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]]>This series of three posts work through what stuck patterns are, and the ways we can address them if we’re stuck in alone, or if we’re stuck in with others. However, all three are relevant to everyone because I’ll suggest that those of us stuck in alone could do with exploring how we might do some of this work with others, while those of us stuck in with others could do with getting plenty of solitude in order to do the parts of the work that need doing alone.
In this first post, I’ll start with a bit more of an introduction to what stuck patterns are, and why we might prioritise shifting them at this time.
Hopefully if/when this period of Covid-19 crisis is over, the ideas and practices here will still be helpful for those finding themselves alone and wanting to address their relationship patterns, and for those wanting to do so while in relationship with others. I’m also aware that not everybody will be ‘stuck in’, particularly those in the category of key-workers. Hopefully some of the ‘stuck together’ advice will also be useful for those who’re still out in the world working with others.
The point of the tweet I began with is that intimate relationships hold up a mirror to our habitual patterns of relating with others, and with ourselves. Most of us will have fetched up with some stuck patterns in how we relate along the way, which will have ended up being harmful – or at least not helpful – to ourselves and others.
These patterns will generally emerge in all of our relationships, given time. Often they influence how we relate to other things in our lives besides people too: work, leisure, food, exercise, technology, etc. In this post I’m focusing on how stuck patterns emerge in relationships, particularly in relationships where we are very emotionally close and/or spending a lot of time together. This is where they often come up most intensely.
Stuck patterns determine how we relate to others – and ourselves – on an everyday basis, and also when we’re triggered or activated. Different therapeutic approaches have all kinds of ways of naming these patterns and understanding where they come from. Generally they agree that stuck patterns are the strategies which we learnt when we were young – or sometimes through stress and trauma in later life – which enabled us to survive.
One useful model comes from Pete Walker’s work on cPTSD. He suggests that these strategies are often versions of the classic trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Some of us learnt as kids that what worked was to battle, belittle or control those around us (fight). Others learnt that striving to perfect ourselves and do all-of-the-things was the way (flight). Others learnt to retreat into ourselves and self-soothing (freeze). Others learnt to do whatever it took to appease others and be what they wanted us to be (fawn).
Most of us have some combination of these strategies, or go to different ones at different times. Generally they have become the way we habitually relate to other people, and they come out most vividly when we’re triggered or activated: in times of crisis or conflict.
For example, my go-to patterns are mainly fawn/flight. The fawn part means I habitually try to monitor myself to ensure I’m being ‘good’ for those around me, and struggle to have boundaries if people want me to do things that don’t feel good for me. The flight part means I tend towards over- rather than under-functioning, like – I don’t know – writing a whole bunch of books, zines, and blog posts to try to figure this stuff out and communicate it to others!
When triggered, fawn/flight means that it can feel life-or-death to me to make things right with people. And I’m likely to throw everything that I have at the situation, exhausting myself in the process, rather than taking the time I need to look after myself and get some perspective.
If Pete’s model doesn’t work for you, there are many other ways of looking at stuck patterns out there. For example Jeffrey Young lists ten common problematic schemas with which we tend to approach relationships, again developed as survival strategies during our lives.
Whatever language you use for the stuck patterns, and whatever understanding you have of how they got there, we all have them and we can address them by:
If we decide to stay in relationship with somebody, we’ll need to address those patterns in order for that relationship to work well for everyone in it over time (if it’s not working for everyone, it’s not working for anyone). If we break-up because the patterns are hurting us too much then we’ll need to address them or we’ll likely bring them into subsequent relationships.
Addressing our stuck patterns is better for ourselves because it will help us to discern which relationships in our lives are good for us. It will also prevent us from getting into painful dynamics with others, and enable us to notice such dynamics and shift them when we have.
Addressing our stuck patterns is better for the people we’re close to because we’re less likely to hurt them, or get stuck in dynamics where we keep triggering each other with our patterns. Hopefully once we’re clearer on what our patterns are – and more able to shift from them – we’ll also have more capacity for the people in our lives and deal better when relationships do become difficult.
Addressing our stuck patterns is better for everybody because when we’re stuck in painful dynamics we have so much less to offer to the other people in our lives and to our wider communities. It’s extremely hard to be empathic and compassionate when we’re stuck in these patterns. We’re also more likely to act out of these patterns with others beyond our closest people if we haven’t addressed them: friends online, the staff in the supermarket, strangers on social media.
It might seem like addressing our relationship patterns is not the most urgent thing we could be doing while the world is literally on fire with rising fevers and global temperatures, conflagrations and conflicts. In fact I’d argue it’s one of the most vital things we can do. Why?
In the next two blog posts I’ll cover how you might address stuck patterns if you’re stuck in alone, and if you’re stuck in with others. In some ways the challenges and opportunities of these two alternatives are opposite. Those stuck in alone may find it easier to get the space and time needed to do this slow habit-shifting work (although this will be more challenging for those who are still working full time from home and/or who struggle not to fill time with distractions). They may find it harder to get opportunities to practise shifting habits in relationship with others. Those stuck in together may find it hard to get enough space to do the inner work needed here, but they may find it easier to get practical opportunities to practice in relationship, particularly if those around them are up for this kind of work too.
A key aspect of what I’m arguing here is reframing our stuckness (alone or together) as an opportunity. Of course it’s vital to experience and express all of our feelings about the ways in which the current situation has altered our lives. This isn’t a Pollyanna approach. We need to feel our fear at what might be coming, our grief at what we’ve lost, our rage at systems which have failed to support us.
However, embracing the potential in what has happened for befriending ourselves and addressing our stuck patterns can definitely be a useful reframe. It also means that we can relate differently to the micro-moments of difficulty which come up as we spend more time alone or with close people. Instead of regarding each freak-out, plunge into loneliness, argument, or relationship tension as a failure, we can reframe these as opportunities to slow down, to turn towards what we’re finding hard, and to learn more about our patterns and how they operate in us.
To read on to the posts about how to address stuck patterns if alone or with others, follow these links:
There’s more about shifting stuck patterns when they are fleeting, entrenched, or overwhelming in this post.
Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.
Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.
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]]>So what if you’re stuck in alone? This is the situation that I find myself in, so I’ll probably be blogging a fair amount about this in the coming weeks and months. I feel fortunate that – for me – I had already decided to live alone and to take a break from certain kinds of (romantic and erotic) relationships for a while in order to address these patterns, before social distancing/isolation hit. It must be much harder for those where this hasn’t been an intentional choice. However I think that solitude can be an opportunity for us all to do this work. Maybe reframing it in this way can be helpful for you if solitude and isolation hasn’t been something you’ve historically welcomed.
The opportunity here – if we want to take it – is to take an intentional break from any kinds of relationships where we get drawn into these patterns in a big way. For a lot of us these are partner, family, and cohabiting relationships. We get drawn into such patterns there because we’re often around each other a lot, and because – whether consciously or not – we tend to look to partners and families to provide us with the kinds of love we lacked or lost when we were younger. Our stuck patterns often emerged as an attempt to get ourselves care and protection from others and to prevent people from abandoning us or hurting us.
So here’s a great chance to go cold turkey on problematic relationship patterns! In a similar way to the way that, for some of us, the current situation enables us to have a period of not doing our job in the way we used to and perhaps addressing some of our stuck patterns around work, it also enables us to have a period away from intense relationships. Of course, just as we could fill our time with other kinds of work, we could fill solitude with online relationships, continuing to date, have online sex, speak to family every day, etc. However, I’d like to suggest the alternative of taking this time as permission to step away from being caught up in intense relationships for a while.
You won’t be surprised to hear me stress the need for gentleness around this kind of cold turkey. While I’m no fan of addiction models, there is something to the analogy between drug addiction and the kinds of compulsions we’re acting out when we long for love to heal or save us. We can expect some detox pain, withdrawal symptoms, cravings, and relapses.
For me the hardest part of this process of trying to shift old patterns of relating to myself and others has been an initial period where everything felt a whole lot more painful and difficult. It’s hard to have the faith needed to keep going when you’re not getting any rewards for the work you’re doing and when there’s a lot of uncertainty – and no guarantees – about what’s on the other side. Again a whole shedload of gentleness and kindness towards yourself is key. I’ll be blogging more about that in the coming weeks too, but it’s worth remembering that you can’t shift these kinds of patterns the same way they came into being, i.e. through treating yourself harshly.
Also this kind of work can’t be done quickly because it takes a lot of time to bed new habits into our bodies. Physiologically it’s like there was a deep channel through which the rainwater made its way off the roof and down to the ground. We need to wear a new channel deeper than that old one before the water will automatically follow the new channel.
So the aim is to notice and shift these patterns in our ways of relating. Initially we won’t even notice the patterns because they come so habitually to us. Then – by bringing our attention towards them intentionally – we’ll start to notice them, but we probably won’t manage to do anything differently. This is often the hardest part: realising how much we do this stuff and feeling unable to change it. If possible at this stage it’s great if you can reward yourself for just simply noticing. That, in itself, is a huge shift. This is followed by a period where you can sometimes manage to do things differently when the old pattern kicks in, although it probably takes a lot of effort.
Eventually there will come a time when the new pattern feels as easy as the old one did. Here it’s useful to remind yourself of times you have changed other – perhaps more minor – habits in this way. You can reach that point! This is just how learning works. Portia Nelson’s poem of the hole in the road, or the visual model of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence can be helpful reminders.
So what are we noticing if we’re alone without close people around us to keep pushing our buttons? Fortunately (!) even if we’re completely isolated our stuck patterns will kick in plenty. They’ll play out when we get a tricky email, or have a rough exchange on social media, or when a tough memory comes to mind, or a song reminds us of something hard: probably many times a day. Certainly the degree of uncertainty in the world and the frequent changes we’re having to make will probably bring out our familiar patterns.
I’ve found that increased solitude has helped me to get a way more vivid sense of what it feels like when my fawn/flight pattern kicks in. This helps me to notice it more and more – including the smaller everyday versions of it as well as the big crisis versions. For me – as for many I suspect – the underlying feeling behind my patterns is one of fear combined with shame. However, initially we may be more likely to notice the feelings that tend to get layered on top of that feeling: anger and blame if we tend to fight, busyness and speed if we tend to flight, lethargy or scatteredness if we tend to freeze, or guilt and self-criticism if we tend to fawn.
Over time I’ve found it possible to identify the earlier flicker of discomfort in my body which precede the pattern kicking in. When I turn my attention towards that, instead of trying to deny that anything is going on as I might have done in the past, I can usually now address it before the bigger pattern kicks in. I’ve started to ask myself why this particular trigger puts me in a fear/shame place, and to consider what it might be like if I looked at it differently. My process is something like this:
For me personally, because I work in a plural way around everything, I found it helpful to locate the part of myself who gets stuck in the fawn place and the part who gets stuck in the flight place. I realised that my fawner is the one who is freaking out in the background trying to figure out what to do in the face of this fear/shame double bind, and this makes my flee-er jump to attention and try to do something immediately, often hurting and exhausting themself in the process. I now speak directly to my fawner when this happens – from a kind part of myself. I conceptualise this process as helping my inner fawner to step out of his prison: something I drew in comic form last year, which has been a helpful visual touchstone for me.
What I’m suggesting here is that, by slowing down and attending to these things intentionally, particularly when they kick in in small ways on a daily basis, we can get a detailed sense of the anatomy of our patterns and how they play out for us. Then we can get creative about how we shift ourselves out of them, eventually coming up with a range of tools which help us to do something – anything – differently when the patterns kick in.
One thing which can really block us on doing this kind of work is fear and shame around it.
Fear: We often don’t want to go anywhere near it because it will involve confronting who-knows-what damage our patterns have caused to ourselves and others over the years. We fear what we might find if we attend to ourselves and our patterns so we don’t go near them.
Shame: In a culture which is utterly rooted in shame in order to sell projects and police our behaviour, we’re terrified of confronting anything which might validate the sneaking suspicion which has been implanted in all of us that we’re unacceptable ‘bad’ people. Certainly admitting to our stuck patterns and the damage they have done is a radical act in a world where being seen to have behaved badly can result in public call-outs and cancelling.
There will be more blog posts and podcasts from me on this topic because I think that shifting the culture of frightening and shaming (ourselves and others) is another of the urgent things we need to do right now. For now let’s focus on how we might personally lift the block of fear/shame in order to enable ourselves to do the work of noticing and shifting our patterns.
I find it useful to remind myself of the following things in order to avoid getting frozen in the fear of what I might find if I address the patterns, and to avoid defending against shame by blaming others instead of looking at my stuff.
Another useful practice which I’ve written about before are regret rituals. If we come up against painful memories where we have been hurt and hurt others then we can make deliberate space in our life to feel the grief and regret around those times. Doing this regularly can help us to feel less overwhelmed. It can help us in the hard work of forgiving ourselves and the others who have been caught up in these dynamics with us. This relates to the idea of embracing both our inner survivor/victim and our inner oppressor/abuser which many intersectional feminists suggest. We’ve all been both of these things and we need to grieve and regret them as part of addressing our patterns.
Finally I’ve recently come up with this process for thinking through any situation which comes up where we feel a lot of shame about our behaviour, often because we’ve acted out of our stuck patterns. It helps me to get my own personal role in perspective so that I can then be accountable for that without becoming so lost in shame that I can’t engage helpfully and responsibly.
I assume that the following elements will be involved in any occasion where somebody feels hurt by another’s behaviour. I work through the specific situation considering what I know each element to be in this situation – or what I can imagine they might likely be when I don’t have all the information.
How did each of these things contribute to the situation?
Then I can consider how best to address my part in it without taking too much responsibility, or too little because I can’t handle the shame.
Another useful way of addressing your patterns alone involves finding inside yourself the things that you’ve been looking for outside yourself. I mentioned earlier that when we form relationships from a place of still having these patterns we’re often trying to find – in another person or people – things that we struggle to find in ourselves, perhaps because we lacked or lost them in painful ways earlier in our lives.
For example, Pete Walker suggests that many survival strategies come into being because we’ve lacked or lost care and/or protection. This means that it’s hard to be kind towards ourselves (due to lack of good models of care) and to keep ourselves safe (due to lack of good models of protection). We could see the antidote to our shame as care, and the antidote to our fear as protection. Pete suggests ‘reparenting ourselves’ as a way of addressing this. Instead of searching for others to provide a kind of total care and protection which is probably impossible for anyone to give, we could cultivate our own capacities for self-care and self-protection.
Working as I do from a plural perspective I’ve found it useful to consider what my inner carer and protector look, sound and feel like, and to intentionally bring them into dialogue with other parts of myself so that they can become increasingly accessible in a way they certainly haven’t been for much of my life.
However you don’t have to work with it in quite this vivid a way. It could just be about talking to yourself – internally or externally – in a kind and/or protective way each time you’re struggling. If this feels impossible it can be an area where ‘acting as if’ is helpful at first. Imagine if you did have such a kind/protective inner voice. What might it say? What would it say to another person in your situation? Again even glimmers of being able to treat yourself in these ways are impressive to begin with, and can build into something much more available and constant over time.
It can be good to consider what else you may have been looking for in external relationships which you could use this opportunity to find in yourself. You could list some of the things you’ve been drawn to in the people you’ve had close relationships with and see if you can access those aspects of yourself. For example if you tend to romanticise or eroticise rescuing vulnerable people, can you find that vulnerable part of yourself to rescue? If you’re drawn to cocky confident clowns, can you find one of those in you? If you get together with people who feel a bit dark or dangerous, maybe there’s a dark, dangerous part of you who needs some love and attention. Again I hope to blog and zine more about how to do this work, but the initial plural zine gives you some tools.
I’ve been asking a lot lately what it might be like if the kind of love which I have projected out onto other people could be turned in towards myself. There’s a lot of fun, pleasure, and interest to be had in experimenting with this, and it seems to expand with practise too. I’d recommend playing with this yourself, if you can, because we need these processes to feel good in some way if we’re going to remain committed to them. Hopefully the peaceful feeling of addressing our patterns, the lifting of shame involved in regret rituals, and the joy of turning the love in, can help us to stay on this path over time. Justin and I have resources on self-love, joy, and love in the time of Covid-19 which may be helpful.
I’ve explored a lot of things that we can do alone to shift our patterns and to turn our solitude into something potentially immensely valuable to ourselves and others. However there’s a limit to what we can do alone.
First, it is very hard – if not impossible – to do solo work without systems and structures to support it. This is why I’m so critical of the ideas of self-help and self-improvement, and why many are shifting their language from self-care to community-care.
Secondly, the point here is to shift our relational patterns, and we do need to practice those in relation with others. Pema Chödrön gives the example of a hermit alone in a cave practising patience. Another monk visits him and starts joking that it’s all a ruse the hermit is using to look good and to get people donating things to him. Eventually the hermit explodes in anger and tells the monk to piss off, at which point the monk asks ‘where is your patience now?’
While we’re in this time of solitude it’s worth asking ourselves how we can cultivate systems and structures to support our solo work, as well as how we can engage in relationships in ways that enable us to practise what we’re learning. One bonus of this time – if we’re stuck alone – is that it can be relatively easy to ensure that we have a lot of spaciousness and slowness around all our relationships in which to process what happens and act intentionally rather than quickly from old patterns.
Relationships you might consider building in online while isolated, if you can, include:
For more about how you might go about shifting stuck patterns with others, check out my post on being stuck in together. There’s more about what the patterns are – and where they come from in this post. There’s more about shifting stuck patterns when they are fleeting, entrenched, or overwhelming in this post.
Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.
Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.
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]]>Perhaps addressing our stuck relationship patterns becomes a matter of greater urgency for those stuck together than those stuck alone. Being up alongside partners, family, or housemates day after day can be a hell or a heaven depending on whether we’re playing out our patterns on each other, or managing to do something different.
I’m reminded of Sartre’s No Exit ‘hell is other people’ or the Jewish parable of the long spoons, where hell is a place with a magnificent feast but everyone has spoons so long that they are unable to feed themselves and they starve. Heaven is exactly the same, but people are using the spoons to feed each other. I guess The Good Place would be ideal Netflix viewing for folk stuck in together for the duration.
Probably, inevitably, time stuck in together will sometimes be heaven, sometimes hell, and oftentimes something in between. Pema Chödrön talks about the six Buddhist heaven and hell realms as places we’re always moving between in our everyday life. In relation to our stuck patterns we could perhaps see the worst hell realm as when we’re utterly locked into our patterns with each other, retraumatising each other constantly. The hungry ghost realm is about addiction and craving. Perhaps it’s where we’re not in permanent hell, but are still filled with unfulfilled yearning and longing for the other person to save us from our pain. The animal realm is where we don’t realise that the things that bring us short term pleasure often cause us long term pain – like a moth to a flame. So perhaps in this realm we’re still employing old patterns to try to get what we want – from ourselves and others – and struggling when it means relationships flounder long term even if we do get some immediate pleasure or control.
The human realm is where we muddle along with glimpses of connection and harmony with others, and times of disconnection and pain. In the realm of the jealous gods we perhaps manage to see how our patterns hurt us all long term and manage do something different, but there’s still that sense of separation of self from other. The heaven realm could be those sacred moments when we feel our connection and oneness and the sense that what helps us helps others and vice versa. Our patterns have dropped away – at least briefly – and we know what it’s like to relate together without those patterns tugging us down into fear and shame.
As with addressing our stuck patterns when stuck in alone, two vital elements of addressing our patterns when stuck together are time alone and support from others.
It is virtually impossible to address our stuck patterns in relationships if we have no space and solitude. We need enough slowness and spaciousness around time together to notice our patterns playing out, and to practise doing something different.
One dangerous idea about relationships is that it is better to spend all – or most – of our time together. This is likely to play out in risky ways at this time as people may be spending all their days and nights together for extended periods of time. It’s easy for us to feel shame around taking our own time and space due to a cultural assumption that we ‘should’ be together, and that being apart is a failure or a ‘bad sign’ about the relationship. This can be especially hard in relationships where one or both people’s patterns involve trying to maximise together time in order to avoid the fear and shame they have around abandonment.
It would be great to reverse this idea and to assume that everyone needs space and time alone in relationships and that it’s okay for people to have different needs and boundaries around this. It could be good, early on, for each person in a shared space under social isolation or distancing to tune into their needs and to communicate them to others. What might be possible in terms of giving people time alone where they know they’ll be uninterrupted? If it’s not possible for everyone to have their own private room, then can shared spaces be allocated on a rota, or private spaces made within shared rooms by blocking off parts of them?
Alone time becomes even more vital when one or more people are activated, triggered, or in a trauma response, as is often the case in conflict. Again, there’s a cultural norm that we must stay together at such times and sort it out to get back to good feelings as quickly as possible, often by making the other person see that we’re right and they’re wrong. Actually when we’re in such a reactive response we are way more likely to act out our stuck patterns and to hurt the other person and/or ourselves in the process. Finding ourselves in traumatic interactions regularly will likely make those patterns play out more, as well as retraumatising us so that we’re less and less able to handle the conflicts and crises that do occur. Over time it becomes increasingly hard to see each others’ perspectives and to look after ourselves and other people in our lives.
As soon as we recognise that anyone present is triggered it’s best to get some space and time so that we can soothe ourselves and/or get support from somebody who is not caught up in the dynamic with us. There’s advice about how to do this in the conflict chapter of my book Rewriting the Rules and in the literature on trauma on and offline.
I love this four elements idea that I recently heard about from Elan Shapiro. Earth stands for grounding, air for breathing, water for salivating, and fire for visualising something safe and soothing: all things that help to calm our nervous system.
Another dangerous idea about relationships like families and partnerships is that they should be private and protected from the eyes of anybody outside of them. That means that all kinds of damaging dynamics can begin to play out without anybody spotting them and saying that something doesn’t seem right. For those within the dynamic it can often be hard to spot this happening because the dynamic has developed so gradually over time, and/or because it may be so familiar from damaging dynamics we’ve been part of in the past that we don’t realise there’s a problem.
Again there’s a risk that this ideal of privacy and protection will play out more during this time because we’re stuck with each other and it feels risky to acknowledge – to ourselves or to our friends – that there are any problems. The cultural ideals around families and romantic relationships really don’t help here because we’re bombarded with images of happy families and perfect loves which we can never live up to, but may well feel we have to pretend we’re managing in order to avoid shame.
It would be great to reverse this idea and come to a new cultural norm whereby a healthy family or relationship of any kind is one with the windows open where everyone involved is nurturing their support system and able to talk freely about what the relationship is like for them: good and bad. That means that the inevitable patterns which are present for all of us can be more easily seen and discussed openly, instead of becoming hidden and unspeakable.
It can be useful for each person in the partnership, family, or household to consider what their needs are to get support from outside, and how those supports might be put in place. Again supportive relationships that each of you might consider building in, separately, online if you can, include:
When doing this work together it’s also useful to consider whether the relationship can be supported, as well as the individuals who make it up, whether that be a partnership, a family system, or a group of housemates. If dynamics have become stuck and/or damaging this is particularly vital. Possible forms of support for this – which can all be done online – include:
You might also get creative about how conversations between members of any cohabiting group might be witnessed and supported by others in your system or community, instead of doing such conversations in private. Can it become a regular practice between you that difficult conversations are carried out in front of each other, perhaps with a designated facilitator? Can you agree a structure for such conversations, such as each person getting time to speak and be heard? Can you have a process for what will happen if anyone gets triggered or activated? Such conversations can be returned to over time rather than being a one-off, and it’s useful to have aims like ‘everyone being heard’ rather than figuring out who is right and wrong.
One great opportunity of being stuck together for extended periods is the potential to do this kind of work together. Very few things bring up our stuck patterns like our close relationships, especially when we’re around each other a lot. What a fabulous AFOG (as Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy call it)!
However it’s very hard to do this kind of work together unless everybody is fully on board. As I stressed when talking about doing this work alone, we’re in for a hell of a ride here. Engaging with our stuck patterns involves facing our deepest fears and shames, and may well bring up tough memories from when these patterns came into being, as well as times when they’ve been most vivid over the years. We’ll likely have to face times when we’ve hurt others badly as well as times when we’ve been hurt ourselves.
If we’re stuck in with families then we might be doing this work with the very people who we were with when the patterns developed in the first place. If we’re stuck in with partners then we may be doing this work with people who we hoped would give us the things we lost or lacked back when these patterns were put in place. Often part of what we have to face is other peoples’ inability to give us those things – at least not in any completely consistent ongoing way – as well as the impact of their patterns on us.
My own personal criteria for doing this kind of work with others are:
If everyone involved is up for it then it can be a good idea to start having discussions about what the processes will be within your partnership or group, as well as how these might be supported from outside, and what support you might offer out in return. For example, you might think about making times for everyone to gather together:
Whether or not the people around you are working on their stuck patterns, it’s still worth doing your work. In fact, you doing this kind of work can become a model for others which they may take up if and when they’re ready. Also when one person changes their patterns it can be that the whole system shifts to encompass that change. Harriet Lerner’s work is really helpful on how to shift our own patterns and hold firm when others try to pull us back into old dynamics or systems.
It wouldn’t be consensual to push anybody into doing this kind of work. Also it’s important to recognise what a big ask it is, and how it may well not be something people yet have capacity for.
However, it is also a hell of a lot of emotional labour for one person to work on their patterns – and to try to improve the relationship or family – when others involved are doing nothing. It is hard – if not impossible – to make these changes within a system where others are actively resisting such changes, or unable or unwilling to confront their role in it at all.
If you want to address your own stuck patterns within a relationship, family or group where others aren’t up for doing it together, then you might find my suggestions on how to do this work when stuck alone helpful. Considering how you can carve out time and space within your home to do this work, as well as how to get outside support, will be particularly important here.
Of course the most dangerous end of the spectrum of these kinds of stuck relationships patterns are abusive relationship dynamics of various kinds, including coercive control as well as physically or sexually abusive relationships. Slightly lower down the spectrum – but still concerning – are relationships where one or more people are frequently being (re)traumatised by the degree of conflict or the kinds of dynamics that are playing out.
In situations where there is abuse, damaging dynamics, and/or where other people involved are not up for addressing the dynamics, it is important to consider other options. Of course this may be far more difficult during this time of social distancing and isolation. There’s government guidance for safe accommodation provision here, a useful article about the spike in domestic abuse here, and a list of places to support you in crisis here and here.
Personally I think it’s useful for all people – whether living alone or with others during this time – to have a sense of what their contingency plan will be if their living situation becomes damaging and their mental health deteriorates because of it. Mental and physical risks need to be balanced. It may be the case that alleviating stress by moving location for a brief period of respite – or longer term – is less risky to everyone’s physical and mental health than staying put. Also remember the toll that the stress of repressing the pain you’re in – or having regular trauma times – can take on the immune system.
For more about how you might go about shifting stuck patterns, check out my post on being stuck in alone. There’s more about what the patterns are – and where they come from in this post. There’s more about shifting stuck patterns when they are fleeting, entrenched, or overwhelming in this post.
Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.
Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.
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