Emotional Healing: How Patterns Work

HOW PATTERNS WORK: From Pain ... To Patterns ... To Creating Our Reality

Locked Up In the Onion
Whether formed through layering or imprinting, patterns lock us into old modes of behavior, and lock us into the past. We respond to a current situation from a frozen place inside as if the present IS the past.

To the emotions, to the place where the pain and memory of the experience reside, past reality IS present. The emotional self does not live in linear time in the same way that mind/spirit does. If an emotion goes unexpressed, if a painful thing is held and frozen and not allowed expression or given light and acceptance, it continues living in that painful experience. That IS its NOW. The pain of then is as real as if it really were happening right now, or happening again. And there is almost no way to convince the parts that are experiencing this reality otherwise. The only way to shift that reality is to allow the pain expression. Give the feelings acceptance and allow them to cry and tell whatever they are holding, whatever they are experiencing. Then their view of what is now, what is real, will naturally and easily shift.

What Patterns Do In Our Lives ...

From the layered onion of pain, messages radiate outward into our consciousness, like subliminal lines flashing across the TV screen, just below our awareness.

These messages predict for us how others will behave, based on a belief system the pattern lives within, and predict for us how we will respond.

These messages and predictions are not necessarily true. The true here-and-now reality is not what we see. Most of the time what we see is a combination of here-and-now, and old, painful realities being broadcast from our buried onions. If the here-and-now reality does not conform to the pattern's predicted reality, in most cases, the pattern will act (cause us to act) to make reality fit what it believes is real, or it will carry us out of the situation.

If we do not feel and believe we are loveable,
we will not be able to maintain a loving relationship.

If we do not feel we deserve to have money and abundance,
we will not be able to get it, or keep it once we do get it.

The only way to truly stop these patterns from acting out their realities, is to cry the pain contained in each and every onion. If the pain is not cried and healed, the patterns will continue to act in ways that draw to us and reinforce the realities that the old pain is still living in.

For example:

If I was repeatedly ridiculed or neglected as a child, the message radiating out from one of my onions says that I am worthless, nothing, that nobody will ever love me. It radiates that feeling message strongly to the back of my eyes, and clouds my vision and clogs my throat. It becomes a filter through which I see the world. When I interact with others, I rarely see the potential for love. I only see the potential for hurt and rejection.

Before a person can get within 10 feet of me, I have already evaluated them from the cloud of my filter. If they appear to dislike me, my hidden belief system is satisfied because its reality has been confirmed.

My pattern kicks in before I have any conscious awareness of it, before I begin interacting with the person. It may have been a matter of survival for me, as a child, to appear not to care when I was ridiculed. Perhaps any time I showed that I was hurt, it brought down more ridicule. So my pattern may manifest in a complex system of walls and behaviors designed to keep others out. Since this response to old pain was designed to help me survive, it must have had some success in the beginning, in deflecting some of the repeats of ridicule. But now, in my adult world. this pattern does not serve me well. I can't control when I keep walls up and when I let them down. I can't allow ANYONE in, even if I want to. What was once a survival mechanism has become a frozen prison.

If the person appears to like me, another dynamic occurs. The old reality the pattern is based on is disturbed. This may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is. These beliefs have become our survival, and disturbing the foundation of "reality" is often deeply painful. The first thing that will happen is the old pain will get jostled. I may feel like I'm dying. One of two things will have to happen at this point. Either the pain comes forward and is allowed to cry, thereby allowing the belief system locked into the pattern to shift and change... or ... I don't cry, and I continue to act from my pattern. I may act to reinforce the pattern further. I do something to require that "reality" conform to my pattern and belief system. I may sabotage the relationship. I may behave in ways that will provoke the person and cause them to stop liking me. Or, I "decide" to reject them, I "decide" that they secretly don't like me despite what they say, or that they just aren't good enough for me. Either way, once the pattern has re-enacted its beliefs, then it can subside into the background again.

Life Patterns

Larger, or more entrenched patterns, have the ability to create realities for us that confirm the beliefs they carry. Emotions are magnetic. Whether we are conscious of them or not, the hidden onions buried in the basement continue radiating their magnetic energy, no matter how hard we may try to live a "positive" life, or use "positive thinking" to change our belief system. The magnetic power of our buried pain radiates and draws to us whatever realities are being held there.

The hardest patterns, those that have the strongest hold on us and are the most difficult to identify, are what we would call Life Pattern. Life Patterns shadow (and help form) the direction of everything in your life. Some patterns affect only small areas of your life - for instance, coloring all your love relationships, but leaving you free to find success in job or friendship. But the Life Pattern affects and colors everything. If you could step outside your life and look at the overall picture, get a sense of the larger shape or color of your life, you might see that everything tends to follow a certain route, fold to a certain curve. You might see an overall tendency toward aloofness, for instance. An inability to be truly intimate with anyone and an inability to commit emotionally to any project, or job. Your desire and zest for life is at a very low ebb, and you find no joy in anything. These might be symptoms of a Life Pattern.

Life Patterns bend and shape our reality, and use the magnetic power of emotions to draw to us experiences and people that fit the form of our beliefs and our pain. They are the most difficult to see, and the most difficult to break. It would be like the proverbial rose-tinted glasses, affecting everything you see, but in this case, the shade of the glasses is more likely to be gray, or red, or brown. No true color in the world can ever come through to you, it will always appear slightly duller than it really is, or more dangerous than it really is. Seeing your own Life Pattern takes a lot of persistence, and courage. It's not something that can be healed in a month of crying.

The Grand Coverup

A pattern's original job is to help us survive. This works in several ways.

Predictability
A pattern helps emotions/soul survive by creating a set of behaviors and beliefs that seem to make the world predictable and controllable. If the world isn't participating in the expected reality, the pattern creates it. This allows the small and fearful child within to know what will happen and what to expect. There is some comfort in knowing what is coming, even if that means punishment or rejection.

Supression
Another survival mechanism the pattern provides is suppressing the true emotions. The pattern's job here is to keep our mind from knowing what our unconscious is holding. Although this begins as a way to survive, patterns eventually become an instrument of denial and resistance, helping to create the separation between mind and emotions, and keeping that gap in place. As long as the pattern is running, the true feelings are kept from expressing and healing.

Given the judgments, punishments, tortures and even death surrounding emotions and emotional expression, it's not surprising that we subconsciously believe suppression equals survival.

False Feelings
One of the things the patterns does to keep this gap alive is to present false emotions, instead of allowing the soul to tell the spirit what it is really feeling. The spirit/mind "feels" these feelings and participates in the illusion by accepting them as "real". These fake feelings cannot be cried. They merely drive us to act out. Then what we have is a spinning drama, with false feelings being blown out of proportion and dramatized in pretense of "expressing", but without the true feelings underneath either being felt or being healed.

Survival of the Pattern
Because the subconscious belief is that the pattern is helping us to survive, the patterns actually take on a life of their own and have an investment in their own survival. If we see the pattern and can identify what we're doing and really feeling, the pattern loses control over our lives. Therefore, the pattern tries to stay in the shadows, outside our awareness. It's a slippery little devil, the pattern, but it's our job to cry our pain, identify and slowly disengage from the patterns.

To Summarize:

Each glommy onion of pain does three things in our lives...

ONE: it becomes a pattern of behavior that we repeat blindly, acting mostly without awareness of the pain, responding to the promptings of the pattern.

TWO: It surrounds us with a fog-like haze, and forever after we see the world only through the filter of our pain and patterns, which causes massive distortions and misunderstandings.

THREE: Being hugely magnetic essence, all glommed together, these big lumps of pain have the power to draw in experiences that outpicture what they are experiencing and remembering. The pain buried in our un/subconscious has the power to create our reality.

The stuckness of a pattern is frustrating, but ... do you hear the hidden message in this? Let me say it again. The emotional body - even though frozen, unexpressed, unremembered and inaccessible - has enormous power to outpicture whatever it is holding.

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