When is the earliest a pattern can appear?
When a child wants to be fed, held, is sleepy, etc., so almost from the moment of birth, they are looking for ways to communicate effectively.
When you talk to newborns, their brains show activity in the areas that will later create speech. Our need to communicate is that strong, virtually genetic. The patterns you learn help you survive, and that would be great if that were all they ended up doing. The problem is they also end up, depending on how they are created and your own particular nature, causing you to behave in certain ways that can last the rest of your life.
If, for instance, you learn rejection at the hands of someone early on, the pattern begins and becomes quite complicated and subtle, but it will govern how you modify and control your behavior for the rest of your life. People add to it, you add to it, and by the time you're an adult, you have a full-blown way of behaving in virtually any situation. Other people created the bulk of those patterns, and most of those people are as screwed up as you think you might be now. In a very real sense, you're living someone else's life. They control you through your patterns. Even when you think you're breaking a pattern, often you are only reacting in ways that would cause the same reactions again if circumstances for the original creation of it were to reoccur.
Sounds like fun, doesn't it. The recap takes you back gradually to the place where it, meaning any given pattern, started, and there you have the chance not to break it, but simply eliminate it from your energy. Try not to break the pattern for breathing, though - that would be a bad thing.