We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions

Chapter 1 examines how personal patterns develop through early childhood experiences, family dynamics, ancestral trauma, cultural conditioning, and survival mechanisms. The authors assert that understanding one’s behavioral patterns is essential for breaking harmful cycles and living with greater intentionality.

The chapter illuminates how individuals often lose vital parts of themselves to fit into families, institutions, and societies that deny people access to their own innate wisdom. This fracturing begins early in life as children adapt to earn love and protection from caregivers. The book presents the psychological theory of attachment styles—secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized—as a framework for understanding how early relationships shape adult behavior patterns. Though these patterns form before the age of two, the authors emphasize that they are not destiny; healing and change remain possible. With this discussion of attachment styles, the authors build off the work of researchers such as John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, as well as various popular science applications of the theory (for instance, Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s Attached)

Family roles (hero, scapegoat, parentified child, peacemaker, lost child, identified patient) represent another dimension of identity formation. These roles, rather than reflecting one’s authentic personality, are scripts developed to maintain family equilibrium.