When you begin to see patterns that hurt you, lose the excuses

You wanted it to be love, so you stayed. So you tried again and again to meet them where they never met you. 

This became a pattern. Right intention – wrong person.

Then the dynamic, the kind of person you chose and were chosen by, kind of echoed, and you began to realise that the choice you made over and over again, and those who chose you, had a similarity about them – not that was good. Not one that gave you what your heart really wanted.

I have found over more than a decade of treating people that the sadnesses, the frustrations, the despair that they come with, understandably looking for help, always come with a pattern. This traceable outline upon therapeutic investigation has an origin, an early maladaptive type of coping, and a misunderstood co-morbidly associated set of behaviours, as well as a perpetual sense of disappointment that seeks to focus on external blaming. As well as hoping that “next time it will be different”.

Anyone might well feel that when they are being and allowing poor treatment from a relationship, and experiencing all the sad emotions and feelings that accompany it, that the blame is due to the way they are being treated. 

This, of course, in its truest sense is true, and they will deserve all the understanding and sympathy that they hopefully will be able to receive.

However, alongside this, there comes a moment where the resolve of this repetition will absolutely need to be investigated from the perspective of the part that they, meaning you, have played in it.

The reason for this is so that the pattern that causes the pain and disappointment can be broken through initially an awareness, and an allowing.

To become part of a resolve 

Change is possible, but there also needs to be a part of you that believes this. It is not enough to just go on someone else’s suggestion because there will be a major part of you that doesn’t allow this to be absorbed to be part of the change. 

So I think also sometimes there needs to be some kind of “bottoming out” felt, and “being sick and tired of being sick and tired”.

It is entirely possible for healing and change to take place once someone is feeling like that. 

Simply because it can’t go on anymore.

I had a patient in particular who came to me, utterly broken and “bottomed out”, a couple of years ago, nothing was working consistently in his life, on so many levels, but he had genuinely arrived at a place where he had enough, and he was willing to go to any lengths not to be in the same place anymore.

I don’t often use the term 'transformational', but I’m going to in his case because from that place, his whole life really did turn around.

How was and is that achieved?

It is my belief and also my experience over the years that returning to discover early relationship dynamics from childhood play a major part in piecing together the origins.

Once this is discovered, new vocabulary can be put around so much that was misunderstood because of our innate instinct to survive.

We, in early childhood, live in a feeling world that is limited and without vocabulary around understood origin, only around what is felt and the part of those feelings and what they play, and the incorrect narrative that we associated these feelings with, can be translated and re written in terms of the narrative they created.

We cannot possess or experience clarity when we do not have the correct facts, or the truth, and clarity is about ownership that cannot be argued with.

Along with this comes a quiet certainty without the need to participate in an imposed confusion. 

Where we allow through lack of certainty another person’s chaos, their rendition of who we are and their imagined love, care, attention and continued presence is unreliable and only based upon what we do for them and not who we are, it will always be a place of fear and not a safe harbour. It will always be what we did as small children to survive, rather than what is good for us. 

We will be coming from a place of threat. The threat of imagined and feared loss rather than from a place of authenticity. It is from a place of your own truth and authenticity that you become untouchable.

This exists in your stillness. Where the only “shots” being called are your own quiet convictions. 

When patterns exist that do not serve us, they must be looked at.

Self-examination can be difficult, of course it can, even when done from within a safe place with an experienced therapist, but it can also be the beginning of a freedom from emotional pain that feels inspirational and liberating.

Start off small. This is always the best way: don’t take on too much. If you take on what is realistically achievable, however small, it will prove to you that you can! 

You will also then have the known and felt experience of the possibility achieved. From there, you will be able to go on to do a little more, and bit by bit, before you know it, a new pattern will begin to take shape.

Here you will no longer have to live in the silence of bad consequences any more. But instead, there will be a felt sovereignty. Your presence will be decided by you, and not determined by fear.

Hope and felt victory will lower the inertia and the fatigue of hopelessness that lives alongside doing and repeating the same patterns that hurt you again and again. And a mirrored dynamic whose narrative was a lie.

Here you do not play out your time and your days in a weary repetition of allowing yourself to be defined by what hurts and diminishes you, but instead, here is your resolve, which needs no explanation.

Some will be committed to misunderstanding you. Leave those people behind. 

You are and always were enough 

What caused you to behave in a maladaptive way when you were a child was not because of you but more because of both circumstance and negative ways of relating and responding by your parents because of their own fears, and because of what they were taught by and from their own experiences. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t do their best or that you were not loved. 

Repeated patterns in our relationships are so much more about what is unresolved rather than by what was intended.

Today is a new day, and a new chance to change and find a way that brings happiness rather than regret.

Please take it and find your joy and freedom.

Your value does not depend on someone else’s chaos, or the way they want to play you because of your own imagined unworthiness, where it lives in a pattern of allowing to secure an imagined promise of love.

Those who you hold up too high, who you fear are irreplaceable and your only hope for love, and who ask you to comply to their mirrored brokenness by becoming it.

There is only one God, and his love is eternal, not conditional.