Just when we think we have completed a body of personal work like overcoming shame, self-loathing or chronic insecurity, it can sneak back up on us. The tendency is to think that we've regressed and that all the previous work we'd done is null and void. This perspective can leave us feeling hopeless.
What's happening is that we had learned one side or aspect of what our pain was attempting to teach us. The realizations we previously came to were useful, but as we evolve, and life around us changes, our previous breakthroughs don't always hold up.
That we revisit old, painful patterns isn't a step backward but an opportunity to come to understand ourselves at a more profound level. Emotional pain calls us into a deeper relationship with ourselves. It's as if we have peeled away one layer of an onion, only to discover that there is another layer. We mistakenly believe that there will come a day when we will no longer have layers to peel away.
The sooner we come to grips with the fact that our wounds never go away, but instead are like sirens calling us into a deeper accord with ourselves, the less we will resist them. The point isn't to eliminate them, but to learn to accept them as a doorway to our next level of evolution.