peaceful chaos

I feel like there’s been a trend with my recent writing about growth and change. I couldn’t tell you why, but I don’t think there needs to be a reason… so strap in, let’s talk about a good one.

we all know what a cycle is at the root, but do we really know just how far these things get buried in our behaviour? I sure didn’t. it’s more than just a repeat of a behaviour and pattern; it’s a wiring of our brain, and re-wiring was something I talked about a lot in my last post, but it’s probably going to come up again because I mean, let’s face it, it’s so important.

as I mentioned in my post about change, we like what we know and sadly, even if the things we know are objectively unpleasant and miserable, if we can predict that it’s survivable, we will simply choose to survive it.

something that our brain also blesses us with is a theory developed by freud (yes, I’m referencing freud right now) that’s called repetition compulsion. put simply, it talks to our desire to recreate a past trauma that we have experienced to give us a chance to ‘fix it’ this time around. fucked right?

here’s a classic example: you might have grown up in a household where you don’t talk about things – emotions or the big elephants that stand tall and proud in the room – and therefore you learn the rule that if you’re sad, you go away until you’re not, and if you’re angry, you are told you’re being dramatic…

how that manifests in adulthood? you guessed it: an avoidant (specifically dismissive avoidant) attachment style. and ironically, the closeness they probably want deep down, they end up pulling away from when things get serious or when they have the ability to talk about emotions and struggle to feel them… and that’s just one example of a cycle and how it could begin.

a lot of our cycles start from childhood, what we love to think of as a blissfully carefree portion of our life. and no, I’m not blaming my parents, your parents, or anyone’s parents for how you or I turned out, but there’s a history to every one of us, and what’s the harm in learning a little more?

in early childhood, we learn our cognitive scripts, or what could otherwise be known as an internal working model – aka, how relationships work. that map that we draw, it tells us what we want/deserve, how others will respond to those wants/needs, and how we can get what we want. think about if you threw enough of a tantrum you’d get the toy; yes, I’m literally talking about that kind of thing…

if we walk around thinking, ‘if I try hard enough, if I ask one more time, I’ll get it’… in adulthood, will we find ourselves begging for the bare minimum from people we love, be it friends, family, or romantic interests?

but enough about how they start; how do we end them… or more importantly, shatter them?

the first stage is acknowledgement. just like realising you have a shopping addiction, you need to realise just how much you spend. we need to see the impulse of the desire; we need to clock the search for the wallet and stop the tapping of the card. without seeing it, we will never be able to fix it.

the hardest part is the next step, and I wish I could tell you it’s easy (because I assume you are reading this for a reason)…

the next step is to start to break it, and it starts in the detachment. it’s hearing the voice in your head that’s telling you, ‘maybe I don’t tell them how I feel,’ and questioning it—shifting from ‘why does this keep happening?’ to ‘why do I keep letting this happen?’ and sometimes we struggle with it so hard because we think, ‘but what if xyz happens?’ if we stop accepting what we know, will we get anything at all? consider it like this, maybe: if we stop accepting the breadcrumbs, will we starve altogether?

put simply, it’s maybe easy to put into three steps:

1. awareness – noticing the pattern.
2. interruption – choosing a different, uncomfortable action.
3. maintenance – holding the line when your default state calls back to you.

what’s an even more difficult thing to accept is that breaking the cycle sometimes means people don’t like it, which could be known as an extinction burst. when you remove yourself from the toxic spiral, the other person doesn’t necessarily pull away too; they ramp up their behaviour because they want you back in the loop that benefitted them.

it also means you end up grieving people that haven’t died; you have to let someone go that is hurting you in the effort to move on for the better, and then again, it will probably be a messy process.

we have heard the phrase ‘break the cycle or repeat it tomorrow,’ but I mean, is breaking really the approach we need to be taking?

if you break a chain, the links are still there… there is a way to put them back together. and in a lot of cases, people can change but they revert to their old ways; it’s so simple to piece it back together. but when you shatter something? it’s not the same. it’s fragmented in ways that won’t fit together again. it’s a permanent change, but I think it’s something that happens when we finally realise ‘fine’ doesn’t meet the reality of our growth.

I know way too many people (including myself) who are scared to shatter the cycle because of the mess it will make. sharp edges in hundreds of pieces and a question to ourselves of ‘well, what am I now?’

what now, you ask? well, maybe now is finally when you realise the shape you were conforming to was never the shape of who you wanted to be.

so are we going to keep attacking the link in the chain, or are we ready to smash the glass ceiling of what we could be?…