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

Now that you have identified your physical and emotional responses, and have brought your body and mind into a state more conducive to logical thinking through breathing exercises, you are ready to search through your history for associated events.  If you are experiencing tightening in your upper back, and you are feeling frightened, when do you remember feeling that way in the past?

This is where you need to seek the Holy Spirit and ask Him to bring up in your mind an event that is connected with these feelings. Go with the first image that pops up in your head, regardless of what you think it does or does not mean.  Trust in God to lead and guide you in this area.

Once you see it, study the event.  What do you remember happening?  What meaning did you read into that event?  How did you think it affected you personally?  How did you expect it to affect the rest of your life?

Now, our memories can minimize what happened to us, or blow it out of proportion. Neither is realistic.  So we need to go back and look at it through another set of eyes that are not entrenched in the moment or going through it personally.

Step back from that time period, out of the first person, and view it as an adult bystander.  Play it like you are watching a video of it happening to that you in the past.  What emotions rise up in you when you see it from the outside?  What do you want to say to the people involved in that situation, including yourself and any other active participants?

Now imagine it happening to someone else.  How does it affect your emotions and your thoughts?  As a bystander, what important things do you see happening?  If you were to fill out a police report on what happened, how would you describe it?

The next step is to interpret the meaning of that event for your historical self. Your younger self may have deduced at the moment of the event that it happened because they should or should not have done something, and decided they would never repeat that mistake again.  Or maybe they decided they would never let someone else do something ever again.  Maybe they drew the conclusion that they were bad or wrong because it happened to them, or even deserved it.

You need to determine the meaning of the situation, because you are going to spell out to your younger self what really happened and clarify what it did and did not mean for you. This is very important, because most likely there was no one there with you when this event occurred, and you were left to make sense of it by yourself.  You needed an adult bystander to explain it to you, help you understand it, and help you make good, healthy decisions regarding it.

Discuss with your younger self what your options were at that time, and comfort her with the knowledge that she responded as best as she could with what limited resources she had at that time.  Then tell her what a better, logical and more efficient response would be if it ever happened again.  Give her a better coping mechanism.

Then, call upon Jesus to come into the event.  Ask Him to come and help you in that situation.  Close your eyes and wait for him to appear in that place and time.  See what He does and says, and let Him minister to you both in word and in action.  Write it down so you can better remember what he said and did.

A good example of this entire process would be how I dealt with my memories of childhood bullies, one of the first issues God had me face when in the throes of a comatose depression.  I would re-live their verbal tormenting, their hateful facial expressions, their physical attacks and I would hope that each one of them (I remembered their faces, names and sometimes even their clothes)  would live a long life filled with torment and disappointment and failure and cruel treatment.  It didn’t matter that I was a Christian – I wanted them to experience hell on earth because of what they did to me.

But Jesus brought to my attention that I was a grown woman still angry at 8 to 17 year old children and teens.  He showed me that these children had no control over me now. I just kept revisiting their torments and reliving those emotions over and over again.  He asked me if it was time to forgive them for their stupid, thoughtless actions, which means not continuing to want them to have to pay for what they did.

I had to remember they were just kids, probably with problems at home of their own, and I needed to just let it go.  Once I changed the narrative of my story to identify my tormentors as just stupid children coping in stupid ways, not trained terrorists that captured and tortured me, I was able to forgive them, and the memories of them that used to repeatedly pop up just faded away. I never think of them any more, so I never include them in my narrative.

The goal here is to re-write the narrative that you have been living by for your entire life into an adult, reality based one. These memories and the meanings we derived from them became who we are and are the source for how we now behave.  Changing the source document for our behaviors is the first practical step to breaking our inefficient life patterns and creating new productive ones.

RESET ASSIGNMENT:

1. Name an important life changing event from your history.  How do you think this event affected your worldview – the way you view people and situations?
2. How old were you when that event happened?  Do you think you were capable of fully understanding what happened to you in that moment of extreme stress?
3. How do you think it would affect you to see it from a calm, logical adult perspective?