The Patterns We Learned Relational Workbook

The Patterns We Learned

Testing people before you trust them. Over-functioning until you’re exhausted. Leaving before anyone gets the chance to leave you. Shutting down at the first sign of conflict.

If you’re an adult adoptee, these patterns probably aren’t random. They’re survival strategies your instincts built a long time ago, when they actually worked for the situation you were in. The problem isn’t that you learned them. The problem is they don’t turn off automatically just because your circumstances changed.

Written by a marriage and family therapist with a trauma specialization who’s also an adoptee, this self-guided workbook walks through five of the most common relational patterns adoptees carry into adulthood, with reflection prompts that help you trace each one back to where it started, and decide what to do with it now.

What’s inside:

Where these patterns come from, and why they’re not a character flaw · testing people before you trust them · fawning and over-functioning · preemptive distance and leaving first · difficulty with conflict · a section for naming what you actually need, instead of managing everyone else’s · a letter-writing exercise to close things out with the version of you who learned all this first.

This isn’t about blaming your younger self for surviving the only way you knew how. It’s about noticing the pattern clearly enough that you get to choose differently, if you want to.

Self-guided workbook · instant PDF download