Once we believe we know what happened, and understand how that event fits into the world as we know it and affects our place within it, we determine what response we are capable of implementing that will most quickly and efficiently reduce the stress we are presently feeling because of the event.

NOTE:  The response has two distinct characteristics.

1. First, we must be capable of performing the response we determine is appropriate.If we are a child, and we are encountering a life-threatening situation by an adult, we will most likely not have any weapons on us to defend ourselves.  Therefore, an appropriate response at that age would not have included a gun. However, it may include running away, or hiding, or biting or screaming. Or it may have included closing my eyes and hoping it would just go away.

   So the response we determine is most applicable to our situation is one we can enact at that moment.

2. Second, the purpose of the response is NOT necessarily to address the current event, but to eliminate the stress we are feeling about the event.

Now, this may seem silly, but it is an all important point.  Our response may not actually be sensible or logical or based in any type of reality.  It may truly be nonsensical.  It may accomplish nothing, from an adult standpoint, in the way of addressing the issue that needed to be solved in the original event. But this doesn’t matter.  Life Patterns are about reducing immediate feelings of stress, not solving any other problem.

That is why you may do things that make absolutely no sense to your adult mind, but which made perfect sense to you at the time you crafted your response.  An example I love is from the show “Everybody Loves Raymond”.  Robert, the older brother, has a strange habit of touching his utensil to his chin and then his mouth before he eats.

This goes on for decades. No one knows why he does it. And then one day it is revealed that, as a child, he watched his mother feed his younger brother, Raymond, and she would use the spoon to lovingly scoop up the baby food that had dribbled onto Raymond’s chin, and spoon it back into his mouth.  Robert was mimicking his mother’s actions to self-soothe his feelings of abandonment as his mother moved her attentions and affection to his younger brother.

When you go back to the initial event, his actions make perfect sense, although they really do absolutely nothing to help him regain his mother’s undivided attention and affection. But it soothed his increasing stress levels at the moment, and he kept that stress-eliminating behavior throughout his adulthood.  A child will create a self-soothing coping mechanism that makes sense to him or her, but it doesn’t have to make sense in reality.

What are the chances that you have some self-soothing behaviors that initiated in childhood that never really solved any actual problems, but just eliminated the immediate stress you were feeling? You most likely didn’t understand how to call out to God for help or wisdom with the situation, so you handled it as well as you could at the time.   If you are open to seeing some of your habits as an equivalent of Robert Barone’s, then you are on the path to being able to RESET Your Life Patterns.

RESET ASSIGNMENT:

1. What are some of your most puzzling behaviors?
2. How far back to you remember performing this behavior?
3. Do you have any clues as to what you were trying to accomplish with that behavior?