Patterns

I’ve made an interesting discovery this week. One that has enabled me to deal with something I’ve been pondering for one and a half year.

This all (of course) started during my stay in the clinic. I was working on emotions and learned that a lot of emotions can be dealt with by analysing them and then applying the gathered information to a solution.

Think about feelings like insecurity, fear, anger etc.

You mostly do this by gathering information on when you get these emotions, where you get them, what they do with you and so forth. It’s very helpful and I can still apply it in many situations.

However, I also found that there are a few emotions that I have seem to defy any rationality whatsoever. There seems to be no method to them, they just arise all of a sudden without there being any plausible reason for them.

I have found this to be very disturbing over time, as I got the feeling there must be something wrong, or maybe I am just a bad person, etc.

Then, this week, I overheard something that struck very true within me. It’s the fact that emotions can arise, not due to any outside cause, but due to patterning.

Patterning is where you have established a set of links within yourself where one triggers almost instantaniously triggers a set response. In this case, an emotion.

A pattern can be anything. It may be something harmless like hearing churchbells and getting that “sunday” feeling or it can be quite disturbing as in my case.

It’s basically a Pavlov reaction. There may have been a very plausible reason for the connection in the past, but now it’s just an automatic reaction. And as long as you are unaware of it, you will in all probability just act it out and reinforce it, without knowing what you are doing and why the feeling won’t go away.

The good thing about it is that a pattern has no moral component: it just is, and once you recognise it, you can work with it. And that gives a LOT of freedom.

You can just apply the same thing I’ve described in my article on “Unlearning“: not fighting against it, not trying to forget about it, but just doing something else and noticing that you don’t die, the word doesn’t end and you don’t turn into a gibbering wreck. It’s that simple.

Simple does not mean easy! It will take time and effort. But it is possible, and that’s what matters.

So, from someone who has just recognised a pattern of always taking a confrontational attitude to other people and is working on that, a total non-confrontational and heartfelt:

“Be well and have a good day!”

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Tags: Anger, automatic reaction, effort, emotion, moral component, pavlov, plausible reason, Simple, work

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