HOW ARE PATTERNS CREATED?

There are basically two ways that patterns are formed: Layered pain, and imprinting. 1. LAYERED UNHEALED PAIN: It goes something like this:    º We are hurt by someone or some situation.    º We are unable (or not allowed) to cry the pain which would bring it naturally to healing.    º The pain, and often the memory of the event, becomes frozen within us.    º This is repeated over and over again, with new pain layering on top of the old pain. Being repeatedly treated in hurtful ways, or being constantly/repeatedly thrown into painful situations, and not being able to express the pain we feel about it, conditions us to respond to the world in a certain way, and to expect certain things from the world. Many patterns are formed in just this way, simply by the repetitive layering and compression of unexpressed emotion. When pain is unexpressed from one experience, it sits inside, heavy and hurting. When we are repeatedly treated in hurtful ways, the unexpressed pain builds up, layer upon layer, creating an onion with tightly compressed, but frozen, emotions and memories. At first the pain may be close to our awareness, but the heavier it becomes, the MORE pain that is piled up there, the more we need to push it away from consciousness. Pushing it away is a survival mechanism. Without being able to cry and heal the pain, having it sitting there at the back of your throat or on your forehead is constant torture. So, we push it away, and "forget". Then it's like having a wound that you don't notice until something touches it. Since emotions are magnetic in essence, similar emotions will be drawn together. When an experience occurs in your life that is similar to the original pain, it is drawn to the pain of the first, and attaches itself there in sympathetic resonance. So the onions grow, and accumulate, and we have to learn to swiftly tuck the pain away in a pocket and forget. After a while we have large pockets occupied by many onions, where lots of pain is glommed together. For many of us, we don't even know this is happening. Our resistance response is so swift and so unconscious, we are not even aware of the new pain coming in, let alone the mega-ton, multi-pocketed, onion-filled bag sitting in a back corner of our psychological basement. We may be briefly aware of some little nagging pain, but our survival depends on not feeling those feelings! And so we've learned ways of avoiding and containing our pain, and never see the patterns we are reinforcing. Patterns begin to form with the first few layers of unhealed pain, and are constantly being reinforced with each new layer that is added. The first painful event may create merely anger and hurt, or fear of it happening again, but it is not yet an expectation. It is not yet a BELIEF. But slowly as the layers build up, the pain we are holding becomes the platform for a belief system that tells us what to expect from the world. If we are treated in hurtful ways, we come to expect hurt from the world. We *believe* that is reality. And worse, we *believe* that that reality is what we deserve somehow. The decisions that first go into forming these beliefs are primitive. They are based on primal response to pain that has no outlet. And because the emotions are frozen in time, they cannot evolve and grow to understanding or forgiveness. The pain is supporting decisions and beliefs that were incorrect, but changing your mind is only part of the solution. TRULY changing these beliefs and patterns can only be done by unraveling, or peeling, each onion; by allowing the pain to move, and the emotions to unfreeze and then the beliefs will evolve naturally. NOTE: Sometimes the beliefs themselves keep the pattern locked in place and prevents us from reaching and feeling (and healing) our pain. If this is the case, it's needful to do some judgment release, goal setting, visualization, etc, to jostle the frozen belief enough to allow the pain to surface. 2. IMPRINTING: Some patterns are formed by a single force or impact at an early stage of development. An extremely traumatic or painful event acts on the pre-consciousness something like smashing a stamp down on a blank sheet of paper. In a pre-conscious state, we experience the pain of this impact without any ability to process it or understand it, and it goes into a state of hiding. Imprinting can occur at later stages of life as well. The main difference between imprinting and layered pain is the magnitude of the pain, and the force of it. If the impact is great enough - painful enough - to cause fragmentation, then the part of us that took the hit is severed from us. We retain the imprint, the stamp, where the pain was given, but we have no memory at all of what happened. This is not merely a hidden memory, but a fragmented one. Whether hidden or fragmented, until we cry the pain and heal the wound, our psyche forever holds the imprint of that stamp, and its shape is forcefully embedded into our lives. Return to Top