How you got love
How we interact
We all have patterns of behavior. Our childhood experiences helped create our patterns. With each experience and the result of that experience, we’d make a decision about us and who we are in the world. For example, if a child discovers that good grades get special attention and love from his parents, he might develop the belief that he has to over-achieve to get love. Study and excelling in school might well become his pattern.
Understanding these patterns may give an adult more options for interacting with those around him. A more detailed explanation of how these decisions become beliefs for each of us is available in the post Life Cycle of Decisions
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Understanding your decisions
If you can discover some of your patterns, you can decide if they are still appropriate for you as an adult. If the pattern is no longer needed, you can decide to replace it or let it go and retrain yourself to react in new ways to experiences you encounter. It often takes some re-training because, for the most part, your unconscious is the part of your brain reacting. It has been conditioned over a lifetime so it can take a while to re-train.
Some decisions are still beneficial for you and so you’d want to keep them. This is where the awareness comes in. Bringing these unconscious patterns to consciousness gives you the opportunity to be more in charge of how and when you will utilize these beliefs.
Here’s an exercise to try
Try this simplified exercise:
Answer this question - “How did you get love as a child?” Think back to times when you got lavished with hugs and praise from someone important to you.
were you the good one among your brother and sisters? Cleaning your room without being asked, maybe helping in the kitchen, possibly policing your siblings to keep the peace for the parent you especially wanted the positive response from,
were you demanding? Being louder than everyone else to gain attention or pouting until someone noticed your unhappiness and gave you extra attention to cheer you up.
were you sickly? Having illnesses would encourage your caretaker to give you extra attention and love because of your sickness. You’d also have fewer expectations because your health was the top priority.
There are unlimited options to answer the question “How did you get love as a child?” Think about it for a moment. You may want to write it down. Some people have different techniques for different caretakers. For dad, you might have been the good one but for mother you have been the little helper.
Exercise part 2: Once you are clear how you got love as a child, now answer this question:
How do you get love today? Again you may want to write it down.
Begin to look for your patterns
Armed with your answers from the exercise above, you can begin to look for correlations between how you got love as a child and how you get love now as an adult. Noticing similar results. Many of us do.
Maybe you realized you gave up on getting love (maybe you had a missing parent or your parents were abusive). Unfortunately negative patterns are developed as well. Even these negative patterns can be turned around and you can consciously work on changing this perception in your adult life. Again awareness is the key - you can’t change a pattern until you are aware of it.
Changing your patterns
Now that you have the information on your patterns you can begin to shift them to habits more useful to your life today. There is some trial and error involved and you will slip back into your old patterns sometimes but give yourself some room for mistakes and slips and congratulate yourself on successes when they occur.
I remember a Seinfeld episode when George was having such lousy luck in his life that it finally occurred to him if he always screwed it up why not try doing the opposite of what he would normally do.
With that in mind, one of your tactics may be to do the opposite (or nearly so) of what you would normally do. Go out on that date that you are hesitant to try. Apply for the job that you think is beyond you. Handle that argument with your significant other in a different way than you normally would. Instead of escalating the argument with accusations or name-calling, stop and speak in “I” statements. Let the emotion dissipate and take responsibility by saying “I thought you said” or “I’m sorry I forgot to tell you” or “this was my fault because I”. This opens the way for new solutions to solve the conflicts between you.
To sum it up
The more often you can become aware of your patterns, you become more comfortable changing them when they are not serving you. Try being more true to your current adult self instead of following patterns you thought you had to in order to get the love you wanted as a child.
Want a little more help working through these patterns? Contact Swies Life Coach for a discovery appointment