Threads of Fate: Why Some Patterns Keep Repeating - and How to Cut the Old Threads

October Special, Part 1

October is the one month when fear gets to play - most of us are more open to the uncanny, and some of us go looking for it. So let's use that.
For one month, we'll walk the line between what psychology can measure and what it (still) can't. Threads of fate and repeating patterns, trance, a machete, and a medium in the Black Forest. Scientific where possible. Open where it's not (yet).

Do you believe in fate?

Last December, I wrote here that belief is neurobiology with a poetic user interface: [When Myths and Biology Speak the Same Language]. The stories we believe become the lens through which we see the world.

"Fate" is one of those interfaces. A very old one. Comforting for some, heavy for others. In this special, we'll take three looks behind the interface: What happens when we believe something about ourselves? When we believe in a method? And when we believe a voice from outside?

Today is about the beliefs we hold about ourselves - and how they can run through our lives like a thread. A red one. Or a pink one.

The past shapes the present. It doesn't write it.

Sounds like a fridge magnet. It happens to be well supported by psychology - and it's one of the oldest stories humans tell.

Many Norns, uneven threads

Long before developmental psychology, there were the Norns: the women of fate in Norse mythology, sitting at the roots of the world tree, spinning the threads of life. Most people know three of them: Urd, what has become. Verdandi, what is becoming. Skuld, what shall be.

The more interesting detail usually gets left out: in Snorri's Prose Edda, there are many more. Good Norns and bad Norns - and they spin unevenly. Some people get light threads.
Others get heavy, short, or knotted ones.

Myth and psychology describe the same observation here, in two languages:
some people start life carrying far more weight than others. And what has settled - Urd, what has become - keeps spinning itself forward as long as no one looks.

"Why does this sh*t keep happening to me?"

I hear this question in my practice regularly. The same type of partner, again. The same conflict at work, again. That feeling of being stuck in a badly written play where only the cast changes.

Psychoanalysis coined a term for this more than a hundred years ago: repetition compulsion. Freud used it to describe the unconscious tendency to repeat painful experiences or their circumstances - sometimes symbolically, sometimes quite literally.

In fairness: it's a psychoanalytic concept, not a law of nature, and parts of it are empirically contested. But the pattern behind it - people repeatedly landing in similar constellations - is easy to observe clinically. And it can be explained in a pretty down-to-earth way.

Attraction? Mechanics!

"You don't attract what you want, you attract what you are." That line has been floating around social media and manifestation circles for years. It sounds deep. It's also a bit off. What actually happens is easier to explain - and, more importantly, easier to influence.

Gear 1: Early experiences become beliefs about ourselves.
Whether we grew up feeling welcome, understood, and cared for - in a way we could actually feel - shapes what we later consider normal, deserved, and possible.

Gear 2: Beliefs steer perception.
If you learned "I'm too much," you'll register every eye-roll and miss three compliments. Our brains preferentially collect evidence for what they already believe (confirmation bias) - faster than we can consciously sort things out. How fast that inner short film starts rolling is in the December article.

Gear 3: Perception steers behaviour.
If you expect rejection, you act differently: more cautious, more adapted, sometimes pre-emptively distant. And that behaviour - surprise - tends to produce exactly the reactions that confirm the old belief. Sociologist Robert K. Merton named this in 1948: the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Gear 4: The nervous system holds on to the familiar.
Familiar feels safe - even when it hurts us. A nervous system calibrated to chronic stress can read calm as a threat and drama as home.

Four gears, interlocking. And here's the good news: gears can be turned. Cosmic attraction, not so much.

Seen this way, "fate" is often just a belief that went unchallenged for long enough.

And those with the heavy threads?

Which brings us back to the uneven Norns: why do some people get more to carry?
Burdens - lived or inherited - are never distributed fairly.
Yes, inherited: unprocessed burdens from earlier generations can leave traces - in parenting, in bodies and nervous systems, in family sentences like "The world is dangerous" or "We just push through." How this gets passed on deserves its own article.
If you want to go deeper now: my article on black sheep, goats, and systemic resilience looks at how burdens travel through generations - and why the "difficult ones" in a family are often the ones making the unprocessed legacy visible.

The why stays open.
Psychology has no satisfying answer. Philosophy has been arguing about it for a few thousand years. Norse mythology just shrugs: good Norns, bad Norns.

What science can say:
how hard your start was doesn't automatically decide how things go on. And some of what gets passed down is burden and valuable knowledge at once. High alertness from an unsafe childhood can be a real strength in the right context: spotting danger early, reading rooms, sensing a mood before it tips. An adaptation that was once essential for survival - and today deserves more options.

What cuts the thread

Patterns rarely dissolve because we find them annoying. They dissolve when the unconscious becomes conscious - and when, at the exact point where we'd usually react on autopilot, we choose.

Healing, as far as healing goes, shows up as the ability to act on purpose where we used to react automatically.

And here's where it gets interesting. Insight alone often barely moves the gears. The question that matters was already in the December article: Can I begin to believe myself - because I have experienced it?

Beliefs change mostly through experience. Through the moment your heart slows down in the presence of a trigger. The moment the old prophecy doesn't come true - and your body notices.

That's what Part 2 is about: why rituals work where understanding alone falls short. From a torn-up letter to a machete.

Want to know which patterns keep repeating in your life? That's what psychological support and therapy are for. And for everything in between, there's my newsletter - the finale of this special lands there on October 30th, with an ending you'll only find there.