Overcoming pattern (Guestpost)

I have overcome yesterdays dreadful feeling in picking up the phone nearly straight after posting.
Later that day Mandy gave me an explanation for the pattern I often feel trapped in. Some days I am dealing better with this feeling than on other days. I thought this might be of interest to many of us and asked her to write this post:

Do we have to keep repeating patterns?
by Mandy

I'm writing this post at Paula's request, based on a conversation that we had last night on the phone.

Some of you may already know me, but for those that don't, I'm an avid blogger who happens to be a therapist, or it could be the other way round!

All our conversations get around to therapy techniques in the end, and none more so than last night. And it is what I told Paula about last night that she wants you to know about, as it made so much sense to her, and she thinks everyone deserves to know it to!

One of the things I go on about is, our histories, and although we can't change them, we can make a choice of whether to be a product or a victim of them. This regardless of what has happened to us as children. As all children get varying degrees of what they may perceive in later life to be bad parenting. So this applies to all, and obviously if you have more issues from your childhood than most, then this may apply even more to you.

So what am I talking about here?

Well, as adults painful things happen to us, relationship break ups, deaths of loved ones, job losses etc etc. All of them traumatic and cause us stress and anxiety.

What we have a choice about is, how we deal with them.

The minute the difficult event happen we go straight away inside ourselves, to the same emotional space we went as children when things were tough.

We feel alone, scared, isolated, guilty and childlike.

We have a well thumbed pattern of behaviour that is the same place we always go to when life gets tough. It will obviously be slightly different for each individual, as we all have different stories from our pasts.

But the response is the same.

As human beings we do not develop emotionally much beyond five! Just think about how you react if you hit your thumb with a hammer. The language may be richer than when you were five, but the response of wanting someone to make it better, or take the blame is universal!

Of course intellectually we have moved light years away from being five! But intellect is no good here in these situations, at least not initially.

What this means then is, a horrid situation has arisen in your life as an adult, and you feel utterly awful. This feeling if not dealt with fairly quickly, and by that I mean letting it go, in getting the words out of your head, whether with tears or rage doesn't matter as long as they are let go of, can turn into anxiety or depression.

Anxiety and depression along with other things are the way human beings DON'T deal with the pain inside. (Anxiety and depression and the other stress related disorders are too big to deal with in a blog post I'm afraid)

So back to feeling awful, and this is the powerful stuff. Just because you go inside to the same place you went to as a child when things were tough DOESN'T MEAN THAT YOU HAVE TO STAY THERE AS AN ADULT!

We cannot stop going to the emotional bad place when terrible things happen in the first place, but we can choose not to stay there.

We stop having to stay there by letting go, screaming, shouting, swearing, crying, sobbing these are all great ways to let of stuff. As adults we don't have mummy on tap to kiss us better. So we have to learn to self care. But to do it properly and not in a nasty controlling parent way, as in 'pull yourself together, don't be so sorry for yourself.' Horrid horrid phrases that we should ban immediatley from our vocabulary. Try saying instead, it's okay to have sorrow, I am in a nasty place and it's okay to feel rotten for a while. Or it's okay to cry and feel sad and when I've let myself cry I will feel better.

These are kind self soothing words and they actually make the difference between mental health and mental dis-ease.

Go on try, be kind to you, know that it's okay to feel what you feel. They are your feelings and whatever you feel is ok, as long as you can identify that you are caring for yourself and not beating yourself up by staying in that lonely child place.

I hope that this is helpful, and if so, pop over and see me sometime as I go on about this sort of stuff lots!

Go well

mandy
(Fire Byrd)