It is rarely the same words. It is the same shape.
A different colleague, a different company, sometimes a different industry — and about four minutes into the disagreement you get a small flicker of recognition. You have been here. The specifics have changed and the thing underneath has not.
Most people notice this in their thirties, file it as bad luck with colleagues, and stop thinking about it.
Why it follows you
The version people reach for is that they attract a certain kind of person. Sometimes true, mostly not.
What actually happens is more mechanical. You have a small number of situations that reliably move you out of your considered self and into a default. Once you are in the default, the argument runs the same way it always does, because you are running the same way you always do.
The trigger is usually narrower than you think. Not "criticism" but a particular kind of criticism delivered in a particular register. Not "being challenged" but being challenged in front of someone whose opinion you have decided matters. That is why the argument seems to come from nowhere — the trigger is specific enough that you have never isolated it, so it reads as random.
The part that surprises people
The recurring argument is almost always downstream of something you value.
The leader who keeps fighting about standards is defending something real. The one who keeps having the same argument about autonomy is protecting something that got taken from her once. The fight recurs not because you are stubborn but because something you actually care about is being touched, and you have no practised way of defending it calmly.
Which means the goal is not to stop having the argument. It is to be able to have it deliberately rather than automatically.
What actually helps
Two things, and only two, in my experience.
Naming the trigger precisely enough to see it coming. "I get defensive" is useless. "When someone questions my judgement in front of a person I respect, I go cold and start being technically correct at them" is usable, because you can catch it in the first thirty seconds. Everything depends on the specificity.
Knowing what you are actually defending. Once you can name the value underneath, you can defend it directly, which takes about a tenth of the energy of defending it sideways through an argument about something else.
Where the general answer stops
Both of those require you to know which pattern is yours, and here I run out of anything useful to say in a blog post.
There are perhaps a dozen common shapes this takes, and they do not respond to the same handling. The one that comes from needing to be right is not the one that comes from needing to be useful, and treating the second as though it were the first will make it worse. I cannot tell from here which is running in you, and neither, usually, can the person having it — because it feels like a reasonable response to the situation every single time.
What tends to break it open is seeing the pattern described from outside, in language you did not choose. Your own account of yourself has already absorbed the pattern into a story where it makes sense. An external description does not have that courtesy.
So the question worth answering is not why they keep starting it. It is: which argument is yours, and what is it protecting?