Why Do I Keep Doing This? by Kati Morton Unlearn the Habits Keeping You Stuck and Unhappy
What's it about?
Why Do I Keep Doing This? (2025) explores how childhood survival strategies around control keep adults trapped in toxic cycles of approval-seeking and people-pleasing. It unveils how behaviors that were once protective disconnect people from their authentic selves and block genuine connection, and shows how you can begin to break free from your unconscious patterns.
You’ve done it again.Said yes when you meant no.Apologized for no reason.Pushed yourself until you burned out or chosen someone who hurts you in ways that feel hauntingly familiar.
These patterns aren’t accidents.They aren’t character flaws or signs that you’re broken.They’re sophisticated survival strategies your younger self developed when the world felt chaotic and unsafe.The same behaviors that once protected you now keep you trapped in cycles that make you miserable. These patterns persist because they run deeper than conscious choice.They live in your nervous system, triggering automatically before you can even think.
But there is another way.This lesson dives deep into where our patterns come from, because knowing what they’re really trying to accomplish changes everything.Freedom doesn’t come from controlling your circumstances.It comes from finally being at home in your own skin.
Your earliest relationships teach you how love works, long before you even have words to describe what you are learning.As an infant and young child, the people caring for you show you what connection looks like, what safety feels like, and what you need to do to receive affection.These lessons sink in deep, becoming the template you carry into every relationship that follows.The tricky part is that this blueprint forms whether your childhood was nurturing or neglectful, stable or chaotic.
Your brain absorbs the patterns it observes and accepts them as normal.If love came with conditions, you learned that acceptance must be earned.If care arrived unpredictably, you learned to stay alert for signs of abandonment.If expressing needs led to punishment or rejection, you learned that taking up space – by being you – was dangerous.Here’s where it gets complicated.As an adult, you might find yourself drawn to people and situations that recreate these early dynamics.
Not because you enjoyed your childhood or think those patterns were healthy, but because they are familiar.Familiar feels safe, even when familiar includes pain.Your nervous system recognizes the emotional landscape.You know the rules of this game, even if the rules hurt.Consider someone who grew up never quite knowing which version of a parent would come through the door each evening.Sometimes warm and engaged, sometimes distant and critical, with no clear pattern to predict the shifts.
That child learned to read tiny signals, to stay small and accommodating, to never fully relax. Decades later, this same person keeps choosing romantic partners who blow hot and cold.The uncertainty feels awful, but it also feels like home.When someone offers consistent kindness, it registers as strange, even suspicious.The nervous system keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop because steadiness was never part of the original blueprint.And that blueprint runs deep.
It shows up in friendships, work relationships, and how you treat yourself.So how can you begin to break free from it?Begin with simple observation.Notice the types of people you’re drawn to and the types of relationships that keep appearing in your life.
Notice when interactions feel comfortable versus uncomfortable, and ask yourself whether that comfort comes from health or from familiarity. Write down what you observe without trying to fix anything yet.Recognition always comes before change.It’s also impossible to rewrite a blueprint until you understand what the original design was trying to protect you from.
Perfectionism looks like ambition from the outside.It shows up as drive, as excellence, as someone who cares about quality.But underneath, perfectionism is a sophisticated form of control.It operates on a simple premise: if you can just be good enough, achieve enough, produce enough, then you will finally earn the love and recognition you need.
The roots of this pattern often trace back to conditional attention in childhood.Some children learn early that their value fluctuates based on their performance.A good report card brings warmth and celebration.A lost game or mediocre test score brings distance or disappointment.The child’s brain makes a logical connection: achievement equals love.The equation feels reliable in a world that isn’t: if you control your output, you can control whether people see you as worthy.
The problem is that this equation never balances.No amount of achievement fills the underlying need because the need was never really about accomplishment.It was always about unconditional acceptance, about being valued for existing rather than for producing.But that realization often comes much later, after years of chasing the next promotion, the next award, the next proof of your worth.This is how it went for Anton, who grew up with parents constantly traveling for their demanding careers.Their absence left him lonely, but when he brought home academic honors they took him to his favorite restaurant to celebrate.
For those few hours, he had their complete focus.Those dinners became his most treasured memories, rare moments when he felt truly seen and valued.The attention was genuine and the love was real, but another message became clear: you are valuable when you achieve.Decades later, he is a partner at a prestigious firm, working seventy-hour weeks and struggling with burnout.He can’t shake the feeling that rest must be earned.When colleagues praise him, he feels a brief surge of relief.
When a project is just good and not spectacular, he feels like a fraud.His self-worth is forever tied to external validation.The exhaustion is overwhelming.Perfectionism demands constant vigilance.You can’t rest because relaxing means losing control of the conditions that make you acceptable.Breaking this pattern starts with investigating your beliefs about worth.
Sit down with a journal and consider this question: What would it look like to deserve rest?Then write whatever comes up, even if the answer is that you don’t know.Notice where you learned that rest needs justification.Notice whose voice is speaking when you push yourself past exhaustion.
Notice what you are really chasing when you chase perfection.The goal isn’t to abandon your standards, but to separate your inherent worth from your productivity.You were valuable before you achieved anything.That truth exists whether you believe it yet or not.
Some people apologize for everything.For being in the way.For asking questions.For needing time, or space, or help.
These apologies spill out automatically, often before the person even registers what they’re saying.This is people-pleasing at its most obvious.It operates as preemptive control, a way of managing other people’s potential reactions before those reactions even occur.The logic goes like this: if you make yourself smaller, softer, less demanding, then you reduce the risk of rejection or anger.If you apologize first, you control the narrative.You beat others to the punch.
The pattern usually begins in childhood environments where taking up space felt dangerous.Maybe expressing your needs led to explosive anger or cold withdrawal.Maybe a parent’s mood was so fragile that you learned to tiptoe, to apologize for normal child behavior, or shrink your presence to avoid triggering instability.Your child’s brain learned a survival skill: minimize yourself and you minimize harm.Meet Amara, who grew up in a household where her mother’s anxiety dominated every interaction.Any request or expression of need would send her mother into a spiral of worry and complaint.
About how hard everything was, or how much she already had to handle.Amara learned to apologize before asking for anything and to frame her needs as small, unimportant.She became an expert at reading the emotional temperature of a room and adjusting her presence accordingly.As an adult Amara apologizes constantly.She says sorry when someone bumps into her.She apologizes for emails that are perfectly reasonable.
Her friends joke about her apology reflex, but underneath the jokes she feels exhausted.She knows the behavior is excessive.She hates how much space she gives away.But stopping feels impossible. This is what makes people-pleasing so stubborn.It runs deeper than conscious choice.
Your nervous system triggers the response automatically because once upon a time, making yourself small kept you safe.To break the pattern, start very small.Pick one situation where you notice yourself apologizing when you have nothing to be sorry for.Maybe it’s saying sorry when you ask a coworker a legitimate question.Or apologizing for taking up space on public transit.Choose something minor, something that feels manageable.
Then try this: before you apologize, pause.Ask yourself what you’re actually sorry for.If you can’t name something specific, don’t say it.It will feel uncomfortable.You might fail for weeks or months.That’s normal.
You’re working against years of conditioning.The point is not to stop apologizing when you’ve genuinely hurt someone or made a mistake.It is to stop using automatic apologies as a way of controlling how others perceive you.
Asking for what you need can feel terrifying.Not just uncomfortable or awkward, but genuinely frightening at a visceral level.Your heart races and your throat tightens.Your mind floods with reasons why your needs are too much, or why voicing them will end in rejection.
This fear keeps many people trapped in a painful loop.They want connection and support.They want their relationships to feel reciprocal and nourishing.But the act of actually asking feels like standing at the edge of a cliff. So they stay silent.Or they hint, hoping that others will notice and offer without being asked.
When that doesn’t happen, they feel hurt and resentful while simultaneously believing they have no right to those feelings.Where does this terror come from?Often from early experiences where asking for needs was met with punishment, mockery, or abandonment.Maybe you asked for comfort and got told you were needy.Maybe you expressed vulnerability and it was used against you later.Maybe the people around you were so overwhelmed by their own struggles that your needs felt like an unbearable burden.
Your child brain absorbed a devastating lesson: your needs make you unlovable.And this fear maintains control long past childhood.It spins out scenarios around expressing what you need that feel so catastrophic you’ll do anything to avoid them.Including staying stuck in unfulfilling or even toxic patterns.But here’s a counterintuitive strategy: go directly into the fear.Sit down and deliberately imagine your worst-case scenario in detail.
What specifically are you afraid will happen if you ask for what you need?Picture it fully.Let yourself feel the discomfort.What you’ll discover is that once you’ve actually thought through the worst possibility, it loses some of its power over you.You’ve faced it.You’ve survived imagining it.
The fear can’t ambush you anymore because you’ve already been there.With this clarity, you can now ask yourself different questions.How likely is this worst case scenario?Examine the evidence you have, like how this person usually responds to vulnerability.
You can even plan for what you might do if the worst really does happen.Having a plan, even for the catastrophic scenario, can give you back a sense of agency.Fear wants you to avoid and distract, and tries to stay vague and overwhelming.When you pin fear down and examine it directly, you often find it’s less insurmountable than it felt when it was just a shapeless dread.
All of these control patterns – perfectionism, people-pleasing, choosing familiar pain, silencing your needs, shrinking yourself – share a common thread.They keep you focused outward.They keep you scanning for other people’s cues about who you should be or what you should want.This keeps your sense of self dependent on external validation.
This is the steepest cost of living in control mode.You lose touch with who you actually are beneath all the strategies.Your real preferences get buried under what you think will make you acceptable.Your authentic voice gets drowned out by the voice that tells you to be smaller, or more ambitious, or less demanding.You spend so much energy managing how others perceive you that you forget to notice how you perceive yourself.The work of breaking these patterns is not really about stopping specific behaviors.
It’s about developing an internal anchor.About learning to come home to yourself instead of seeking home in other people’s approval.This means pondering things you may have spent years avoiding.What you actually want, separate from what you think you should want.What you need, not what seems reasonable to need.What feels true for you, regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else.
You might feel anxious just thinking about this.That’s normal when you’ve spent decades prioritizing everyone else’s reality over your own.Start small.Notice moments when you automatically defer to someone else’s preference without checking in with yourself first.Notice when you say yes before you’ve even considered whether you mean it.Notice when you “perform” a version of yourself, rather than actually being yourself.
Just notice.You don’t have to change anything yet.Then start experimenting with tiny acts of self-knowledge.Spend an evening doing exactly what appeals to you instead of being productive.Say no to an invitation without offering three explanations.These exercises may feel trivial, but they’re revolutionary when you’ve been living on autopilot.
What you’re building is a relationship with yourself.You’re learning to trust your own judgment, to value your own experience, and to believe that your internal landscape matters as much as anyone else’s.You’re learning that you don’t need to control external circumstances to feel secure.Security comes from knowing yourself and trusting that you can handle whatever comes.Being at home in your own skin takes practice.You’ve spent years learning to be anywhere but there.
But every small moment of checking in with yourself, every choice made from genuine preference rather than fear, every time you let yourself be seen without armor – these moments accumulate.They build a foundation underneath you that external circumstances can’t shake.That’s freedom.Not controlling everything around you, but being grounded enough in yourself that you don’t need to.In this lesson to Why Do I Keep Doing This?
by Kati Morton, you’ve learned that your earliest relationships created a blueprint for how love works, and you’ve been following it ever since.If love came with conditions, you learned to earn it through achievement.If care was unpredictable, you learned to stay small and apologetic.These patterns feel comfortable because they’re familiar, even when they make you miserable.
Breaking free means understanding what the original blueprint was protecting you from, then learning to give up control by coming home to yourself, bit by bit.
Why Do I Keep Doing This? (2025) explores how childhood survival strategies around control keep adults trapped in toxic cycles of approval-seeking and people-pleasing. It unveils how behaviors that were once protective disconnect people from their authentic selves and block genuine connection, and shows how you can begin to break free from your unconscious patterns.
You’ve done it again.Said yes when you meant no.Apologized for no reason.Pushed yourself until you burned out or chosen someone who hurts you in ways that feel hauntingly familiar.
These patterns aren’t accidents.They aren’t character flaws or signs that you’re broken.They’re sophisticated survival strategies your younger self developed when the world felt chaotic and unsafe.The same behaviors that once protected you now keep you trapped in cycles that make you miserable. These patterns persist because they run deeper than conscious choice.They live in your nervous system, triggering automatically before you can even think.
But there is another way.This lesson dives deep into where our patterns come from, because knowing what they’re really trying to accomplish changes everything.Freedom doesn’t come from controlling your circumstances.It comes from finally being at home in your own skin.
Your earliest relationships teach you how love works, long before you even have words to describe what you are learning.As an infant and young child, the people caring for you show you what connection looks like, what safety feels like, and what you need to do to receive affection.These lessons sink in deep, becoming the template you carry into every relationship that follows.The tricky part is that this blueprint forms whether your childhood was nurturing or neglectful, stable or chaotic.
Your brain absorbs the patterns it observes and accepts them as normal.If love came with conditions, you learned that acceptance must be earned.If care arrived unpredictably, you learned to stay alert for signs of abandonment.If expressing needs led to punishment or rejection, you learned that taking up space – by being you – was dangerous.Here’s where it gets complicated.As an adult, you might find yourself drawn to people and situations that recreate these early dynamics.
Not because you enjoyed your childhood or think those patterns were healthy, but because they are familiar.Familiar feels safe, even when familiar includes pain.Your nervous system recognizes the emotional landscape.You know the rules of this game, even if the rules hurt.Consider someone who grew up never quite knowing which version of a parent would come through the door each evening.Sometimes warm and engaged, sometimes distant and critical, with no clear pattern to predict the shifts.
That child learned to read tiny signals, to stay small and accommodating, to never fully relax. Decades later, this same person keeps choosing romantic partners who blow hot and cold.The uncertainty feels awful, but it also feels like home.When someone offers consistent kindness, it registers as strange, even suspicious.The nervous system keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop because steadiness was never part of the original blueprint.And that blueprint runs deep.
It shows up in friendships, work relationships, and how you treat yourself.So how can you begin to break free from it?Begin with simple observation.Notice the types of people you’re drawn to and the types of relationships that keep appearing in your life.
Notice when interactions feel comfortable versus uncomfortable, and ask yourself whether that comfort comes from health or from familiarity. Write down what you observe without trying to fix anything yet.Recognition always comes before change.It’s also impossible to rewrite a blueprint until you understand what the original design was trying to protect you from.
Perfectionism looks like ambition from the outside.It shows up as drive, as excellence, as someone who cares about quality.But underneath, perfectionism is a sophisticated form of control.It operates on a simple premise: if you can just be good enough, achieve enough, produce enough, then you will finally earn the love and recognition you need.
The roots of this pattern often trace back to conditional attention in childhood.Some children learn early that their value fluctuates based on their performance.A good report card brings warmth and celebration.A lost game or mediocre test score brings distance or disappointment.The child’s brain makes a logical connection: achievement equals love.The equation feels reliable in a world that isn’t: if you control your output, you can control whether people see you as worthy.
The problem is that this equation never balances.No amount of achievement fills the underlying need because the need was never really about accomplishment.It was always about unconditional acceptance, about being valued for existing rather than for producing.But that realization often comes much later, after years of chasing the next promotion, the next award, the next proof of your worth.This is how it went for Anton, who grew up with parents constantly traveling for their demanding careers.Their absence left him lonely, but when he brought home academic honors they took him to his favorite restaurant to celebrate.
For those few hours, he had their complete focus.Those dinners became his most treasured memories, rare moments when he felt truly seen and valued.The attention was genuine and the love was real, but another message became clear: you are valuable when you achieve.Decades later, he is a partner at a prestigious firm, working seventy-hour weeks and struggling with burnout.He can’t shake the feeling that rest must be earned.When colleagues praise him, he feels a brief surge of relief.
When a project is just good and not spectacular, he feels like a fraud.His self-worth is forever tied to external validation.The exhaustion is overwhelming.Perfectionism demands constant vigilance.You can’t rest because relaxing means losing control of the conditions that make you acceptable.Breaking this pattern starts with investigating your beliefs about worth.
Sit down with a journal and consider this question: What would it look like to deserve rest?Then write whatever comes up, even if the answer is that you don’t know.Notice where you learned that rest needs justification.Notice whose voice is speaking when you push yourself past exhaustion.
Notice what you are really chasing when you chase perfection.The goal isn’t to abandon your standards, but to separate your inherent worth from your productivity.You were valuable before you achieved anything.That truth exists whether you believe it yet or not.
Some people apologize for everything.For being in the way.For asking questions.For needing time, or space, or help.
These apologies spill out automatically, often before the person even registers what they’re saying.This is people-pleasing at its most obvious.It operates as preemptive control, a way of managing other people’s potential reactions before those reactions even occur.The logic goes like this: if you make yourself smaller, softer, less demanding, then you reduce the risk of rejection or anger.If you apologize first, you control the narrative.You beat others to the punch.
The pattern usually begins in childhood environments where taking up space felt dangerous.Maybe expressing your needs led to explosive anger or cold withdrawal.Maybe a parent’s mood was so fragile that you learned to tiptoe, to apologize for normal child behavior, or shrink your presence to avoid triggering instability.Your child’s brain learned a survival skill: minimize yourself and you minimize harm.Meet Amara, who grew up in a household where her mother’s anxiety dominated every interaction.Any request or expression of need would send her mother into a spiral of worry and complaint.
About how hard everything was, or how much she already had to handle.Amara learned to apologize before asking for anything and to frame her needs as small, unimportant.She became an expert at reading the emotional temperature of a room and adjusting her presence accordingly.As an adult Amara apologizes constantly.She says sorry when someone bumps into her.She apologizes for emails that are perfectly reasonable.
Her friends joke about her apology reflex, but underneath the jokes she feels exhausted.She knows the behavior is excessive.She hates how much space she gives away.But stopping feels impossible. This is what makes people-pleasing so stubborn.It runs deeper than conscious choice.
Your nervous system triggers the response automatically because once upon a time, making yourself small kept you safe.To break the pattern, start very small.Pick one situation where you notice yourself apologizing when you have nothing to be sorry for.Maybe it’s saying sorry when you ask a coworker a legitimate question.Or apologizing for taking up space on public transit.Choose something minor, something that feels manageable.
Then try this: before you apologize, pause.Ask yourself what you’re actually sorry for.If you can’t name something specific, don’t say it.It will feel uncomfortable.You might fail for weeks or months.That’s normal.
You’re working against years of conditioning.The point is not to stop apologizing when you’ve genuinely hurt someone or made a mistake.It is to stop using automatic apologies as a way of controlling how others perceive you.
Asking for what you need can feel terrifying.Not just uncomfortable or awkward, but genuinely frightening at a visceral level.Your heart races and your throat tightens.Your mind floods with reasons why your needs are too much, or why voicing them will end in rejection.
This fear keeps many people trapped in a painful loop.They want connection and support.They want their relationships to feel reciprocal and nourishing.But the act of actually asking feels like standing at the edge of a cliff. So they stay silent.Or they hint, hoping that others will notice and offer without being asked.
When that doesn’t happen, they feel hurt and resentful while simultaneously believing they have no right to those feelings.Where does this terror come from?Often from early experiences where asking for needs was met with punishment, mockery, or abandonment.Maybe you asked for comfort and got told you were needy.Maybe you expressed vulnerability and it was used against you later.Maybe the people around you were so overwhelmed by their own struggles that your needs felt like an unbearable burden.
Your child brain absorbed a devastating lesson: your needs make you unlovable.And this fear maintains control long past childhood.It spins out scenarios around expressing what you need that feel so catastrophic you’ll do anything to avoid them.Including staying stuck in unfulfilling or even toxic patterns.But here’s a counterintuitive strategy: go directly into the fear.Sit down and deliberately imagine your worst-case scenario in detail.
What specifically are you afraid will happen if you ask for what you need?Picture it fully.Let yourself feel the discomfort.What you’ll discover is that once you’ve actually thought through the worst possibility, it loses some of its power over you.You’ve faced it.You’ve survived imagining it.
The fear can’t ambush you anymore because you’ve already been there.With this clarity, you can now ask yourself different questions.How likely is this worst case scenario?Examine the evidence you have, like how this person usually responds to vulnerability.
You can even plan for what you might do if the worst really does happen.Having a plan, even for the catastrophic scenario, can give you back a sense of agency.Fear wants you to avoid and distract, and tries to stay vague and overwhelming.When you pin fear down and examine it directly, you often find it’s less insurmountable than it felt when it was just a shapeless dread.
All of these control patterns – perfectionism, people-pleasing, choosing familiar pain, silencing your needs, shrinking yourself – share a common thread.They keep you focused outward.They keep you scanning for other people’s cues about who you should be or what you should want.This keeps your sense of self dependent on external validation.
This is the steepest cost of living in control mode.You lose touch with who you actually are beneath all the strategies.Your real preferences get buried under what you think will make you acceptable.Your authentic voice gets drowned out by the voice that tells you to be smaller, or more ambitious, or less demanding.You spend so much energy managing how others perceive you that you forget to notice how you perceive yourself.The work of breaking these patterns is not really about stopping specific behaviors.
It’s about developing an internal anchor.About learning to come home to yourself instead of seeking home in other people’s approval.This means pondering things you may have spent years avoiding.What you actually want, separate from what you think you should want.What you need, not what seems reasonable to need.What feels true for you, regardless of whether it makes sense to anyone else.
You might feel anxious just thinking about this.That’s normal when you’ve spent decades prioritizing everyone else’s reality over your own.Start small.Notice moments when you automatically defer to someone else’s preference without checking in with yourself first.Notice when you say yes before you’ve even considered whether you mean it.Notice when you “perform” a version of yourself, rather than actually being yourself.
Just notice.You don’t have to change anything yet.Then start experimenting with tiny acts of self-knowledge.Spend an evening doing exactly what appeals to you instead of being productive.Say no to an invitation without offering three explanations.These exercises may feel trivial, but they’re revolutionary when you’ve been living on autopilot.
What you’re building is a relationship with yourself.You’re learning to trust your own judgment, to value your own experience, and to believe that your internal landscape matters as much as anyone else’s.You’re learning that you don’t need to control external circumstances to feel secure.Security comes from knowing yourself and trusting that you can handle whatever comes.Being at home in your own skin takes practice.You’ve spent years learning to be anywhere but there.
But every small moment of checking in with yourself, every choice made from genuine preference rather than fear, every time you let yourself be seen without armor – these moments accumulate.They build a foundation underneath you that external circumstances can’t shake.That’s freedom.Not controlling everything around you, but being grounded enough in yourself that you don’t need to.In this lesson to Why Do I Keep Doing This?
by Kati Morton, you’ve learned that your earliest relationships created a blueprint for how love works, and you’ve been following it ever since.If love came with conditions, you learned to earn it through achievement.If care was unpredictable, you learned to stay small and apologetic.These patterns feel comfortable because they’re familiar, even when they make you miserable.
Breaking free means understanding what the original blueprint was protecting you from, then learning to give up control by coming home to yourself, bit by bit.
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