Spinning Our Wheels

Why do we get stuck in miserable patterns? Why do we make the same mistakes, or fall into the same emotional funk time and time again? Why do we wind up in the same types of relationships over and over?

Ask any therapist and you’re likely to get a different answer. Actually, you’ll probably get similar answers; only the jargon will change depending on that counselor’s theoretical orientation. Most theories, however, seem to boil down to one simple point:

our past predicts our future.

It’s a simple answer with a complex meaning. In general, we trust our brains too much. To understand how we get stuck, we must know that our brains try to work as efficiently as possible. They don’t want to waste energy relearning things that have already been learned. While they excel at recognizing new information, organizing it in a meaningful way, and recalling the information when the situation occurs again, they are not good at adjusting information once it has been recorded. This is where our problems begin.

We Live According to Blueprints

Think about the your experiences starting a new job. Or the time you had a first date in a new relationship. Think about the first time you used a smartphone or the drove a car. During these new experiences, our brains had little background to rely upon in order to give us direction. Luckily, it doesn’t take long for us to create a set of guidelines for responding and then apply those to similar scenarios in the future. If I were to put you in a new car today, or hand you my phone and ask you go Google “brain functioning”, you would know exactly what to do. From the moment you were born, your brain has been developing instructions for navigating your life.

Our Blueprints Go Deep

It’s not just simple tasks that your brain is creating blueprints for. You have a blueprint for how to be a spouse, a parent, a friend, or a professional. You have blueprints for how you handle anger, happiness, and sadness. You have patterns for how important you are to others, what gives you value, and how you get noticed by others. The rules that our brain develop become the messages we adopt about ourselves and our role in our worlds. They become the voice of our inner dialogue and they become automatic. If our minds had their way, we would eventually act only on auto-pilot.

When Our Brains Are Wrong

While it is helpful that we do not have to relearn how to act in day-to-day situations, it is likely not beneficial if these instructions were written during stressful, traumatic, abusive, or otherwise disruptive moments of life. Imagine a young child playing on a playground. Her parents put her down and she runs off to play. Soon she falls down and suffers a minor scratch. She begins to cry and her parents come to her, pick her up, comfort, and encourage her to continue. This child has adopted a message that it’s safe to explore her world because when she falls she will be supported. She has developed a sense of trust in herself and her parents. She has developed a sense of self-worth because she was worthy of being comforted. She has also developed a sense of resiliency by learning that pain can be worth the trouble of exploration.

But what if she wasn’t comforted? What might she have learned about herself? How bad would she have to get hurt for someone to notice? How extreme would her behaviors have to get before people paid attention? One time falling on a playground likely won’t create long-lasting emotional scars, but consistent rejection, embarrassment, abuse, loss, ridicule, punishment, etc. can lead to negative patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. The blueprints created in these scenarios will be carried into all future scenarios if they are not actively acknowledged and challenged.

The Therapy Voodoo

Uncovering these patterns is the “magic” of therapy. This is the “unconsciousness” people expect to learn about in therapy. It’s a common assumption that in therapy you sit down, talk about your childhood, and then leave a new person. I don’t believe that. We can talk about your past until we’re both blue in the face, but if we’re not doing it with a purpose, then we’re just reminiscing.

Counseling With A Purpose

Of course, exploring our past is a vital part of the therapy process, but we do so in a way that helps us understand where patterns and messages were written. Because when we understand what messages we’ve adopted as truths and how they’ve developed we can begin to see how the past is influencing the present. When this is discovered, you can learn to leave the past where it belongs and to create more helpful, realistic patterns for the present. This means taking your life off auto-pilot and exploring the hidden messages in your thoughts and behaviors. Notice when your emotion changes and become curious about how your experiences have shaped your response. The next time you feel angry, jealous, sad, or excited, pay attention to the messaging within those emotions.

Therapists are trained to look for the patterns and messages behind behaviors. If you would like help discovering your own messages, let’s talk.