a way to start breaking the cycle.
One of the ways I’ve started noticing and shifting these patterns is through journaling. My Ashes Journal is designed exactly for this — writing through collapse and naming the patterns that weigh you down so you can begin writing a different story.
Facing My Own Energy Reflections in Therapy
For years, I’d find myself muttering the same script in my head: “Here we go again. If I want it done right, I’ll have to do it. It always falls to me.”
What I couldn’t see at the time was that in my overfunctioning — in my managing, controlling, perfecting — I was unintentionally training Matt to stay back. If I always jumped in, why would he risk stepping forward? If I handled everything, where was the space for him to rise?
The truth is, my resentment, bitterness, and eventual resignation weren’t only about him. They were about me, too. My anxiety, my need for external validation, my fear of things falling apart if I wasn’t in control — they all shaped the very dynamic I resented.
In one session, my therapist didn’t let me dodge this truth. She looked me in the eye and said: “You’ve trained your husband to be where he is.”
It was humbling. Gutting, honestly. I had to face that I hadn’t always treated Matt like a partner. My tone, my words, even my inner thoughts were often dripping with superiority and contempt: “You could never do this. You’re stupid. Why is everyone so dumb?” I would never speak those words aloud, but I carried them in my body, in my sighs, in my silences. And he felt it.
That night, I went home and told him. All of it. I admitted the disdain, the contempt, the shame. We sat for an hour naming the pain — his, mine, ours. It wasn’t neat or tidy, but it was real. For the first time in a long time, I felt like we were both sitting at the table honestly.
When therapy feels heavy, I anchor myself with small rituals — even lighting a candle can be a reminder that I get to choose differently. That’s why I created my Inner Light Candle, as a way to ground and reset energy in the middle of difficult conversations.
Choosing Differently
Choosing differently, for me, isn’t about never slipping into those thoughts again. It’s about catching myself when I start to spiral into contempt, when my old wound says, “He’s just trying to make this harder for you.”
Instead, I ask: What if he’s scared to get it wrong? What if he doesn’t know what I need until I say it?
Feedback isn’t nagging. Naming what I need isn’t weakness. And shifting my tone, my words, my presence to come from the best version of me — the one not ruled by fear or old shadows — is the real cycle-breaking work.
Therapy and the Willingness to See
One of the key differences between my dad and Matt is this: Matt was willing to change. He was willing to sit in therapy, to hear hard truths, to name patterns, and to try something different.
In couples therapy, we didn’t land on any neat diagnoses. But what we did see was that Matt’s trauma from the military, his possible ADHD, his PTSD, his anxiety and depression — all of it intersected with his upbringing. Every layer of his nervous system shaped the way he showed up in marriage.
And my own therapy revealed that my family of origin trained me into people-pleasing, overachievement, and masking my own needs. Neither one of us came in with a clean slate.
That’s the thing about emotional avoidance: it’s never just one person’s fault. It’s a cycle. It takes two to create it, and two to heal it.
A Projector’s Challenge
From my Human Design lens, I’m a Projector. That means I see deeply into people, often long before they’re ready to see themselves. What might feel like a 2 out of 10 in sadness to Matt registers as a 6 out of 10 in my system. I sense patterns and energy before they’re conscious in many others.
But being a Projector in a relationship with someone emotionally avoidant is complicated. Waiting for the invitation — which is central to my design — can feel like waiting forever. And in the meantime, I internalized the message: I’m too much. Too sensitive. Too deep.
I know now that wasn’t true. It was never about my “too-muchness.” It was about the capacity, capability, and willingness of the people around me. Some people simply aren’t able or ready to hold depth. That doesn’t make me wrong for offering it.
Choosing a Different Legacy
This is where the generational break happens.
My dad never changed — but Matt has shown me he’s willing to. He’s willing to name his own issues, to go to therapy, to open up to vulnerability. That matters.
And I’ve stopped silencing myself. I’ve stopped contorting to fit someone else’s emotional capacity. I name what I see. I honor my own truth. That matters, too.
We are cycle-breakers. Together.
If you’ve ever looked at your partner and suddenly seen your parent’s patterns staring back at you, know this: you’re not broken for noticing. You’re not doomed to repeat. You can choose differently.
Breaking generational cycles in love is messy, complicated, and sometimes painful — but it’s also the most powerful work we can do for ourselves, our marriages, and our children.
Closing Reflection & Invitation
This isn’t about villainizing our parents or our partners. It’s about recognizing the patterns that shaped us and asking: Do I want to carry this forward, or do I want to put it down?
If you see yourself in these words — if you’ve ever felt like emotional avoidance has shaped your love life — I invite you to reflect on your own story.
- What patterns did you see in your family that you now see in your relationship?
- Which ones are you ready to release?
And if you’re curious about what your own soul path might reveal about the cycles you’re here to break, explore my Soul Path Quiz — designed to help you see your life path number and what it means for love, purpose, and legacy.
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August 25, 2025
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