The
Dynamics Of Releasing Old Patterns And Habits
By Kelly Tobey
In
the following article the name of the person who asked the question has
been changed to preserve her privacy.
Sally’s
question: Can
you offer me some wisdom/feedback?
I
have identified a group of related old beliefs that have been
affecting/determining my behavior/outlook.
I have imagined life without them.
I have made intention to release them.
I am willing to release them.
I
find them still popping up. It
seems to me I'm missing a piece/step in this process... or does it
always take so long to be free of an old way of thinking?
Do
you have any insight on this?
To speed up the process of
change, every time you play out the old habit, bring full conscious
attention to the detrimental results. This awareness helps break the
habit-stage quicker because it reinforces the needed feedback that the
old ways are not serving you. To again use the example of smoking. When
caught in the habit, a person can light up on "automatic
pilot", talk to someone, or watch a TV program and barely have any
attention focused on the act of smoking so the detrimental effects are
not witnessed. If instead they brought full attention to the smoking,
they could consciously experience any detrimental effects. They might
notice the effects it has on their throat and lungs as they draw it in.
They may notice a cough. They may notice a suppression of their
emotions. And so on. The longer someone can stay unconscious while
smoking, the longer they can ignore the detrimental results, and the
longer the habit can continue.
Many of our actions are
determined by a subconscious evaluation of the ratio between assumed
payoffs and assumed detriment. If the payoffs are getting a higher
rating in the subconscious than the detriments, the action is likely to
continue. To complicate matters further, often the subconscious
evaluation system is flawed because of old programming that carries
misconstrued perceptions about what is valuable and what is not. For
example, if we were told as a child that we were better to been seen but
not heard, we may have decided that being quiet would bring us the
payoff of other peoples approval. If that old belief remained in the
subconscious unaddressed, it may totally undermine us in the face of
wanting to do something such as a verbal presentation for work.
Preparing for the presentation may trigger an underlying fear that we
will be faced with disapproval if we go through with it. As long as the
source of the fear stays subconscious, we may end up sabotaging the
project with out ever knowing why. Bringing awareness to the
subconscious brings us into consciousness about the situation, and then
we have the opportunity to see and change any possible flaws that we
have held in our subconscious beliefs.
As long as we maintain levels of
denial and refuse to look at what "makes us tick", we can live
out a path of self destruction that is motivated by a fully approving
subconscious mind that actually thinks the path is constructive and will
lead us to payoffs of some kind.
Sally, in your subconscious, you
may still carry a belief that acting on the old patterns that you
referred to, will lead to some kind of payoff. That part of your mind
will not want you to release the old behaviors. If the patterns you
mention truly are unfruitful behaviors then the more conscious awareness
you bring to them whenever they are playing out the better. Through this
you can raise your awareness of the detriments to a level where the
payoff is not worth the price being paid.
Another approach to accelerating
the change is to be clear on what the payoffs are and then look at how
to create them in a different way that is not plagued with detriment.
Lets return to the smoking example. If the main payoff to be gained from
smoking is relaxation, the person can look for other ways to get to the
payoff of relaxation that are free of the detriments created by the
smoking. For example if the relaxation can be achieved through applying
a meditation technique that can been used when needed with little or no
detriment, then releasing the smoking is going to be easier.
Finding a payoff such as a desire
to be more relaxed may be fairly straightforward, but be aware when
looking for payoffs that they are not always obvious. An example of a
trickier payoff to uncover: We may be carrying an underlying belief that
we deserve to be punished for some mistake that we made. The payoff of
living out a detrimental pattern is that we get to give ourselves the
punishment that we think that we deserve for having made that mistake.
If we want to be able to release
our self-punishing, destructive, patterns, sometimes we need to uncover
our underlying subconscious beliefs about mistakes we have made, and
then truly forgive ourselves for those mistakes. Once the forgiveness is
in place there is no reason to keep punishing ourselves, so the
destructive patterns can release. (Note: Forgiveness is attained through
a heartfelt process of mercifulness. Many people do not understand that
it is not enough to just practice a mental concept of forgiveness. The
head alone cannot forgive; the heart is essential in the process.)
One thing that shores up denial
is an inability to forgive mistakes. If we feel our mistakes are
unforgivable then we will not want to bring our subconscious beliefs up
into conscious awareness because our subconscious holds a history of
every mistake we ever thought we made. Ironically our unwillingness to
look at and forgive our mistakes will assure that we continue to make
those mistakes because without awareness they cannot be attended to.
I would suggest that those
people that claim the past is just the past and is better left forgotten
are mistaken. The past is the foundation of who we are in the present.
If past mistakes are left unaddressed and unforgiven our foundation
remains unstable and we are set up for self-destructiveness.