When You Don’t Like Who You Become Around Other People

Art by a robot

Have you ever walked away from a conversation and wondered why you behaved the way you did?

Perhaps you found yourself apologising for something that wasn’t your fault. Maybe you became defensive when someone questioned a decision, or noticed yourself taking responsibility for a problem that wasn’t really yours to solve.

Sometimes it’s more uncomfortable than that.

You hear yourself using a tone of voice you don’t particularly like. You realise you’ve been trying to keep everybody happy, even though you’re exhausted. Or perhaps you’ve become the person who always needs to be in control, despite knowing how it feels to be on the receiving end of that behaviour.

And afterwards, you wonder: Why do I keep doing that?

What’s particularly interesting is that we don’t always behave like this. With some people, we’re confident, relaxed and entirely ourselves. With others, we seem to become a different version of who we are.

It can be frustrating when you’ve worked hard on your personal growth, only to discover that an old pattern is still there. But noticing the behaviour might be more significant than it first appears.

Because sometimes personal growth begins by recognising who we no longer want to be, rather than with knowing who we want to become instead.

Key Ideas

• We can develop familiar patterns of behaviour in our relationships, including taking responsibility for others, seeking approval or becoming defensive.
• Transactional Analysis offers a psychological framework for understanding how these patterns can appear in our interactions.
• Recognising a familiar response doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us. It may be a way of behaving that once served a purpose.
• Changing relationship patterns often involves learning to notice our automatic responses before choosing how we want to behave.
• Personal growth isn’t always about becoming someone new. Sometimes it’s about having more freedom to be ourselves.

Why Do We Become Different People in Different Relationships?

Think about the different people you interact with throughout your week.

There might be someone around who you feel comfortable expressing an opinion, even when you disagree. Someone else might bring out your playful, creative side. Perhaps there’s a person with whom you feel confident enough to admit when you don’t know something.

But then there’s that other relationship.

The one where you find yourself carefully choosing your words. Where you feel the need to justify every decision, or perhaps become unusually critical, defensive or withdrawn.

You might know perfectly well that you don’t need to respond this way. Yet somehow, when you’re in that situation, you do.

These responses can be influenced by our experiences, the expectations we’ve learned to live with and the dynamics of the relationships themselves. Over time, a particular way of behaving can become familiar. We might find ourselves stepping into it without really considering whether it still suits us. This is where changing relationship patterns becomes interesting because we may have spent years understanding ourselves as someone who is helpful, responsible, agreeable or strong, without noticing when those qualities have become expectations we’re struggling to escape.

And sometimes, the first sign that something is changing is a growing sense of discomfort with the role we’ve been playing.

Understanding the Roles We Fall Into: Transactional Analysis

There’s a psychological model that we find particularly useful for exploring these experiences.

Transactional Analysis, developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the 1950s, offers a way of understanding how people communicate and how familiar patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving can influence their relationships. At its heart are three different ego states: Parent, Adult and Child.

These aren’t descriptions of our age, job title or actual role within a family. They’re ways of understanding the different patterns we can move between when interacting with ourselves and others.

The Parent ego state reflects attitudes, beliefs and behaviours we’ve learned from influential people in our lives. Sometimes this is wonderfully nurturing. It’s the part of us that offers encouragement, care and reassurance. At other times, it can become critical or controlling. We might find ourselves telling people what they should do, taking over their responsibilities or judging them against expectations they didn’t necessarily agree to.

The Child ego state reflects patterns of feeling and responding associated with earlier experiences. This can be where our spontaneity, playfulness and creativity emerge. But it can also include those familiar feelings of wanting approval, being frightened of disappointing someone or becoming defensive when we feel criticised.

The Adult ego state helps us respond to what’s actually happening in the present. Rather than automatically following an old rule or reacting from an earlier experience, we can consider the circumstances, recognise our feelings and make a more conscious decision about what to do next.

None of these states is inherently bad, and we needn’t aim to eliminate any of them. The difficulty often arises when a particular response becomes so familiar that we no longer realise we’re choosing it.

Transactional Analysis also explores the idea of life scripts: patterns of beliefs and decisions that may develop through earlier experiences and continue influencing our relationships. These ideas aren’t a complete explanation of human behaviour, nor can we reliably diagnose another person’s ego state from a single conversation, but they can offer a useful language for understanding something we might already have noticed about ourselves.

And that’s where the possibility of change begins.

When Being the Responsible One No Longer Feels Right

Consider someone who has always been described as the responsible one.

Perhaps they’ve spent much of their life looking after other people, anticipating difficulties and making sure everything is all right. Their friends appreciate their reliability. Their family knows they can turn to them. People often tell them how strong and capable they are. And perhaps they are.

But somewhere along the way, being responsible has become something they feel unable to stop doing. They might recognise this in their personal relationships, where they take responsibility for everybody else’s feelings.

Or perhaps they’ve created their own business, hoping for more freedom and independence, only to discover that they’re constantly accommodating clients, responding to messages outside working hours and struggling to establish boundaries.

They might even recognise it in their leadership. They wanted to empower their team, but found themselves solving everyone’s problems, making every decision and becoming exhausted by the weight of being the person who always knows what to do.

These are different environments, but the experience can feel remarkably similar.

“I’m tired of being the person everyone expects me to be”.

Through the lens of Transactional Analysis, we might explore whether a familiar nurturing or controlling “Parent” response is influencing some of these interactions. But the more important question isn’t necessarily which ego state someone is using, it’s whether the way they’re behaving still reflects the person they want to be. Because caring about people doesn’t have to mean rescuing them. Being responsible doesn’t have to mean taking responsibility for everything. And being a capable leader doesn’t have to mean having all the answers. Sometimes the change we’re looking for is about discovering that we can express those strengths differently.

When You Find Yourself Seeking Permission You No Longer Need

There’s another experience that we suspect many people will recognise.

You make decisions perfectly well until you encounter someone whose opinion matters to you.

Perhaps it’s a parent, a former teacher, an experienced colleague or someone you regard as more successful than yourself. Suddenly, the confidence you normally feel becomes a little less certain. You might find yourself explaining too much, trying to justify your choices or feeling unusually uncomfortable when the other person disagrees. Sometimes, you might simply go along with their suggestion, only to feel frustrated with yourself afterwards.

From a Transactional Analysis perspective, this might resemble aspects of the “Adapted Child” ego state, where earlier patterns of accommodating expectations or seeking approval become active.

That doesn’t mean you’re behaving childishly or that those patterns were ever unreasonable because for some people, being agreeable or avoiding disagreement developed as a way of maintaining important relationships, navigating difficult circumstances or protecting themselves.

At the time, those responses may have been entirely understandable, but perhaps your circumstances have changed. Perhaps you’re now making decisions about your own life, developing a business or occupying a leadership position where you need to trust your judgement, and yet, in certain relationships, you can still feel as though you’re waiting for someone else to tell you that you’re allowed.

One of the more uncomfortable experiences of personal growth is realising that we can intellectually understand our independence long before we feel comfortable exercising it. This is where the work of change is about practising a different response.

It might simply be allowing yourself to disagree without immediately explaining why. Making a decision without seeking reassurance. Or giving yourself permission to disappoint someone without assuming you’ve done something wrong.

These can seem like small changes from the outside. From the inside, they can feel enormous.

Why Changing Relationship Patterns Can Feel So Uncomfortable

Something interesting can happen when we start changing how we respond to others.

The people around us may not immediately recognise or welcome the change.

If you’ve always been the person who takes care of everything, someone might feel disappointed when you begin establishing boundaries. If you’ve spent years agreeing with someone, they might be surprised when you begin expressing a different opinion. And if you’ve always been the leader who provides answers, people may feel unsettled when you start asking them what they think instead.

It’s tempting to interpret that discomfort as evidence that we’re doing something wrong, but familiar relationships often develop patterns of mutual expectation. We come to anticipate how another person will respond, and they come to anticipate how we will behave. When one person starts responding differently, that familiar exchange can change.

Transactional Analysis describes interactions between people as transactions. Sometimes these “transactions” reinforce patterns that both people have become accustomed to, even when the experience isn’t particularly satisfying.

Changing our own response can interrupt that familiar sequence. It doesn’t guarantee that the other person will respond positively, or that the relationship will improve. We can only influence our own behaviour, we can’t control another person’s response. And not every difficult relationship is simply a matter of communication. Power, safety, resources and organisational or family circumstances matter too. In situations involving coercion or abuse, personal safety and appropriate support are more important than trying to find a better way of conducting the conversation.

For many everyday interactions, though, the discomfort of changing an established pattern is worth noticing. Sometimes we’re not only learning to communicate differently, we’re also discovering whether our relationships have room for the person we’re becoming.

How Do You Begin Changing a Familiar Response?

One thing we’ve come to appreciate about personal growth is that understanding something doesn’t automatically mean we can do it differently.

We might recognise a pattern immediately when reading about it. We might even be able to explain where it came from and why it happens. And then find ourselves doing exactly the same thing the next time we’re in that situation!

That’s part of what can make the “Integration” stage of change so challenging. We’re no longer entirely unaware of the old behaviour, but the new response doesn’t yet feel natural.

Rather than expecting ourselves to become different overnight, we can begin with noticing.

Notice what happens. When you find yourself behaving in a way that doesn’t feel right, consider the circumstances. Who were you talking to? What did you feel? What did you want to do, and what did you actually do?

Become curious about the pattern. Is this a familiar experience? Does it happen with particular people or in particular situations? Are you following an expectation that no longer reflects your values?

Consider what the response might be doing for you. Perhaps you’re trying to protect a relationship, maintain a sense of control or avoid the discomfort of disappointing someone. Understanding the purpose of a response can be more helpful than criticising yourself for having it.

Explore another possibility. What might change if you didn’t automatically take responsibility? What would it feel like to ask a question instead of providing an answer? Could you express your own needs without apologising for them?

Practise something small. You don’t have to completely transform a relationship in a single conversation. Sometimes the change is simply recognising the familiar impulse and making a slightly different choice.

This is where reflective practices can be particularly helpful. Journalling, meditation, coaching and therapeutic conversations can give us opportunities to explore our responses without the immediate pressure of having to act. Some people might use tarot or other symbolic tools as reflective prompts, exploring the roles they recognise in themselves and the possibilities they haven’t yet considered. Others might prefer a structured psychological model, such as the Transactional Analysis model we’re talking about today.

The tools might be different, but the underlying intention can be much the same. To become more aware of the way we’re living, relating and responding, so that we’re better able to choose what happens next.

Personal Growth Doesn’t Mean Leaving Every Old Version of Yourself Behind

We think there’s something important about recognising that not everything familiar needs to be changed. Some of the ways we’ve learned to interact with others are valuable. Things like our capacity to nurture people, our willingness to cooperate, our playfulness, our sense of responsibility and even our caution can all serve important purposes. Personal growth doesn’t require us to reject these qualities simply because they developed during earlier parts of our lives.

And not every moment of discomfort is evidence that a relationship or behaviour needs to end. Sometimes we need to recognise what is still valuable and decide what we’d like to carry forward. The person who has always looked after others might discover how to offer care without becoming responsible for everybody. The person who seeks approval might learn that they can value someone else’s perspective without surrendering their own. And the leader who feels compelled to control everything might discover that their experience and judgement become more valuable when they’re used to create space for others.

The change is then about having more choice over which parts of ourselves we bring into different situations.

The Magick of Becoming Someone You Recognise

Within Humanistic Magick, we are interested in the relationship between our inner experiences and the changes we make in the way we live, work and relate to others.

Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. Sometimes that change begins with a clear vision of what we want, but sometimes it begins with a less comfortable realisation: I don’t want to keep being this version of myself.

We may not yet know what a different response would look like. We might not feel confident enough to behave differently, and we may be uncertain about how other people will react. But something has already shifted. We’ve begun to recognise the difference between a familiar way of behaving and the way we’d actually like to live.

And perhaps that’s one of the quieter signs of personal growth. Not that every difficult conversation suddenly becomes easy, or that we never slip back into old patterns, but that we begin noticing those moments when we’re about to become someone we no longer want to be and occasionally, perhaps hesitantly at first, we discover that we have another choice.

A Reflection to Take Away

Think about a relationship or situation where you sometimes behave in a way that doesn’t feel quite like you.

You might want to explore these questions in a journal, during meditation or simply in a quiet moment to yourself.

1. Who do I seem to become in this situation?
2. What do I feel expected to do, say or be?
3. Is there something about this familiar role that I no longer want to carry forward?
4. What is valuable about this part of myself that I’d like to keep?
5. What might one small, more authentic response look like next time?

You don’t have to answer all these questions immediately. Sometimes noticing that the old way no longer fits is enough to begin.

References

Credit where credit is due, we aim to cite our sources because we value truthful content. 2 sources were used as part of our research for this article, and you are encouraged to follow our other links.

1. Berne, E. (1961). Transactional analysis in psychotherapy: A systematic individual and social psychiatry. Grove Press.
2. Berne, E. (1964). Games people play: The psychology of human relationships. Grove Press.

About Humanistic Magick

Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework developed by Andie Brookes that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. You can explore the full reference guide here: https://magentaschoolofmagick.com/what-is-humanistic-magick/

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