You can be confident almost everywhere in your life and become strangely unsure of yourself around one particular person.
You can make decisions easily at work and find yourself waiting for permission when you visit your family. You can speak openly with friends and become careful around a parent. You can feel secure in most relationships and suddenly become preoccupied with rejection when you become deeply attached to someone.
It can feel as though an older version of you has returned.
Sometimes this happens when you’re stressed or exhausted and old responses become easier to fall back on. But sometimes nothing is particularly wrong. The difference is simply who you are with or where you are.
Patterns are not always learned as general rules that operate everywhere. They are often learned in particular situations.
You may have learned to become quiet when one person was angry. To monitor another person’s mood. To avoid disagreeing with someone who reacted badly to disagreement. To become especially helpful around someone whose approval mattered.
Repeat those responses often enough in the same kinds of situations and the situation itself can start bringing them back.
We recognize this in ordinary life. You behave differently when you walk into a classroom than when you walk into a friend’s house. You lower your voice in a library. You may become more formal when speaking to someone in authority. You don’t have to stop and decide to do these things. The setting itself helps call up the response.
Longstanding emotional patterns can work the same way.
A particular tone of voice can make you cautious. Someone’s disappointment can make you start explaining yourself. Being around your family can make you feel younger than you do anywhere else. Becoming close to someone can bring back fears that barely appear in casual relationships.
This doesn’t mean you have gone backward. The pattern may never have operated equally in every part of your life.
Some patterns show up mainly in intimate relationships. Others appear around authority, conflict, dependence, criticism, uncertainty, or responsibility for someone else. They can remain quiet until the kind of situation that calls for them appears.
This is why a person can be assertive and still become accommodating around certain people. They can trust themselves in most of their life and become uncertain in a particular relationship. They can feel secure alone and become frightened of abandonment when someone becomes important to them.
Returning to an old environment can make this especially obvious. Someone who has lived independently for decades may visit their family and almost immediately become quieter, more defensive, more responsible, more dependent, or more easily irritated than they are anywhere else.
The environment doesn’t have to recreate the past exactly. It only has to contain enough of what became associated with the old response.
The same thing can happen with new people. Someone doesn’t have to resemble a person from your past in every way. A certain kind of distance, criticism, unpredictability, authority, or closeness can be enough.
That is why a pattern can seem to disappear and then suddenly return in very specific circumstances.
It wasn’t necessarily gone. You were somewhere it wasn’t being called up.