I am sitting at my desk, minding my own business.  My female boss, who doesn’t like me, comes to my desk and speaks to me in a passive/aggressive condescending manner. I start to shake internally as I try to remain professional on the outside and control the tone of my voice. I feel sick to my stomach, and a flash of pins and needles go through my arms.

But I have gone through this cycle so many times, I’m used to it. It doesn’t take me that much by surprise, and since it is now a part of my normal day at work, I don’t even think twice  about it or try to stop it from happening.  What is wrong with this picture? Why do I have that emotional and physical response?  Why am I not paying attention to it? Why am I not trying to determine why it is happening and how to solve it?

Because this woman reminds me of another angry woman from my past who had authority over me and spoke to me in a similar way.  I was a child and did not feel I had the authority to confront the person or the issue, and the general idea was that I just had to endure whatever this person did to me, with no one to protect me or stand up for me.   I developed a cycle to suppress feelings of fear and panic I experienced any time I dealt with an angry woman in authority. I always felt helpless and didn’t know what to do.  That was one of my Life Patterns.

Life Patterns are the beliefs, attitudes and actions we have developed throughout our life as we interacted with our environment.  Each new event we encountered evoked stress, because we didn’t know how to understand and successfully navigate it.  Our primary goal, believe it or not, was not how to create a successful outcome from that event. It was simply to eliminate the stress as quickly as we could.

Our bodies naturally dislike our physical and emotional responses to stress, and we want them gone as soon as possible.  So we did three (3) things with that event.

1. We created a belief about what we thought happened during that event.
2. We decided what meaning that event held for us.
3. We determined how we would respond to that event.

Those three items became a Life Pattern, a systematic way of dealing with life events that evoked similar feelings of stress.  You connect present stressful feelings with an earlier event and apply that Life Pattern’s belief, meaning and response to this newly encountered event.  It is kind of like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing if it sticks.

There are just a few problems with this method of adjusting to new life events.

1. The most blatant one is that we have been encountering new situations since birth. This means we started creating beliefs, assigning meaning and determining responses long before we acquired the knowledge, wisdom or understanding to correctly interpret the situation.  The younger we were when we created the Life Pattern, the more simplistic and unrealistic the belief, meaning and response actually is. That explains why so many of us have such an inaccurate understanding about ourselves, others and the world.  Our earliest Life Patterns are a child’s best attempt to assign meaning to and navigate a very complex and mystifying adult world.
2. Life Patterns are not independent of one another.  Just as the Bible states, we learn “Precept upon precept, line upon line”, building upon what we have previously learned. If the foundation of the building is crooked, the attached walls will never be straight, and the doors and windows will never completely open and shut as they were designed. Eventually, parts of the house crack and break and fall off, even if they were perfectly sound when added to the house.  You cannot extract a single Life Pattern and expect the rest of the house to be righted, or even continue working as before. Chances are, the building will start wobbling and acting like it will cave in, and you will put that Life Pattern right back where it was to stop your house from shaking and collapsing.
3. Life Patterns are accepted truths that you created and chose to continue to believe. You will do everything in your power to protect that truth, because it is all you have ever known. If faced with an opposite statement that claims to be the truth, you will compare it with your own truth, and if it doesn’t line up with it, you will jettison it.  That’s the purpose of learning the truth, right?  You use it as your standard of comparison for everything else.  Voluntarily giving up your accepted standard is a herculean feat.
4. Once you believe a truth, it “feels” like the truth, and everything else “feels” like a lie.  Changing what you believe means you will have to feel all wrong, which causes an inordinate amount of stress, and avoiding stress was the entire reason you came up with your Life Pattern in the first place.  It is easier to just retain your pre-existing truth and keep feeling “right” about it than it is to completely re-orient your reality and endure the very “wrong” feelings that will accompany re-orientation.
5. Life Patterns are rarely examined for accuracy and realism, but are instead accepted without question. Like functions of our autonomic nervous system, they initiate on their own, triggered by stress, with a rhythmic precision obtained from years of repeated usage.   They are like camouflaged soldiers deep in the jungle of your psyche who march the same maneuvers over and over to keep the peace and ensure tranquility in the region.

So, although Life Patterns help us learn how to understand and interact with our world, they do not necessarily do so in a realistic, healthy or productive manner.   Their goals were initially to eliminate stress, not come up with the best way to handle the situation.  Unfortunately, those Life Patterns have proven to be less than adequate to help us face the stress generated by the adult complex realities of life.

If we don’t know they are there, we don’t even think about replacing them. Instead, we try to forcibly change our actions in an attempt to better handle life’s daily crises.  However, that ignores the fact that every single one of our actions is an external response to our internal belief and attitude system.

We will continue to do exactly the same things in exactly the same ways because we believe exactly the same “truths” as we did before.  We will always act in a manner that is consistent with the “truth” we believe.  To change the action, you must change the “truth”.  And to change the “truth”, you must, with God’s help, through the power of the Holy Spirit, RESET your Life Patterns.

RESET ASSIGNMENT:

1. Do you believe it is possible that you may not see yourself, others and the world as they truly are?  Or are you completely certain that how you see things is the only way things can be seen?
2. Think of a time when you were sure you had done or seen something, only to find out you had been mistaken.  You thought you had put your keys in your purse, but you had left them on the table instead.  You could have sworn you told your husband about something important, but he swears you never told him.  You thought you understood what someone had said, but later discovered that you had not heard them correctly, or had misinterpreted their words.  All of these are times when you were sure you were right, but were actually wrong.
3. All you need right now is just a slight opening in the door of your mind to consider the possibility that everything you have learned and known may not be the completely based in reality.  Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you areas where your beliefs may not be based in truth.