The Pattern of Adam: Why "Failure" Is Built In.

In Hebrew, adam isn't primarily a personal name. It means "human" or "humankind," and it's tied to adamah, the ground the first human was formed from. Eve, Chavah, is named "the mother of all living." The story in Genesis was never meant to be only about two people long ago. It's a story about what it means to be human.

So when I call this the Pattern of Adam, I mean the human pattern. You could just as easily call it the Pattern of Eve, or the Pattern of Adam and Eve. Eve is the one who first chooses, and her choice opens the way for everything that follows. Every man and woman walks this same road.

Ancient readers seem to have understood this. Jewish tradition read the creation account as God organizing formless matter (tohu wabohu), not making the world from nothing, which is also what Restoration scripture teaches. Some rabbis imagined Adam and Eve's first clothing as garments of light, later exchanged for garments of skin: a picture of glory veiled by mortality, waiting to be restored. The Restoration fills in the rest of the arc: where we came from before the Garden, why the Fall was necessary, and where the road leads. Put together, it reads less like a cautionary tale and more like a map of human development.

The Pattern at a Glance

The pattern has seven phases. Adam and Eve walk through them. Christ walks through them. And every one of us walks through them, both across a lifetime and in smaller cycles within it.

What drives movement from one phase to the next is a simple sequence: agency, then awareness, then alignment. Notice the order. Adam and Eve's eyes were opened after they ate the fruit, not before. We choose first, and understanding follows as a consequence of the choice. Then we decide what to do with what we now see. That movement is what carries us into the next cycle with a little more capacity than we had before.

This matters therapeutically. Many people believe they have to fully understand themselves before they're allowed to act, or they get stuck in regret and the thought I knew better. The pattern says the opposite: awareness is usually the fruit of a choice already made. Our choices change us, and the feedback we get from experience is how awareness grows. With that awareness, we can choose alignment with our values, and with God, one increment at a time. That is the transformative process.

So "failure" is built in. The Fall wasn't a misstep in the plan, even when our own falls feel that way. It's how growth happens. We move from being with God in innocence to choosing Him with our eyes wide open, an intentional alignment made possible only through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

Not the Hero's Journey

If this sounds a little like Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, there's a reason. Departure, ordeal, and return show up in myths across the ancient world. But the Pattern of Adam differs in a few important ways.

• It starts before the story starts. The hero's journey begins in the "ordinary world." The Pattern of Adam begins in God's presence, with an identity that already exists. We aren't heading out to discover who we are; we're descending to grow into who we already are. It's the same reason an infant leaves the womb and a young adult leaves their parents' home: we have to separate in order to become.

• It's for everyone, not the exceptional few. The hero is set apart. Adam is humanity. Nobody has to be special to walk this road.

• Power is received, not seized. The hero wins a prize through his own strength. In this pattern, empowerment comes as God's response to our willingness.

• The return is relational. The hero brings a treasure home. Here, the return is becoming one with God and loving others the way we've been loved.

At the same time, the pattern lines up remarkably well with what developmental psychology already describes. Infants move from total dependence toward separation and exploration. Attachment research shows that children explore most confidently when they have a secure base to come back to. Erik Erikson framed each stage of life as a crisis between two outcomes, like trust versus mistrust or identity versus role confusion, where growth depends on how we meet the challenge.

The Pattern of Adam echoes all of this: a secure beginning with God, a necessary separation, a crisis that can resolve toward growth or stagnation, and a return. The difference is scale. Psychology maps a single lifetime. This pattern places that lifetime inside an eternal one.

The Seven Phases

Each phase has a developmental task, and each has a distorted belief that can keep us stuck in it.

1. Pre-existence: Identity. Before Adam was Adam, he was Michael. He received a new name in mortality, but he did not become someone else. The same is true of us. Our identity as sons and daughters of God comes before anything we do. Think of a baby in the womb: fully sustained and fully belonging before it has done a single thing. The stuck belief here is that worth must be earned. The truth is that it was given first. People who know this can fail without collapsing, because their failures are events, not definitions.

2. The Garden: Innocence. Eden is a place of closeness to God, but also of limited growth. This innocence is a "not yet" more than a virtue: untested agency and limited awareness. Psychologically, it resembles childhood. It's safe, but it can't last if we're going to grow.

3. The Fall: Agency. Lehi teaches that Adam fell that men might be (2 Nephi 2:25). The stuck belief is that our first big choices, and the losses that came with them, were simply mistakes that ruined everything. Maybe we did know better in theory. But behavior is driven by needs and desires, not just knowledge, and learning by experience gives a depth of understanding that theory can't. It's good when we don't have to learn the hard way. When we do, it isn't simply a moral failure. Leaving the Garden was necessary. When people reframe a painful turning point as the beginning of growth rather than the end of goodness, shame loosens its grip.

4. The Wilderness: Awareness. Mortality brings real opposition: grief, exhaustion, anger, temptation. The biblical words for sin, Hebrew chata and Greek hamartia, carry the sense of "missing the mark." Sin shows us where we're still immature or out of alignment. It doesn't reveal who we really are. The danger here isn't struggle; it's denial. People stay stuck in the wilderness when they justify what's harming them instead of facing it. The turning point comes when we are "harrowed up" (Alma 36), and what harrows us begins to belong to our past rather than our present. Being haunted by a former self is a sign you're no longer the same person.

5. Sacrifice: Accountability. The stuck belief is that we have to fix ourselves before we can approach God. The truth is lighter than that. The offering is willingness, including the willingness to give up the pain itself. "I can't do this alone" isn't defeat. It's the beginning of healing.

So consider what you're willing to sacrifice, including the beliefs that hold you back. Are you willing to give up the part of you that says I've messed up too much or I don't belong? Christ sacrificed His life. We sacrifice our sins, and that means more than changing behavior. It means loosening our grip on a shameful past. This is the first intentional step of alignment.

Sacrifice has always been tied to being set apart. In ancient Israel, animals were offered on the altar, and priests were washed, anointed, and clothed before they served (Exodus 29). Christ became the final sacrifice, and after Him the offering shifted to "a broken heart and a contrite spirit" (3 Nephi 9:19–20). Now we are the offering, a "living sacrifice," as Paul put it (Romans 12:1). In the sacrament we witness that we're willing to take upon us the name of Christ (Moroni 4:3). A new name marks a consecrated life, the same pattern we see when Abram becomes Abraham, Jacob becomes Israel, and Simon becomes Peter. Latter-day Saint temple ordinances carry forward this ancient language of washing, anointing, and consecration.

6. Endowment: Empowerment. If Sacrifice is our reach toward God, Endowment is God reaching back. The stuck belief is that change must come from sheer effort. Clinically, this is where white-knuckled self-improvement gives way to something sustainable: power that is received rather than manufactured. Paradoxically, we receive the most when we're willing to give everything away, and what we receive isn't of ourselves. Christ follows the same arc. After laying down His life, He rose and declared that all power had been given to Him in heaven and in earth (Matthew 28:18). Ancient imagery points the same way. Israel's priests were clothed in holy garments "for glory and for beauty" (Exodus 28:2), and the rabbinic image of Adam and Eve's lost garments of light says the same thing: what the Fall veiled, God restores, and more.

7. Return. Return is not arrival or being finished. It's becoming one with God by extending to others the love we first received. The stuck belief is that our lives are our own and that connection threatens our autonomy. Sacrifice reflects the first great commandment, to love God. Return reflects the second, to love others. Endowment is the hinge between them, because we can only give love we've first received.

Christ's return took several forms. Between His death and Resurrection, He organized the preaching of the gospel among the spirits of the dead (D&C 138). After rising, He returned to His Apostles, to the Nephites and Lamanites (3 Nephi 11), and, as the Book of Mormon teaches, to the lost tribes of Israel (3 Nephi 16:1–3; 17:4). Scripture promises that He will speak to all nations of the earth (2 Nephi 29:12). Our returns take different forms too. Death is a return home to God (Alma 40:11). But we also return each time we turn back toward the people we love, carrying what we've learned.

Down Before Up, and Never Just Once

Look at the shape of the arc and you'll notice something: descent keeps showing up. We leave God's presence. We leave the Garden. We lay things down in Sacrifice. Even Return involves a descent, though not for our own sake: we come back down to help others walk the road we've walked. Descent comes before development every time. But development isn't automatic. The descent is guaranteed; the growth is a choice.

The pattern is also a spiral, not a circle. We don't go through it once and graduate. We cycle through it again and again, at deeper levels. And it runs in different areas of life at the same time. You might be in the wilderness at work while experiencing real empowerment in your marriage. You might be newly fallen in one relationship and quietly returning in another.

That's good news for anyone who feels behind. You aren't failing the pattern because one area of your life is hard. You're simply in a different phase there.

Where the Story Ends Up

The pattern begins and ends in the same place: love. In the first phase, we are known and loved before we've done anything. In the last, we learn to love others the way we were first loved. Our identity is never replaced along the way. It's revealed, tested, and consecrated.

If you're in a hard phase right now, the pattern doesn't ask you to pretend otherwise. It asks you to see where you are, to notice what belief might be keeping you there, and to take the next small step. Adam and Eve didn't understand everything when they left the Garden. Neither will we. That's how growth has always worked.

This post draws from my upcoming workbook, The Pattern of Adam: An LDS Therapeutic Workbook on the Transformational Truths of the Restoration.