Unseen, Unchosen, Unconscious: The Hidden Patterns Running Your Life (Part 3)

Do you feel like you are consciously creating your life? That you are the artist or architect of the life you are intentionally building for yourself?

As human beings, we desperately want to feel we have agency and free will over our lives and choices in them. The idea that our lives might be predestined, preplanned, and unchangeable can feel incredibly defeating.

While we do indeed have conscious choice and agency over not just our lives but our bodies and brains, we are also limited by them.

Early in my career, I gravitated toward teachings and research that supported the idea of choice, agency, and ownership. That we could choose our thoughts, shape our experiences, and improve our lives as a result.

While nothing I’m about to say negates that those things are possible (at least to some degree), they are in fact far less influential than we might have previously been led to believe.

Our life experience is truly shaped much more by the many unconscious past patterns embedded in our body and brains, than it is any independent choice.

These patterns are the invisible architecture behind our thoughts, emotions, behaviors, relationships, leadership styles, and even organizational cultures.

The Core Truth: 

Most of what we do every day isn’t consciously chosen—it’s habitual, patterned, and neurologically encoded.

As we grow from a cluster of cells to fully formed and developed adult human beings, our bodies are forming neural connections and pathways throughout our bodies. Neurons are the cells in our body that send messages telling everything in our body what to do both consciously and unconsciously. 

When I raise my hand, a neural message is being sent to my hand. 

When I breathe or digest food, neural messages are sent to my lungs and gut.

When I speak, think, feel, or act, neural messages are being sent. 

We can't possibly consciously direct our bodies to breathe, digest, walk, and talk all at once. Doing so would overload our cognitive resources very quickly, limiting our ability to survive in a world where quickness was critical to acquiring resources and avoiding predators. 

As we evolved, our bodies developed the ability to create patterns in the neural pathways that could be run unconsciously in our systems. The patterns and pathways were pre-programmed from centuries of evolution. 

It's why babies know to cry to get food, shelter, and protection. 

It's why we don't have to learn to breathe or digest food. 

Likewise, as we grow and develop throughout our lives, our bodies form neural pathways in response to our environments and experiences. 

• If we get hurt touching a hot stove, we learn not to do so again. 
• If we learn from others to avoid snakes (seeing them jump away from them), we will instinctually do the same. 
• If our caregivers require certain behaviors or actions to get praise or receive love and connection, we will develop patterns that produce this positive reinforcement. 

Everything we encounter in our environments (or cultures) and experiences gets coded into our neural pathways and networks in the human body. 

Why is this important? 

Our brains require a tremendous amount of energy to consciously operate, therefore, to conserve resources, the more the body can create automatic patterns, the better the chance of surviving. In a world where resources are scarce (such as lack of food), this is particularly important. 

Similarly, we must be able to react very quickly to threats or predators if we are to survive them. The time it takes to consciously register a predator, decide the best strategy for surviving it, and implement that strategy would likely cause us to fall prey to the predator. 

While these are the evolutionary reasons for patterns, our bodies automatically create them in response to everything we encounter. These patterns become our ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving. 

Once encoded, they happen automatically. Like driving a car or riding a bike, we execute the patterns without even thinking about it. They happen so automatically we are often totally unaware of how often they are running or influencing us in our lives. 

We’re not operating fully from free will or intention nearly as often as we think. Instead, we’re running on old wiring created as a result of:

• past stress stuck in the body
• survival responses
• social conditioning
• internalized expectations
• unprocessed pain & traumas
• inherited cultural scripts

Our collective lived experiences have shaped our entire perception of and experience with the world. The more we have similar experiences, the stronger those neural pathways and connections become making them even quicker and embedding them even more into our patterns of being - thinking, feeling, and behaving. 

How Unconscious Patterns Drive Us

These neural connections are influencing everything we think, feel, and do every day of our lives. Let's look at some examples of how this impacts our lives. 

Our Thoughts

• Experiencing repeated rumination, self-doubt, criticism, over-analyzing.
• Rooted in early experiences where thinking became a strategy to stay safe or earn approval.
• Head-brain hijacks presence with constant “what ifs” or “not good enoughs”.

Our Feelings

• Emotions arise from patterned interpretations of threat, loss, or unworthiness.
• We “feel” based on what our nervous system expects to feel.
• We often confuse old emotional responses for our current reality.

Example: You feel rejected in a team meeting—not because you were, but because an old wound was triggered by tone, posture, or facial expression.

Our Actions

• Overworking, avoiding, pleasing, withdrawing, fixing, controlling.
• All rooted in past adaptive strategies to survive or feel loved.
• These form behavioral pathways—we do what we’ve always done, often unconsciously.

I often wondered why when my children are yelling (particularly at me) it felt so triggering and overwhelming for me. As I looked at my patterns, I discovered a pathway that yelling means "in trouble" or "danger" or "anger," eliciting a pattern of protection such as yelling back louder or shutting down to ignore the overwhelm of it. 

Similarly, I've always been sensitive to and sought the approval of others. Anytime there was a risk of rejection, I would begin thinking of strategies to defend myself, including overworking or over-promising to please the other person. 

As a result, I developed performance patterns of perpetually over-producing, even if it meant sacrificing myself (sleep, identity, doing the things I love, health, or wealth). 

Most Common Patterns

Understanding past neural pathway patterns can illuminate why so many people react, respond, and relate in similar (and often limiting) ways. These patterns are essentially the brain’s well-worn roads—formed through repeated experiences, emotional responses, and survival strategies.

Here are some of the most common patterns people carry (consciously or unconsciously):

🔁 Overachieving to Feel Worthy

Pattern: “If I’m productive, I’m valuable.”

• Rooted in: Conditional love, praise only for success, fear of failure
• Shows up as: Hustle culture, workaholism, inability to rest, burnout
• Nervous system state: Often sympathetic (fight/flight), driven by cortisol and urgency

🚪 Avoidance to Stay Safe

Pattern: “If I ignore it, it’ll go away.”

• Rooted in: Punishment for mistakes, conflict avoidance, unsafe environments
• Shows up as: Procrastination, emotional shutdown, ghosting difficult conversations
• Nervous system state: Freeze or flight mode

🧍♀️ People-Pleasing to Avoid Rejection

Pattern: “If I make everyone happy, I’ll be safe/loved.”

• Rooted in: Unpredictable caregivers, rejection, fear of abandonment
• Shows up as: Overcommitment, resentment, difficulty saying "no"
• Nervous system state: Fawn response (submissive safety strategy)

🧠 Perfectionism to Prevent Criticism

Pattern: “If it’s not perfect, I’ll be judged or rejected.”

• Rooted in: Early shaming, hyper-critical environments
• Shows up as: Paralysis, obsessiveness, burnout from unrealistic standards
• Nervous system state: Chronic tension (fight/freeze blend)

🤐 Silencing Self to Avoid Conflict

Pattern: “My truth is dangerous.”

• Rooted in: Being punished or dismissed for speaking up
• Shows up as: Holding back opinions, playing small, internalizing stress
• Nervous system state: Freeze or fawn, especially in group settings

🔒 Control as a Coping Strategy

Pattern: “If I control everything, I won’t get hurt.”

• Rooted in: Chaos, unpredictability, betrayal
• Shows up as: Micromanaging, rigidity, fear of letting go
• Nervous system state: Fight mode masked as 'leadership' or 'standards'

🤷♀️ Disconnection as a Survival Response

Pattern: “Feeling is dangerous.”

• Rooted in: Overwhelming emotion, trauma, invalidated experience
• Shows up as: Numbing, apathy, chronic fatigue, checked-out presence
• Nervous system state: Deep freeze or dorsal vagal state

Reflect

Did you relate to any of the patterns listed above as your own or ones you've observed in others? If so, pick a few and consider:

• When does this pattern show up for you (or others)? How does it show up - what are you (they) doing or experiencing as a result of the pattern? 
• What experiences in your past (or theirs) might have created this pattern? 
• How far back does this pattern go? To your childhood? To your parents? To your grandparents? 

Where These Patterns Come From

We may be able to recognize the patterns, but where do they come from, what created them to begin with?

Every person will have their own unique set of experiences that have created their unique set of neural pathways. Like a puzzle, our pieces are put together in a very particular way and while it might be similar to other puzzles, no two are the same. 

Our patterns are the combined result of our historic inherited generational experiences, our personal past and present experiences, and our past and present environments or cultures within which we've lived.

Have you ever taken time to reflect on your patterns and where they come from? What is something you find yourself repeatedly experiencing?

Maybe, like me, you've experienced people-pleasing to avoid rejection. Maybe you've experienced overachieving to feel worthy, perfectionism to prevent criticism, or control as a coping strategy.

Our patterns are shaped by a combination of:

• Early childhood experiences (especially attachment and emotional mirroring)
• Family systems and culture of origin
• Societal norms and performance expectations
• Workplace trauma and stress conditioning
• Collective patterns (e.g. urgency, scarcity, perfectionism)

Every significant experience we have contributes to the shaping and reinforcement of our patterns. 

The impact of traumatic experiences (as experienced by the body not the mind) are particularly powerful. Significant research shows how early attachment to caregivers and internal family systems impact how we develop our ways of being (thinking, feeling, behaving) and then get reinforced by experiences we have throughout our lives, particularly in systems that are built to perpetuate them. 

For example, a child might develop a pattern of overachievement to feel worthy because their caregiver withholds love and praise only giving it in exchange for achievement. This pattern is reinforced in our school systems and workplaces by incentivizing achievement with recognition, grades, ratings, and reviews. 

With time, this pattern pushes people to overwork, overcommit, and ultimately become overwhelmed by chronic stress, inevitably leading to burnout. (An epidemic we've been talking about for a few years now!) 

While we all develop unique patterns in our lives, these patterns can also be passed on from generation to generation. Thanks to the work of people like Dr. Rachel Yahuda, Dr. Gabor Mate, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, we know that patterns are passed on through our DNA.

In Dr. Yahuda's 2015 study, she provided concrete evidence that the descendants of Holocaust survivors inherited the effects of the trauma their ancestors endured.

Even without genetically inheriting these patterns, we can see how the way we are raised by our parents would shape our patterns. Parents with a pattern of proving their worth model this to their children, who then develop the same pattern in their lives.

Which brings us finally to our current systems (cultures, workplaces, families, communities) that are responsible for perpetuating the patterns. Without intervention, the patterns become:

• Embedded into our workplace practices and ways of working. They become part of the way we make decisions, solve problems, build relationships, deal with emotions, execute work, and protect our own interests. 
• Integrated into our families' ways of living and how we express emotions, connect with each other, make decisions, raise our children, and live our lives at home. 
• Engrained into our cultures and communities they shape entire social systems impacting how we connect and relate to others, influencing the governments we elect, our economies, education, and healthcare practices. 

What Makes These Patterns Powerful?

Ultimately, the patterns are so intertwined with our lives and world, that the systems we've created are designed to preserve the patterns. 

Even seeing the connections between our systems and our human neural patterns are challenging at first because they are so interrelated. The unconscious nature of these patterns embedded in our bodies makes them difficult to recognize and therefore more difficult to change. 

We can't simply choose to "think different thoughts," "feel less or more," or "behave better" because these patterns are embodied not consciously created. 

Furthermore, we've seen these patterns become predictive. Our systems anticipate what will happen and act accordingly (even if no longer true), further reinforcing the same pattern. 

Just like the age-old question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" We are faced with the challenge of identifying how to influence a system with no beginning or end. 

Our individual body systems and collective cultural systems are perpetually shaping and impacting one another in a never-ending cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. These systems which were meant to protect us might also be the very thing that leads to the ultimate demise of humanity. 

As our past patterns attempt to protect us from threats and predators that no longer exist, we're instead accumulating all this chronic stress. The result: 

• Physical Collapse: we are less healthy, more sleep deprived, and suffering from pain.
• Energetic Depletion: we are more stressed, exhausted, and dysregulated impacting our ability to access our inner intelligence.
• Cognitive Overload: we are making worse decisions and struggling to solve problems.
• Social Disconnection: we are lonelier and more isolated than ever before. 
• Emotional Overwhelm: we are struggling to process the exponential increase of extreme emotions occurring more frequently.
• Intuitive Shut Down: we are less likely to trust our gut and more likely to ignore its messages causing us to disassociate or to behave in ways that are inauthentic and unproductive. 
• Spiritually Suffering: we are increasingly more disconnected from our sense of purpose and our personal creator, God, source, or universal consciousness.

Conclusion

Our past patterns are clearly no longer serving the best interests of humanity. We've created a world that our bodies were not designed for, therefore, our only choice is to re-wire ourselves to better survive within it. 

“Until we see the unseen, it will keep running the show.”

We must acknowledge individually and collectively, the degree to which our current lived experience is truly shaped by unconscious past patterns and the systems that preserve them. 

If we want to expand capacity, lead wisely, or transform how we work or live—we must surface and rewire these unconscious patterns. Not just in individuals, but in teams, cultures, and systems.

It's not a question of: "Should we focus on changing the culture or the people within it?" but rather, "How will we simultaneously shift our systems and ourselves to bring the change we need to ensure a better future for humanity?"

Ready to discover how to get started transforming yourself and our systems to improve the experience for all of humanity? 

I'm confident you are! Stay tuned here, more to come. 

Or reach out to get started now—transforming yourself, your team, family, or workplace. Don't wait or hesitate, every second is one we might have spent on cultivating more capacity and co-creating a better future.