Why do you keep making the same mistake?

The short answer: a mistake you make once is a mistake. A mistake you make every time is a strategy, and it is being kept because it solves something. Not well. Just well enough. You will keep making it until you find out what it solves, and then it will stop being needed.

The same partner with a different face. The same job that goes wrong in the same month. The same promise, the same breaking of it. People look at the pattern and conclude that they are stupid, or cursed. They are neither. They are consistent.

What the pattern is doing

Every repeated behaviour is paying for something. The partner who cannot commit is also the partner who cannot trap you. The job that always falls apart in the second year is also the job that never asked you to find out whether you could succeed. The thing you keep not doing is also the thing you can keep not having failed at.

The payoff is never the thing you would have chosen. It is a smaller, older safety, usually learned in a house you no longer live in. The pattern is loyal to it.

Why insight does not stop it

You may already know all this. Most people with a strong pattern have had the thought "I always do this" many times, and the thought has changed nothing. Insight is not the lever. Knowing why you do a thing does not stop you doing it, any more than knowing why you are hungry stops the hunger.

What changes it is doing something different at the moment the pattern wants to run, once, badly, and surviving. The pattern is a prediction that something terrible will happen if you do not do the usual thing. The only evidence that moves it is the terrible thing not happening.

Find the moment

Patterns have a trigger, and the trigger is almost always a feeling, not a situation. Boredom, usually, or a particular kind of fear, or the sudden sense of being too close to somebody.

Watch for the feeling. It arrives before the behaviour, and in that gap, which can be a second, there is a choice that has never been exercised. Exercise it once. It will feel like walking into traffic. It is not.

The schedule

Repetition has a way of hiding itself in time. A man can lose track of how many times he has nearly ruined everything once the ruining starts happening on a schedule. Count. Write the dates. The pattern on paper is smaller and more obviously a pattern than the pattern in memory, and a thing that can be seen can be interrupted.

Where this is in the book

The Endless Hunts is the fourteenth scene of chapter two. Departure, pursuit, return, repeated so often that memory stops filing the hunts separately, and a man finds he cannot say how many times he has almost died. The scene is about what repetition does to a person who has not asked what it is for, and the moment he does.