There are five (5) basic steps to resetting your Life Patterns using the acronym RESET.

• R – Recognize/Realize
• E – Examine/Exercise
• S – Seek/Search/Study/Step Back/Spell Out
• E – Explain/Elaborate/ECHO/Embrace
• T – Test/Taper/Tell

First we will review the R – Recognize/Realize.  Admitting you have a problem is the first step, but a lot harder than we think.  What we do is so normal to us that we cannot see from the inside the things people see in us from the outside.

The lives we live are truly the lives we want at this moment.  You may be tempted to dispute that, but it is the truth.  Regardless of how much stress you may be encountering, and pain you may be experiencing, the misery that you are used to is preferable in your eyes than the unknown that could be worse.

In addition, you know logically, somewhere in the back of your mind, that making a change will add to your current stress level, and avoiding stress is your main objective.  So you would rather live with circumstances for which you have already created coping mechanisms  than have to start over and create new ones. You’re not as dumb as you look, because you are absolutely right.

You see, your primary objective in life is to be happy – to experience peace and contentment.  Trying to deal with difficult people, trying situations and painful memories appear to lead you in the exact opposite direction from your goal of continual nirvana.  Yet, to be finally free of stress, we have to eliminate the source of the repeated stress, not just the feelings of stress at the moment. That will require energy that most stress filled people just don’t think they have to spare.

Until you recognize that how you presently feel and act is not how God intended you to feel and act, you will accept your emotions and actions as part of the acceptable status quo.  You will entertain the fatalistic idea that this is just who you are, how you’ve been, and will always be.  But it is not God’s best for you.

When you were born again, your spirit within you came alive, and with it  came the birth of your true spiritual personality – who God created you to be in order to fulfill His Kingdom purposes.  Are you currently all that God created you to be? Are you fulfilling His Kingdom purposes? If not, then you need to recognize that there is more to you, and you will have to apply the energy and planning required to lay down who you have become in order to be who you were created to be.

Once you recognize that this is not the end of the line for you, that God has much more for you, you need to face the corresponding truth.  You’re the one who got you where you are today.  Your unique history, your combination of genetics, relationships and environment, affected the decisions that you made which resulted in the creation of the person you now are.

You must recognize that the person you see in the mirror is incomplete, and must realize that you made her who she is today. You are responsible for the coping mechanisms you created in response to what you have encountered in your life. You did the best that you could with the resources you had at the time, and it allowed you to survive, and even prosper at times.

But so many of those coping mechanisms were short sighted and ineffective in the long term because they were created in a time of high stress and unclear thinking.  That’s the bad news; the good news is that you can change them because you are the one that created them.  Realize that if you made them, you can make new ones and replace the old inefficient ones.

My husband and I need to continually work through our marital patterns.  Our historical patterns are unhealthy and result in each of us in a different part of the house avoiding the cause of our feelings of stress – each other! We’ve perfected this pattern for almost 2 decades.

I bring up an issue, we disagree on some point of it, my husband experiences stress at the thought of dealing with the issue, tells me I’m talking down to him like I’m a know-it-all, and then instructs me to stop talking. I feel ignored and dismissed, helpless to fix the issues that require both of us to affect change, and so I give up on fixing the problem as well as dealing with Ronnie. Both of us leave the aborted discussion with resentment toward the other person, believing it is all the other person’s fault.  Nothing ever changes, nothing is ever resolved.

It is how we have dealt with the stress of two polar opposites living in close quarters, sharing ministry responsibilities, who see problems in completely different ways, and whose attitudes couldn’t be more different.  Why don’t we just face the music, call a spade a spade, and deal directly with the issues?  Because dealing with each other causes so much stress, we are exhausted even at the thought of dealing with the stress caused by our actual problems!  We are always a work in progress.

Sometimes we need someone from the outside to hear our story and repeat it back to us for us to truly see and understand who we think we are, what we think happened to us, and what we thought were appropriate responses.  Only then can we truly compare them to reality and decide what to do about them.  A supportive group and intuitive questioning is a powerful combination that can move emotional and mental mountains in your life.

However, the very first step is praying to God the Father to reveal to us what our issues are (where and how we presently are), as well as a vision of who He created us to be (where and what He wants for us in the future). We need him to do this in a way that we can understand and accept, and know one knows how to do that specifically for us better than our Father. Our own abilities are so limited, and a  trying to go through this process in our own strength and with our own earthly wisdom will not accomplish the complete healing that God wants for us.

RESET ASSIGNMENT:

1. Describe yourself, including your good and bad characteristics. When you read them do you have a strong desire to change what is bad?  Or do you think to yourself, “It is exhausting just to think about changing myself, much less doing it.”?
2. Can you see any coping mechanisms in your life?  Can you look back over your life and see times when you may have created those coping mechanisms?
3. Are you ready to acknowledge that there are things in your life that need to change and, more importantly, can be changed?  Are you interested in doing something about it?  On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest, where would you rate your commitment to be changed?