Turns Out I've Been the Red Flag This Whole Time

Red flags aren't just something you spot on a first date while side-eyeing someone's group chat name. Turns out I've been quietly running a full portfolio of them myself, and there's actual research to make me feel slightly less unhinged about it.

The Nine Patterns, According to Actual Psychologists

Researchers interviewed practicing therapists about their clients and identified nine repeat offenders when it comes to sabotaging your own relationships. Attacking your partner, criticizing, accusing, the "revenge" text you immediately regret. Pursuing and clinging, checking their phone, demanding reassurance on a loop. Withdrawal, aka going completely silent, the emotional witness protection program. Defensiveness about literally everything, even things that weren't accusations. Contempt. Jealousy dressed up as "just checking in." Destructive coping, stress drinking, stress shopping, stress anything. Low commitment or wandering eyes. And straight up controlling behavior.

I read that list and personally related to at least four, which is either self-awareness or a personal crisis, depending on the day you catch me.

Why This Is Happening, According to Science

Here's the actually useful part. Psychologists agree the root of almost all nine isn't that you're secretly a terrible person. It's fear. Somewhere along the way, protecting yourself started to feel more urgent than letting someone close, so your nervous system picks self-protection every single time, even in relationships where nobody is actually threatening you.

This traces back to attachment style, essentially how you bonded, or didn't, with your caregivers before you were old enough to have opinions about any of it. So no, you did not wake up one day and decide to be emotionally unavailable for sport. It's an old survival strategy that never got the memo that the danger's over.

Researchers actually describe relationship sabotage as a protective strategy, not a destructive one, even though it almost always produces destruction as the end result. Your brain isn't trying to ruin things. It's trying to keep you safe using outdated instructions.

What Actually Helps

The move isn't spiraling about the pattern once you notice it. It's just naming it, out loud if you can stomach it. "Oh, I'm doing the thing again" does more work than it sounds like it would, because you genuinely cannot fix a pattern you're still pretending doesn't exist. Awareness doesn't erase it overnight. It just means the pattern stops running completely unsupervised.

WithinOz Perspective

This is basically the science behind that "red flags I've ignored in myself" carousel I posted recently, which, in hindsight, I wrote approximately 60 percent of while actively doing one of the nine things on this exact list. Growth is not linear. Apparently neither is writing about growth.