Are you a Puppet on Your Emotional Strings?

Breaking the Chains of our Unconscious Patterns

Cycles and patterns have been on my mind lately. Cycles of behavior, of thought, of emotions, the dances we do with ourselves and with others. The idea that unless we are intimately familiar with our inner selves we are destined to repeat the same cycles over and over again. And even when we are familiar, sometimes we still repeat them, because we haven’t truly learned what they feel like in order to recognize them and then choose a different behavior.

Many of our patterns are engrained from our upbringing. Many are adopted for survival. Many of the cycles, if not identified, worked through, and monitored can show up as unhealthy behavior like codependency, being controlling, living in a victim mentality, etc. In fact, most maladaptive behaviors can be linked to unconscious coping and defenses.

Here are a few examples, pulled from my work with clients, of patterns and how they might be internalized when we’re young:

-We learn that we are shown the most love and attention when we are being useful, or taking care of others (mostly our parents), so that translates into a cycle of saving or of taking care of others in order to feel valuable and loved, sometimes at the expense of our own needs. It might be hard to…