Episode 5: Why Trauma Repeats — The Brain’s Loyalty to Familiarity

Written by Stephanie Underwood RSW

Welcome back to Episode 5 of The Relational Safety Podcast. And trust me, this is an episode that you definitely want to tune in to. It’s a big one.

In the last episode, we talked about how repeated disruptions in relational safety lead to the development of attachment strategies and Early Maladaptive Schemas.

Those strategies helped the nervous system survive environments that felt unpredictable, critical, inconsistent, or emotionally unavailable.

But today we’re going to explore something that confuses a lot of people. If those adaptations were designed for childhood survival… why do they continue to show up in adulthood?

Why, and how, do people who experienced abandonment often find themselves in relationships where they feel abandoned again?

Why do people who experienced emotional deprivation repeatedly end up with emotionally unavailable partners?

Why do the same relational patterns seem to replay themselves over and over again?

The answer lies in something the brain values more than happiness.

Familiarity.

Remember that the brain is not designed to make you happy. It is designed to keep you alive. And from the brain’s perspective, familiarity increases survival probability. If something has happened before and you survived it, your brain treats that pattern as known territory. Known territory feels safer than the unknown, even if that known territory is painful.

But now, how exactly does the brain get us to repeat specific patterns? How does our brain know, upon meeting someone, that this particular person is going to end up being emotionally unavailable?

Let’s break this down.

When a child repeatedly experiences relational instability, criticism, neglect, or unpredictability, the nervous system doesn’t just form a survival strategy. We go through these experiences and our brain creates meaning from those particular experiences, because we human beings are meaning-making organisms.

Now, the meaning that we create from these experiences becomes what we call Early Maladaptive Schemas. Schemas are mental frameworks that help the brain interpret the world quickly.

They answer questions like:

What should I expect from people?

What should I expect from relationships?

What should I expect from myself?

Once a schema forms, the brain begins filtering new experiences through that framework. This is where something called schema confirmation comes in. Schema confirmation is the brain’s tendency to interpret new experiences in ways that reinforce existing beliefs.

Now, this is the mind-blowing part.

Let’s say someone develops an Abandonment Schema in childhood. The brain now has a template as to how a person should perceive relationships, which would be through a lens of abandonment. Their nervous system expects people to leave.

Now imagine their partner takes longer than usual to respond to a message. From the outside, this is a neutral event. But the schema interprets it through the lens of abandonment. The nervous system reacts as if a familiar threat pattern is emerging. The person may become anxious, hypervigilant, or distressed.

But it goes even deeper than interpretation. Schemas don’t just filter information. They also influence behavior. And there’s a reason for that.

Someone with an abandonment schema might seek reassurance repeatedly. They might test the relationship. They might become hyper-attuned to signs of distance.

Now let’s say that their partner becomes overwhelmed by the reassurance-seeking and they decide to end the relationship. What is the person going to think? What is the belief that is going to be reinforced?

“People leave.” or “I’m always abandoned.”

This is one of the reasons trauma can feel so persistent. The brain isn’t intentionally recreating pain. It’s attempting to navigate the world using the map it built during early development. And that map was designed for survival in a specific relational environment.

The brain is basically saying, “Hey, we developed this template in childhood and I need you to make sure that you keep walking on that familiar, specific path. So I’m going to make sure that we reinforce these maladaptive schemas from childhood because I need you to keep repeating the same pattern over and over again.”

Now, I know that sounds a little harsh for the brain to do that to us. But ultimately, it’s trying to do what it needs to do, which is to keep us alive. Which is not a bad thing, you know.

Let’s talk about another example.

Imagine someone who grew up with emotionally unavailable caregivers. Both parents were emotionally unavailable and they essentially develop the Emotional Deprivation schema.

Their nervous system learned that closeness often came with emotional distance. When they enter adulthood, emotionally unavailable partners may feel strangely familiar.

Not comfortable, necessarily. But recognizable.

Predictable. This is why people sometimes say things like: “I don’t know why I keep attracting the same type of partner.”

We can see how someone who keeps getting into relationships with emotionally unavailable partners might feel emotionally deprived. And therefore the Emotional Deprivation schema is reinforced every time the person finds themselves in a relationship with an emotionally unavailable partner. And therefore the stronger the belief, the stronger the template, and that is how the brain gets us to keep moving down the path of the familiar.

And let me tell you something important, because this applies to all 18 of the maladaptive schemas.

If you take a closer look at your schemas, you will be able to see exactly how those schemas are constantly being reinforced in your life. And I don’t mean once in a while. You make decisions based on your schemas on a daily basis. And you find yourself in relationships and situations that are constantly reinforcing your schemas.

For example, if you have a distrust schema, you will continuously encounter individuals who are going to reinforce that schema. So you’re going to find yourself in relationships or partnerships with people who are going to disappoint you. Why? Because the brain wants to reinforce the belief that you can’t trust others. Because that’s part of the template and that’s the path that we need to stick to.

Now here’s where safety comes back into the conversation.

Schemas persist because the nervous system continues to calculate relational threat using outdated data.

The safety system is operating on old information from your childhood experiences, which was created through meaning and repetition. The brain believes it is still navigating the same environment it encountered earlier in life.

So it activates the same strategies. The same interpretations. The same defenses. This is one of the reasons relational trauma can be so difficult to shift.

In my Relational Safety Framework, change occurs when the nervous system receives repeated experiences that contradict its original safety conclusions.

Not once. Not twice. Repeatedly.

Over time, those experiences begin to introduce prediction error. The brain starts to notice something different. The outcome it expected did not occur. The abandonment did not happen. The criticism did not arrive. Each time that happens, the safety calculation begins to shift slightly.

And with enough repetition, and a new updated meaning, the nervous system gradually updates its model of what connection means.

But this process takes time. Because the brain does not abandon old survival maps easily. Those maps once kept you alive. You can see why the brain might be a little bit reluctant to change the very template that has kept you alive for so many years.

So in the next episode, we’re going to explore what actually changes the safety calculation. What kinds of relational experiences create prediction error. And why resolving relational trauma requires more than simply understanding the pattern.

Because awareness is the beginning of change. But safety is what allows the nervous system to believe that change is possible.

I’ll see you in Episode 6.

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The Relational Safety Podcast

Episode 5