Choosing Presence Over Reactivity: The Three Patterns That Keep Us Stuck

I was in a team meeting years ago when I felt it happen—that familiar tightening in my chest, the heat rising in my face. It happened again. The same person, who constantly resisted my ideas without even hearing them out, had just shut me down again.

My body knew what to do before my mind caught up. I went quiet. I stopped participating. I checked out emotionally while still sitting in my chair, nodding occasionally, but no longer present. By the time the meeting ended, I’d already left—not physically, but energetically. I moved away.

What I couldn’t see then was that two patterns were colliding in that room. Their pattern was to move against—to resist, dismiss, dominate the conversation. My pattern was to move away—to withdraw, disconnect, disappear. And each pattern triggered the other. The more they pushed against, the more I retreated. The more I retreated, the more aggressive they became. We were locked in a dance neither of us had chosen consciously.

These patterns become default in the same way learning to drive a car becomes unconscious knowledge. When you first learned to drive, every action required conscious attention—mirror, signal, brake, accelerate. Now you drive while having a conversation, drinking coffee, and thinking about your grocery list. The conscious learning became unconscious behavior. That’s precisely what happens with our interpersonal patterns. What once required thought and decision now runs automatically, without our awareness.

It took me years of personal growth work—and my own visual journaling practice—to recognize this pattern. When I felt threatened or unseen, my default response was to withdraw. To disconnect. To tell myself I didn’t care, when the truth was I cared so much it hurt.

This wasn’t presence. It was reactivity wearing the mask of detachment.

The Three Ways We Abandon Ourselves

While I had been involved in organizational and leadership development for more than 20 years in Fortune 100 companies, it was the work of Karen Horney in the 1940s that made this pattern observable and understandable to me and my clients.

Horney identified three interpersonal patterns that humans unconsciously adopt when we feel anxiety or threat. She called them neurotic trends, though I prefer to think of them as survival strategies we learned long ago that no longer serve us.

Moving Toward: We become compliant, seek approval, and shrink ourselves. We prioritize others’ needs over our own, hoping that if we’re helpful enough and accommodating enough, we’ll finally be safe, loved, and accepted.

Moving Against: We become aggressive, dominating, and defensive. We push back, argue, and control. We build walls and wield weapons—sometimes literal, often verbal—believing that strength and dominance equal safety.

Moving Away: We withdraw, detach, shut down. We remove ourselves emotionally or physically, creating distance. We tell ourselves we don’t need anyone, that isolation is freedom, that checking out keeps us safe.

Here’s what I’ve learned after 30 years of facilitating transformation: None of these patterns are presence. They’re all reactivity.

And we all have a default pattern we reach for when we’re triggered.

The Problem With Our Default Patterns

These patterns aren’t inherently wrong—they likely protected us at one time. The child who learned to be agreeable in a volatile household developed a valuable survival skill. The teenager who learned to fight back against bullying found a way to reclaim power. The adult who withdrew from toxic relationships chose self-preservation.

The problem isn’t that these strategies exist. The problem is that we continue to use them long after the original threat has passed. We use them unconsciously, automatically, reactively—even in situations that don’t warrant them.

I disconnect and withdraw when someone’s genuinely trying to connect with me.

You might smile and accommodate when speaking up would serve the situation better.

Someone else snaps defensively when their partner asks a simple question.

Reactivity doesn’t ask, “What’s actually happening right now?” It assumes the old story is still true.

And here’s the deeper truth: when we’re locked in reactive patterns, we can’t integrate. We can’t learn. We can’t update our “operating system” with new information because we’re too busy running the same old program.

Integration—the process of allowing our experiences to settle into our body and psyche so we can learn and grow from them—requires presence. It requires us to pause long enough to ask: What’s actually true right now? What pattern am I running? What else is possible?

What Presence Actually Looks Like

Presence isn’t passive. It’s not detachment, spiritual bypassing, or pretending everything’s fine.

Presence is the conscious choice to feel what you’re feeling, notice what you’re doing, and choose your response rather than defaulting to your pattern.

Presence asks:

• What’s happening in my body right now?
• Which pattern am I reaching for?
• Is this response about now, or about then?
• What would it feel like to stay here and choose differently?

When I learned to recognize my “moving away” pattern in that moment of being dismissed, I gained a choice. I could still choose to step back if that truly served the situation—but I could also choose to stay engaged, to speak up, to remain present with my discomfort rather than immediately disconnecting.

That’s the difference between reactive withdrawal and conscious boundary-setting.

The patterns themselves aren’t the enemy. The unconsciousness is.

Your Patterns Are Invitations

I’ve spent decades watching people discover their default patterns—in coaching sessions, in retreats, in the visual journals they create. And every time, the recognition is both uncomfortable and liberating.

Oh. I do that. I’ve always done that.

Your patterns are trying to keep you safe. They’re beautiful in their loyalty. But they’re also keeping you stuck in old stories, old wounds, old ways of being that no longer fit who you’re becoming.

The invitation is to see them. To thank them. And to choose presence instead.

This week, I invite you to notice:

When do you move toward? When do you become smaller, more accommodating, more agreeable? What are you hoping will happen if you make everyone else comfortable?

When do you move against? When do you get defensive, argumentative, or controlling? What are you trying to protect by pushing back so hard?

When do you move away? When do you withdraw, shut down, disconnect? What are you avoiding feeling by checking out?