Hello again!

In case you missed it, you can read Part One of this post here!

Now let’s keep looking at how our programming affects us - especially in the context of trying to make big (or even small!) life changes.

 

Why This Programing Can Be A Problem

 

Today, we live lives where we aren’t so connected to reality - where humans have created all sorts of safety-nets and other ways of separating ourselves from the direct consequences of our actions. 

We have childhood programming that is based on the temporary codependent relationship we had with our caregivers and based on the false understanding that the world is a place where we must FIT IN to be safe and where we must be understood and approved of by others to get our needs met through them. 

We have programs that were created in our childhoods when we had little to no agency and the only thing we could control was our behavior - and we tried to control our behavior again so that we would be pleasing to the authority figure in our lives so that THEY would understand us and meet our needs for us. 

We have programs that tell us to do certain things and be a certain way in order to be ‘good’ that are actually harmful for us but that were vital in childhood to keep us alive, and we have a program that says if we are rejected that we won’t be ok - even if as adults we can now see that the approval of others is no longer the middle man between ourselves and getting our needs met. 

We learned ways of being in our childhoods not just intellectually, but deep in our bodies - and to stray from those patterns now is VERY difficult, because to the nervous system these patterns are VITAL for our survival. 

Even if there are parts of what we do now that cause us harm or cause others harm - it can be very challenging to actually CHANGE because the body is going to feel like change = death! 

 

We also have to remember that a LOT of our patterns weren’t created from our ADULT logic where we had a clear view of what was happening, why it was happening and what was best. Rather, we developed a lot of our patterns in childhood when we were projecting a whole bunch of things onto reality that weren’t true, and where we were figuring things out with our CHILDHOOD reasoning. Not our adult logic. We were filtering our experiences through a childhood perspective - which isn’t usually in alignment with actual reality. We were assuming that certain reactions from our caregivers meant this or that when they really didn’t. We were assuming that we were being responded to because of something WE were doing right or wrong when a lot of the time what was happening to and around us wasn’t because of us at all. We created a LOT of stories that we then built more and more meaning on top of/into over time - that are rooted in a temporary reality that no longer exists - us being essentially victims to our caregivers and other authority figures who didn’t have the agency to make our own lives better when we were in pain - and that are rooted in genuine misunderstanding. 

 

We as adults walk around with essentially two operating systems going at once. We have those old programs that we have to fit in and follow the patterns we learned in childhood running at the same time as our adult, conscious mind is trying to navigate this world of independence and autonomy that is big, complex and oftentimes out of our control.

Yet very few of us have an AWARENESS of all of this. Rather it simply appears to us that we have an adult, conscious mind that can see and understand the world around us, and then we have these drives, impulses, behaviors and thoughts that take us ‘off track’ or that do bad/harmful things seemingly for no reason.

Most of us experience that there is the logical, reasonable part of ourselves that believes that it should be able to be in total control of our actions, and then we have our emotions, our impulses, our patterns and our habits that seem to run contrary to this logic - and a lot of us then feel like we have to fight with/try to get rid of/try to ‘fix’ these seemingly ‘broken’ parts of ourselves because they just make no sense and are causing harm for ‘no reason!’

When the reason is - we are doing our best to get our needs met. Most of the time we don’t actually know what our needs are because again, we’ve never been taught to look for that - rather we have lived lives of trying to live up to external expectation because that was what we thought we needed to do (and did need to do) to be cared for by OTHERS.

Everything we do habitually is a result of us learning that THIS is the BEST WAY to keep ourselves safe and to get our needs met. 

THAT is the foundation for EVERYTHING.

 

Remembering that our patterns are a mish-mosh of childhood reasoning, programming from our early life, adaptations that have come as we’ve matured and developed and that combination of the childhood mind and the adult mind.

Learning to understand where our patterns came from, why we have them, why our bodies are doing the same things over and over again even against our conscious will, why we react the way we react, why we FEEL the way we feel about certain things and why we are driven to our coping, numbing and self sabotaging behaviors is KEY to being able to make actual, sustainable changes over time - and this requires that we take a step back and start with compassion and curiosity.

 

We’re doing everything we’re doing for a good reason, we learned to do it at some point, and we learned that it was the safest/best way to survive. 

We are drawn into our patterns because to the body, what we’ve always done is the BEST thing to KEEP doing - because there is a sense that what we’ve always done is the reason we’re still safe and alive - even if this isn’t the case in real reality. 

Remember, during our evolution as a species, if a habit worked, it would have been good for us and it would have been something we DID want to repeat - like instinctively running for shelter when we heard a rustle in the bushes behind us without having to actually CHECK if there was an animal or other person trying to kill us. 

Now in our current reality we likely developed a whole bunch of patterns in our childhoods in response to feeling that we weren’t being loved or that we weren’t safe or in response to not getting our needs met that DIDN’T actually ‘save’ us or fix the problem - like learning to be quiet so that our caregivers would approve of us more even when we wanted to be loud, which in REALITY didn’t actually ‘save our lives’ because in REAL reality our caregivers were likely going to provide for us even if they were upset with us - but it didn’t FEEL this way to US.

Because we experienced that FEELING of threat/not being safe, did an action and then didn’t die - our bodies programmed in that that action was the REASON we stayed alive and thus, we are going to have that as an instinctual response to pain moving forward. 

 

This is a HUGE key to realize.

Our patterns, in many ways, have been developed as ways of escaping pain or trying to procure pleasure within the context of the codependent relationship we had with our caregivers and in the context of the reality of not having actual autonomy or power for MOST of our childhoods. THIS is why we have our patterns now - they made sense to as as children, and they got programmed in as lifesaving when we felt the threat of our caregivers/other authority figures pulling away because we NEEDED them.

Now that we are adults, things are different - but our bodies don’t understand that a lot of the time.

If we didn’t have agency and were in pain, we were GOING to develop coping mechanisms to try to numb out/hide from that pain or threat - and a lot of the time those methods of coping were going to bring with them their own set of negative outcomes because as children we didn’t have the ability to develop habits that were truly addressing our needs - we could only numb or stimulate to make the feelings feel better - we couldn’t actually make the CIRCUMSTANCES better.

We all have ways of being now that are a part of our ‘normal’ that are very hard to change, because they are not things we are doing consciously - they are programs we are repeating based on how our biology works!

When we can slow down and have compassion for where our patterns and programs have come from, we are often going to find SO MUCH clarity on WHY we do what we do and what we actually need to support ourselves in changing - safety, comfort and slow and steady movement towards new actions that get our NEEDS met in better ways.

But understanding that we aren’t doing anything we’re doing for ‘no reason’ is a BIG first step in this whole change process - and it’s not easy!

Hopefully this brief exploration has given you some insight into why our patterns exist and why change can be so challenging.

Can you have some compassion for yourself and your patterns, after reading and realizing all of this?

Perception And Change

Next, we have to remember that our minds are constantly looking for a consistent narrative about reality.

A LOT of what we think about and feel about the world around us isn’t actually ‘fact’ the way a lot of us think it is.

 

Rather, we are constructing meaning and projecting ideas out onto the world that help us explain to ourselves what’s happening and why that, oftentimes, aren’t actually TRUE.

We all have a perception and a perception - but again this perception isn’t something we are consciously aware of - it is the lens through which we view the world yet because it’s so close to us, because it’s HOW we see, we don’t have an awareness that it’s there most of the time.

We are taking in the world around us and we are filtering it through our perception machine - giving meaning to things, making connections between circumstances, words, events and outcomes, finding or creating patterns that make sense to us and justifying what we’re seeing as happening because of how we believe the world functions.

We are creating a narrative about reality constantly - and rather than seeing this we are perceiving that we are simply viewing life objectively, seeing things for how ‘they are’.

We are creating all sorts of stories all day long, again most of the time totally unconsciously. We might be saying that this person treated us in this way because of us doing X, Y or Z - even if that person was simply having their own experience and their behavior had little to do with us. We may be assuming that we’re doing things the ‘right’ way or the way they ‘have’ to be done without truly looking into the roots of our patterns, why we do them and if they are actually the most effective way of getting our goals/needs met. We could be creating stories about what others are saying and doing and correlating those stories to ourselves. 

We are filtering the reality we are seeing through the lens of our understanding - the rules we think are controlling the world and the rules we think we must follow in order to be ‘good’ or ‘right’.

We aren’t seeing reality objectively, we are seeing it as a part of our narrative - a narrative we’ve constructed and been handed through our entire life experience.

 

Which means again, we can be assuming that we are getting a certain outcome in life ‘because’ of this or that thing we are or aren’t doing, or because of this or that cosmic reason, when in reality what’s playing out is happening for a totally different reason.

We can have expectations that something ‘should’ give us a certain result based on how we currently understand the world, only to be surprised every time when the expected result isn’t the actual result.

We can be in a state where we are connecting two things that have no connection, or not connecting two things that are intimately connected.

We are going to be looking at the world and determining what’s happening by fitting reality INTO OUR PERCEPTION - ie. we are going to come up with explanations for how the world is and what’s happening that fit our world view, vs. being in a state where we are open to shifting our world view if it doesn’t match what we seem to be observing/experiencing. Rather than observing and coming up with explanations based on the observations, we are explaining what we see based on what we already believe - and this is what can oftentimes get us into trouble.

 

We are always going to favor the narratives we already have, and we are going to USE those narratives to explain reality to ourselves, vs. observing reality and creating our narratives FROM that observation.

 

This is what gives us a sense of security and continuity in life. 

 

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Let’s take another pause here, and come back next week to finish our exploration of perception!

<3

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