Tori Hope Peterson: How I Recognized and Overcame the Patterns Holding Me Back

Tori Hope Petersen grew up knowing instability all too well. Born to a single mother navigating her own struggles, she was in and out of foster care, moving between different homes and environments. By the time she aged out of the system, she thought she had broken free from the past. She believed she had put the pain behind her.

She hadn’t.

“When I became a mom, I was so determined to give my children a different life,” Petersen says. “I thought, ‘My home will be different. My family will be different.’ And outwardly, it was. But inside, I was struggling with thought patterns I didn’t even realize I had.”

Those patterns—subtle, sneaky and deeply ingrained—were shaping how she moved through life. They dictated how she saw herself, how she handled relationships and how she reacted when things felt too familiar. Petersen had spent her entire life watching people leave, so she was no stranger to loss. But even after she built a stable home with her husband and children, she found herself repeating old behaviors—guarding her heart too tightly or, at other times, latching onto people with an anxious desperation.

“I would get into these relationships—friendships, mentorships, church communities—and they would always end the same way,” she says. “I’d get close to someone, I’d need them in ways that weren’t healthy and then the relationship would fall apart. Again and again. And I finally had to stop and ask myself—why does this keep happening?”

The answer was sobering: She was living out a script written for her in childhood. Research backs this up—people who grow up in unstable environments are four times more likely to recreate dysfunction in adulthood. Not because they want to, but because the brain finds comfort in what it knows even when what it knows is broken.

That realization forced Petersen to dig deep. She learned about attachment styles—how the relationships we experience in childhood create templates for how we connect with people as adults. She discovered that she had an anxious attachment style, meaning she was prone to cling to relationships, desperate for validation and security.

“I put people in the place where God should be,” she admits. “I expected them to fill a hole that only He could fill. And when they inevitably couldn’t, I felt abandoned all over again.”

That pattern played out in friendships, in mentorships, even in how she interacted with her church community. And it wasn’t until she saw it clearly that she could start to change it.

Recognizing these patterns was only the first step. Changing them was something else entirely. For Petersen, it meant shifting her source of identity. Instead of looking to people to define her worth, she started focusing on who God said she was.

“When I really started to hear God’s voice over my life, everything changed,” she says. “I stopped running to people for affirmation. I stopped trying to prove that I was lovable. I just rested in the fact that I already was.”

But the process wasn’t easy. Healing never is. She had to sit with the discomfort of being alone, learning to trust that solitude wasn’t the same as abandonment. She had to resist the urge to reach for familiar but unhealthy relationship dynamics. She had to unlearn what her childhood had taught her about love, security and self-worth.

“I had to be willing to do the work,” she says. “And it’s hard. It’s really hard. But it’s worth it. Because if we don’t deal with our pain, we just pass it on—to our kids, to our friends, to our spouses. I wasn’t willing to do that.”

Petersen’s story isn’t just her own. It’s one that countless people—especially those who have experienced trauma, loss or instability—can relate to. And it’s why she wrote Breaking the Patterns That Break You, a book that isn’t just about her journey but about how all of us can step into the fullness of life God has for us.

“If we don’t heal, we stay stuck,” she says. “We keep repeating the same cycles. We keep hurting people and getting hurt. But when we do the work, when we actually let God change us, we find freedom.”

And freedom, Petersen believes, isn’t just about breaking free from something. It’s about breaking free for something—a life of wholeness, peace and love that isn’t dictated by the past. A life that doesn’t have to repeat the same broken story.

“We don’t have to live in the patterns that were handed to us,” she says. “We get to choose something different.”