Ep 44 | The Relationship Templates You Keep Repeating

If your relationships keep replaying the same conflict, rejection, or emotional distance, it might not be a “bad picker” problem. It might be a template your brain and nervous system learned long before you had words for it.

This episode explores how our childhood experiences shape our relational templates and how understanding them through a biblical lens can lead to freedom and healing.

In this episode you'll learn:

• How early childhood experiences  can create lifelong templates
• The role of the brain in learning and repeating relationship behaviors
• Common templates formed from childhood trauma or environments (e.g., unresolved conflict, neglect)
• The impact of trauma on our relationship with God and ourselves
• The power of Scripture in transforming templates and beliefs
• Personal testimony on learning developing new templates for a Godly marriage

Resources: 

• Enroll in Biblical Boundaries for Love, Life & Marriage Course
• Download the YouVersion Bible App
• DM me on Instagram @jemeselachel with “BOUNDARIES” to get the course link and start a convo about the support you need to build healthy templates for love, life, and marriage after trauma
  
  

Show notes: https://anewcreationpodcast.com/breaking-free-from-relationship-patterns/

Subscribe, share this with a friend who feels stuck, and leave a review so more women can find healing and freedom.

💁🏾‍♀️NEW HERE?  Jemese is a Christian trauma therapist, women's mentor and Spirit-filled host of A New Creation Podcast. Through Christ-centered conversations and inspiring testimonies, Jemese guides women through trauma healing, deeper faith, and freedom in Jesus Christ so they can form better relationships with God, self and others. 

🎙 Do you want to  share your testimony?   Tap here to apply to be our next guest.

CONNECT WITH JEMESE

Instagram: @jemeselachel
Facebook: fb.com/graceabidesco
Counseling: graceabides.co
Coaching + Mentorship: jemeselachel.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not therapy, counseling, or medical advice, and no therapist-client relationship is formed by listening. If you are experiencing mental health, medical, or spiritual concerns, please seek support from a licensed professional or appropriate local services.

Transcript

Why The Same Pain Repeats

SPEAKER_00 0:00

If someone recorded your relationships over the last five to ten years, would they all tell the same story? Would you notice the same patterns, the same arguments, the same cycles, maybe even the same heartbreaks, the same fears? And maybe you found yourself asking, Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep ending up here? I know what I should do, but I keep reacting the same way. What if the answer isn't that something's the matter with you? What if you have simply been living from patterns, patterns that were formed long before you even had language to describe them? We're going to talk about where those patterns come from, why they keep showing up in your relationships, even though you don't want to keep repeating this, and most importantly, how Jesus can help you break the cycle for good.

Welcome And Opening Prayer

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Hey, welcome back to a new creation podcast with Jamise Michelle. I'm a Christian trauma therapist pointing you toward victory in Christ, one Jesus story at a time. You're in the right place if you're done feeling stuck and you're ready to form better relationships with God, yourself, and others. So pull up a seat to the table, girlfriend. You belong here. Let's go. Welcome back to a new creation podcast with Jamise Lachell. That is me, my Christian trauma therapist and mentor for a woman. Before we get into this episode, let's pray. Gracious and heavenly Father, Lord, I just praise your name. I thank you. I thank you for my listener today. I thank you for sending this person to come and hear what you have to say, Father. Touch my lips that I speak what you would have me to speak to the listener's heart. Touch my ears that I can hear what the Spirit is saying. Touch the listener's ears that she can hear what you're saying, Lord. And I just want to thank you for being such a very real and such a very present help. I want to ask you to surround this time and space right now that we have created, that you have created for us. I ask that you would bring healing where healing is needed. I ask that you would bring clarity where there has been confusion. And I ask that you would just open us up into understanding the ways that you're inviting us into freedom today. In the mighty and the maculous, in the powerful name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

What A Relationship Template Is

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Alright, so I've got something very important to share with you today. Today, we're gonna talk about what I call templates, and what is that? A template is simply a pattern or a story that your brain learned from what you repeatedly experienced. Think of it like a blueprint. Your brain has been asking questions your entire life. How does love work? How does marriage work? How do people handle conflict? What does safety look like? What does it feel like to get my needs met? And based on what you have experienced, your brain and your nervous system begin creating answers. These answers become your templates, they become the things that you now repattern your life after. Here's why that matters: because much of what we tolerate, expect, and repeat comes from these templates. And many of them begin forming when we are young. Science says that maybe ages zero to five are our formative years. This is a time when your brain is constantly absorbing information from what you see, what you learned, what you experience, what is happening around you in your world. Personally, I believe this continues beyond childhood because we are always learning, we are always adapting throughout life. Think of your brain like a supercomputer that is constantly taking in information based on what you're living through, and it's organizing that information. Over time, your brain and your nervous system begin creating patterns for things like marriage, trust, safety, conflict, relationships, etc. In simple terms, I like to think of templates like this: what you live becomes what you learn. And what you learn becomes what you repeat. Again, remembering we're talking about your formative years here, so I'll say that again. What you lived in those early formative years becomes what you learned. And what you learned in those early formative years becomes the template that you repeat.

Real Life Templates In Marriage

SPEAKER_00 4:47

So let's make this practical. Your brain, your nervous system, probably developed a storyline that maybe says something like this. Marriage includes fighting. It's normal to fight in an argument, it's normal to get hit, it's normal to whatever, right? That doesn't mean that today you actually enjoy fighting and conflict. In fact, you may hate fighting and conflict in your marriage. You may have even looked at your parents' relationship and said to yourself, I will never have a marriage like that. I will never get hit on like that. I will never argue like that. I will never repeat that pattern. But when you get older, somehow you enter a relationship and you find yourself repeating the same patterns you swore you would never repeat. The same arguments keep happening. Maybe you communicate the same way that your parents did. Maybe now conflict feels normal, even though deep down you hate it. Why does this happen? It happens because you developed a template. Your brain learned this is what marriage is. This is what marriage looks like. Not because it was healthy, but only because it is what was familiar to you.

Coping And Emotional Silence Patterns

SPEAKER_00 6:12

So here's another example. Maybe you grew up watching your parents drink all the time. Anytime life got stressful, that's how they solved their problems, that's how they celebrated. Maybe nobody ever sat you down and said, This is how we solve problems, but you were watching, your brain was taking in that information, and you learned that when life gets hard or when life is great, I need to celebrate. This is what we do. We turn to a drink, we turn to a numbing agent. When we're overwhelmed, this is how we cope. Now, maybe alcohol is not your struggle. Maybe it's food, maybe it's shopping, maybe it's scrolling for hours, maybe it's you constantly staying so busy that you don't ever have to sit with your emotions. The behavior may look different. The place where you're feeling so stuck and like you're in a cycle, it may look different, but the template remains underneath. The template is the same underneath, right? What if you grew up in a home where nobody talked about their feelings? Nobody ever apologized for anything. You never heard your mom and dad say sorry to you. You never heard your caretakers say sorry. You don't have an example, you don't have a template for what that looks like. So, of course, now in adulthood, you may struggle with apologizing. It makes sense that you would have trouble apologizing or knowing what that looks like. It may feel like vulnerability to you because you grew up in a space where you learned we don't talk about hard things. Everyone just acted like life was fine. And so now you have a template that says, don't talk about hard things. Just keep the peace, just stay silent. It's better to stay silent than for me to speak up right now. I know I'm giving you a lot of examples, but I really want to illustrate to you what a template can look like. I want to illustrate to you how it is that the things that you lived through become the patterns that you repeat until we break the cycle. And of course, we're gonna get there. There's hope. So keep listening to this episode. Here's another example. Maybe growing up, you were made to feel like a burden. You were told that you were too sensitive. You were maybe ignored, you had trouble making friends. Maybe in um like elementary school, you were bullied, you learned that needing anything from anybody else was unsafe. They would just mock you, laugh at you, make fun of you. So now, as an adult, what could that look like? That could look like you struggling to ask for help, you struggling to receive healthy love. It could look like you struggling to believe that your needs matter. Because somewhere along the way, your nervous system, your brain created this template. Perhaps that is where the roots of rejection are so deep for you. It goes all the way back to

Rejection Roots And Attachment Science

SPEAKER_00 9:14

the patterns that you picked up. Do you see how this works? The templates and the programming that we get from our lived experiences, we subconsciously create that in our future relationships unless you break the pattern. The beauty is that we do serve a holy God, we do serve a God who redeems. And our templates that we live through do not have to be the templates that we keep recreating in an unhealthy way. You can break that. And I'm gonna teach you how. So here's an article I found from the National Library of Medicine, and I will link it in the show notes. But in summary, it says that attachment is an enduring emotional closeness that helps us become independent. Attachment experiences or those formative years that we're speaking of create what they call internal working models or lifelong templates. This is exactly what we're talking about. Lifelong templates for what we expect relationships to be like. Do you see? These templates become kind of the model that we will take out into the world into adulthood, and you will re-pattern, you will kind of go based off from these templates unless and until you change the template. So I'm here to give you some language and understanding. If you're wondering why do I keep repeating this pattern in my relationships, well, it's probably because of these templates. Templates become the lens through which we interpret love, safety, trust, connection. So again, if you grew up in an environment where love felt safe and consistent, your brain, your nervous system, probably developed a template that says love is safe. And that is the model you carry out into the world. You won't be like shutting down your partner. You won't be scared when people try to get close to you. But if you grew up in an environment where the people who were supposed to protect you were very unpredictable, were very unsafe, they were emotionally unavailable or hurtful, you would have created a completely different template that maybe sounds more like love is unpredictable. You may have a deep belief that says something like, People always leave, and then rejection comes into your heart. A lot of times in my therapy work, we sort of navigate this conversation around the ideas of stuck points because these thoughts can really create a rigidity that unless you do the work and think about what you're thinking about, like I discussed in the last episode, you just completely keep repatterning your relationships and circling the same mountain of trauma in a way that is actually very maladaptive for you. It's actually very hurtful for you. And it's the reason why you feel so stuck. This is where we're gonna do the work of thinking about what we're thinking and questioning our templates. Because sometimes we will walk into adulthood carrying beliefs that were created in those formative years and you don't realize that they're there.

Trauma Templates And God Images

SPEAKER_00 12:32

Here's where trauma comes into the conversation because when trauma enters your life, especially through those people who are supposed to love and protect you, it not only impacts your templates and how you relate to other people, but it can impact the way that you're now relating to the Lord. It can impact you because when your safety is broken, your brain starts looking for ways to prevent that pain from ever happening again. The goal is not to shame you for having these patterns, the goal is to help you understand them so that you can heal. We cannot heal what we don't acknowledge. You have to acknowledge it, you have to do this work. And this is why thinking about what you think about is so important because these templates they often operate underneath the surface. You may not consciously be thinking my needs don't matter. You're probably not consciously thinking that, but your actions and your reactions and relationships reveal that belief. And that's where the hope of Jesus comes. Because Jesus doesn't just forgive us of our sins, he doesn't just save us, he doesn't just heal us, he redeems us, he renews us. Romans 12, 2 says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The Lord God cares about our mind, he cares about what we're thinking, he cares about our patterns, he cares about the beliefs that we carry, he cares about you, he cares about your wounds, he cares about your suffering, and he cares about everything that shaped you. Psalm 147, verse 3 says that he heals the brokenhearted and he binds up their wounds. Psalm 34, 18 says that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. He cares. For the woman who has experienced trauma, I want you to know that one of the most powerful revelations you're ever gonna have is that the Lord loves you. Jesus truly does love you. We hear that so much that it's almost like I don't know, become common. But I want you to get that down in your heart. The Lord loves you, and it is safe to be loved by the Lord, it is safe to experience love because God is love, He is the ultimate template for love. The template for love is God. God is love, and so wherever trauma has come in to damage and disrupt and hijack your understanding of love, we have got to deal with that because the love of God is like a tsunami. I get this image of a fire hydrant, and then you crack that thing open and it comes gushing out so powerfully. The love of God is running towards you. God is love, and so I am so prayerful that your understanding of love, your ability to receive love, will be redeemed and restored because you were created in love, you were created by a God who is love, you were created in the image of God. So, does that not mean that you were also designed to reflect safe love? You were designed to receive love and bring this topic up because as we're discussing templates, many times you have templates for how to relate to God based upon, in some cases, maybe how you relate it to your father. Maybe your earthly father was difficult for you to speak with, maybe he wasn't safe, maybe you weren't able to get vulnerable with him. But when you have that kind of template without knowing it and without addressing it, you will then apply that same sort of thing to the Lord. Where now you only take certain prayers to him, you take the prayers that seem good. You don't go to him whenever you need him because you feel like you're not worthy. You see, our templates don't just affect our horizontal relationships, they affect our vertical relationships. And so this is why it is imperative to do this work. And so I want to teach you how do you actually change your templates?

Three Steps To Change Templates

SPEAKER_00 17:00

The first thing that you're gonna do is identify the template that you're living from. You may ask yourself, what is the belief that is running in the background? Maybe your template is I'm not safe. And so now you are engaging in your marriage, not feeling safe around your husband, and you're like logically telling yourself, there's no reason for me to feel unsafe with my spouse. He is the safest person, but in your nervous system, you don't believe that. That's because you're running a template there, right? You have to stop and just identify that. That's step one. Next, what you're gonna do is identify where did that template come from? This is where it's very good to be filled with the Holy Ghost because He will direct you. You can ask him, Holy Spirit, where did I learn this? Is there a specific relationship? And just listen. He may give you a memory, he may just drop it into your heart as a word of knowledge. Where did I learn this? What experience taught you this? Was it something that you saw? Was it something that you heard on the playground? Did somebody say something to you? Was it a school teacher in the third grade? Did something happen to you? It came in from somewhere, and so just ask the Lord because remember, what you lived becomes what you learned, and what you learned becomes what you repeat. So take some time and really prayerfully figure out where did this come in. The third thing you're gonna do is ask the Lord for the correct template. You're gonna ask him to correct that template with his truth, because this is where the Lord is gonna begin renewing your mind. This is where you bring the template before him and say, Jesus, is this true? Maybe your template says I'm alone, but God is saying, I'm with you. Maybe your template says, I have to earn love, but the Lord is saying, You are already deeply loved. Maybe your template says, I'm unsafe, and the Lord Jesus is saying to you right now, I am your refuge. This is how your templates begin to change as you begin to listen to the Lord. The best way to hear him is in his word. If you're not familiar with the voice of God, get in his word. I encourage everybody to get through the whole Bible, the whole Bible as fast as you possibly can. You don't earn brownie points for taking a whole year to get through the Bible when you have never read the Bible at all, right? Like, and this is not me getting on a soapbox and in judgment. I'm trying to help you because the word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword, and it is the only book that as you read it, it is reading you back. The word is alive, so the Holy Spirit will begin to speak to you through his word. You have to get into it, you have to get into his word. I would encourage you, if you don't know where to start, to read through the Psalms. I have the U Version Bible app, which I love, and I often put that on audiobook. I'll put my head my headphones on and I will listen while I am washing dishes, or I will listen as I'm cleaning my house. Get the whole Bible in you as fast as you can. There's 90-day reading plans, there are 60-day reading plans, there's 30-day reading plans, believe it or not. I think this is so important. And this is something that is so unique to my work as a Christian therapist because everything that we do here is based on the word of God. And so if everything we do here is based on God's word, we want to get that word in us, okay? Because this is how your templates are actually gonna begin to change as you bring this before the Lord and let him minister back to you. So here are those steps. You're gonna identify the template, you're gonna understand where it came from, and then you're gonna invite the Lord to replace that template with the truth. And the truth is his truth. Over time, through surrender and through healing and through walking with the Lord, you will find that the Lord is renewing your mind and creating you into something so beautiful, so new. He makes everything beautiful in its time. I want to tell you and give you the heads up that you may notice a lot of emotions come up as you look back and you realize, oh my goodness, that experience really shaped the way that I see love. I want to give you permission to feel both things. Both things can be true at the same time. You can have love for them, the people who maybe helped uh create the atmosphere for you to develop these talents. Templates and you can still recognize that what I learned was very unhealthy. And you can take responsibility for storting over your life now that you are recognizing yourself as a daughter of the most high God. Okay. Just meet that realization with compassion because at that time, when you were developing these templates, all you were trying to do was make sense of your world.

Renewing The Mind Through Scripture

SPEAKER_00 22:27

And I think that we would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the aspect of spiritual warfare. I mean, I don't like to spend a lot of time focusing on the raggedy enemy, but the reality is that we do live in a fallen world where we know that we have a real enemy who hates you. He hates the people of God because he will never be a child of God. He will never be a child of God. He's received his judgment. We are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus. That's our identity. So I think it's important to recognize that, yeah, the enemy does come in on some of those negative patterns and really kind of manipulate at the area of the mind. Because, you know, even the devil knows that if he can get a hold of you and get some negative templates installed, he's got you. But guess what? He doesn't in the name of Jesus because we are children of God who have awareness. And the Lord wants you healed. And that's why He has set people like me out here in the marketplace, out here in the field, out here in the harvest to come and speak life into women just like you and say, Listen, daughter of God, okay, you don't have to live with trauma running you. You don't have to live like that anymore. You can simply take those patterns that you learned and bring them to the Lord and let him redeem you. He is a redeemer. Bring these templates straight to Jesus Christ, straight to the Lord, straight to the throne room of heaven. You have the opportunity and the privilege as a blood-bought believer. What you're gonna do is simply allow his word to wash over you, allow the truth of God to speak life unto you, and allow Jesus to speak into those places that have been shaped by pain. Because those experiences may have influenced you, they may have created patterns that you have carried into your relationships for all of these years, but they don't have to keep dictating your life. Today can be the end. Jesus gets to have the final word, and that is the hope. Because the same God who created you is the same God who renews your mind. Come to him. He's the God who teaches your heart what safety really is, who teaches you what love really is. He is the ultimate template keeper, right? Like he's the one that you want to get your templates from. For example, a real personal um example of this. I didn't necessarily have a template for what healthy marriage looked like. My parents were married 46 years, something like that. 45, 40. My parents were together for something like 46 years and they passed away married. But frankly, a lot of what I experienced growing up, I wouldn't necessarily want to remodel that in my own marriage. So I had to go to Jesus, I had to go to his word, I had to go to Song of Solomon to get the template for what is my marriage supposed to look like? Okay, you're not being judged about not knowing. For many high-achieving Christian women, there's a lot of self-condemnation that you do because you keep thinking, I should know better, I should know better, I should, I should be further than this by now. This is where I ask you to give yourself some grace. How could you? How could you know better when you didn't have a template? You didn't have it, but you get to get one today. You get to go to the throne, you get to go straight to the Lord, you get to go straight to God, who will help you replace that old template with the new. He will help you replace fear with faith. This conversation today isn't happening for no reason. You're not listening to this for no reason. The Lord has a word for you, and he needs you to understand that there's templates running in the background that he wants you to hand over to him now. And it's an exchange. You get to give him the old template and receive from him the correct one and let him install that into you like software. It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. If you need help with this, I have a course called Biblical Boundaries for Love, Life, and Marriage. It's more focused on creating healthy boundaries in your relationships where maybe you have overfunctioned or been walked over. But a part of that is really creating new healthy templates and doing that hand in hand with Jesus. So if you're interested in that, you can DM me boundaries on Instagram and I will send you the link, or I will just drop the link also in the show notes and in the description. As we close out, I would love to do so in prayer. I want to pray for my listener today who is just coming into the revelation about everything we talked about today. Let's pray. Gracious

Spiritual Warfare And A New Identity

SPEAKER_00 27:27

and heavenly Father, Lord, we just give you all the glory, honor, and all of the praise, Lord Jesus. I lift up this listener right now in the name of Jesus. I pray that you would break off from the listener, Lord Jesus, every faulty thinking script that she has been running in her head, Lord God. In the name of Jesus, Lord God, we put on the helmet of salvation, Lord Jesus, that every fiery dart of the enemy, Lord Jesus, would no longer be able to strike the listener at the point of the mind, Lord God, for she has the mind of Christ. My listener has the mind of Christ in the name of Jesus, Lord God. I ask that you would begin to do something like spiritual surgery on her mind and on her heart, Lord Jesus, to you begin to bring awareness to you where there have been old templates that she's been functioning in, where she has been functioning in um maybe like self-protection, where her nervous system has taken the lead rather than you and the Holy Ghost taking the lead in her life, Lord God. I pray for just deliverance at that point. God, I pray against any stronghold in the name of Jesus, any stronghold of the mind, Lord God, that is keeping the listener from freedom in you, that is keeping the listener from functioning in her relationships as the woman of God that she is, Lord God. I command every one of these strongholds to break right now in the mighty and the powerful name of Jesus Christ, Lord God. Let your precious blood, Lord God, speak the better word right now in the name of Jesus, Father, where the listener is feeling guilty. There is guilt coming up, Father, in the name of Jesus. We just silence the voice of guilt and the voice of shame. We say there is no condemnation in Christ Jesus. May my listener find herself in Christ Jesus now, in the name of Jesus, Lord God. Let every lie, let every stronghold, Lord Jesus, just break right now in Jesus. Powerful name, God, in which you send your fire, Lord Jesus. Send your fire, oh Lord God, to strike a death blow against every enemy of her soul, Lord Jesus, who is speaking um words of of death over her for real. We're okay, we're going somewhere. We're going somewhere in this prayer, Lord God. There's people around the listener, perhaps, who have not wanted her highest and best, who have not spoken life into her. And those are the words, Lord Jesus, that continue to repeat in her mind. Those are the words that

Boundaries Course Invitation And Closing Prayer

SPEAKER_00 30:01

have formed these negative templates. Lord, we're not asking you to harm that person, for we know that we don't fight against flesh and blood. We know that we fight against powers and principalities in the heavenly places, Lord God. And these are who our enemies are. They are agents of Satan, oh Lord God, spirits, Lord Jesus. And so I ask you right now in the name of Jesus, according to Psalm 91, where you have sent angels to deliver us, that you would send angels, oh Lord God, to strike a blow against the wickedness that has kept your daughter oppressed for too long. In the mighty, the powerful, and the matchless name of Jesus Christ. Freedom, Lord God. I declare freedom and peace over this listener. And I just pray that this be the beginning of a deeper intimacy with you. I pray that this be the beginning of her knowing you like she's never known you before, oh Lord God, in the powerful name of Jesus. The book of Song of Songs speaks so beautifully to the way that you see us as your bride. I pray that the listener would begin to see herself as the beloved of the bridegroom, the beloved of Christ, Lord Jesus. We thank you so much. Again, I just want to thank you for renewing the mind. And I just want to thank you for the peace that you bring, the peace that passes all understanding. I want to thank you for faith. I want to thank you for your fire. I want to thank you for your love, Lord God. And I especially want to thank you for my listener today. It's in your beautiful and your powerful name that we pray. Amen. Thank you so much. I pray that this was a blessing to you. Like I said, DM me the word boundaries, and I will send you a link to my course. And um, you could just DM me because I love to hear from you. Okay, I will see you in the next episode. Bye.