Patterns Between Us Podcast

It’s 11:47 on a Tuesday. You weren’t asleep yet — you’re never quite asleep on a Tuesday. The phone vibrates again, and you don’t even have to look. You already know who it is. The name comes up in the dark, and you pick up. You always do. You say, Hey, what’s going on? — the way you’ve done for fifteen years. You put the report away in your mind, and you listen. This episode is about the woman on...

It’s been about a month since we started this show together. Six episodes in. And before we go anywhere else, I wanted to stop and name something out loud. This isn’t really a podcast about relationships. Or — it is, but not in the way I thought when I started. It’s a podcast about the patterns capable women carry . Patterns that show up in romantic relationships, yes. But also in friendships. In...

I was twenty-seven years old the first time I paid someone to take care of my hands. The women who raised me did not do this. My mother did not. My grandmother did not. And last week, I walked into a nail salon and saw a little girl getting a fill-in, scrolling on her phone like it was nothing — because for her, it is nothing. Something has shifted between her generation and mine, and between mine...

Last week, we sat together and named a pattern. Self-abandonment. The way we hand ourselves over, slowly, often in the smallest moments — to keep peace, to keep connection, to keep being seen as the capable one. This week, I want to take you somewhere harder. I want to show you what self-abandonment actually looks like. Not in a story from your childhood. Not in a relationship that ended years ago...

Sometimes the deepest pattern isn't with a partner. It's with yourself — the quiet ways you keep leaving yourself behind, even in the rooms you worked hardest to enter. In this special Field Notes episode, Cyd reflects on what surfaced for her during the Black Women Invent (BWI) experience — and the pattern of self-abandonment she watched move through the room and through herself. With honesty and...

Most of us think our patterns started with a heartbreak or a hard relationship. The truth is, the blueprint was already being written before we said our first word. EPISODE SUMMARY In Episode 2, Cyd takes you back further than most conversations about relational patterns ever go — to the womb, to your earliest caretakers, to the emotional environment you were formed inside of before you had any la...

Episode 1: Why Do I Keep Ending Up in the Same Relationship? Same feeling. Same dynamic. Different person — but somehow it all starts to feel familiar. In this first episode, therapist Cyd McDaniel, LCSW, offers a gentle shift: away from what’s wrong with me? and toward a more useful question — what feels familiar here? She explores why we’re wired to move toward what’s known, even when it doesn’t...