A pattern I recognize more clearly is…
A compassionate guide to choosing differently
The patterns you learned helped you survive.They don’t have to shape your future.
The Patterns We Carry explores how childhood wounds follow us into adult relationships—and how insight, accountability, and practice can help us build something new.
Clinical insight. Human stories. A path forward.
The book
Why do the same relationship patterns keep returning—even when you know better?
Long before we can explain love, trust, conflict, or safety, we begin learning what relationships require of us. Those early lessons can become adult strategies: hiding when we feel ashamed, pursuing when we fear abandonment, withdrawing when closeness feels dangerous, or controlling when uncertainty becomes unbearable.
Through the fictional composite stories of Todd and Claire, clear clinical insight, and reflective exercises, readers explore attachment, shame, control, betrayal, boundaries, grief, repair, and the difficult freedom of choosing differently.
“Your past deserves understanding. The people affected by your behavior deserve accountability. And your future deserves choices that are not made entirely by an old wound.”
Ready when you are
Start recognizing the patterns you carry.
Companion workbook
Insight becomes change when you practice it.
The companion workbook gives you room to slow down, notice what is happening beneath your reactions, and return to the exercises as your understanding deepens.
- Identify core beliefs and protective patterns
- Explore attachment, boundaries, shame, and repair
- Write a final commitment to yourself
- Print fresh copies and revisit exercises over time
Meet the author
Tammy McKee, LCSW
Tammy is a California-licensed clinical social worker who writes about childhood patterns, adult relationships, accountability, boundaries, and the possibility of choosing differently.
Born in Nova Scotia and shaped by twenty years in Southern California, she now lives outside the Dallas–Fort Worth area in Texas with her family. Her writing brings a clinician’s understanding together with a warm, direct voice that speaks to the human being behind every pattern.
Tammy
Reader reflections
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A place to begin
Three questions worth sitting with
Something that surprised me about myself is…
A strength I see in myself now is…
A personal copy
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