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.

What are stuck patterns?

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:

• Noticing the patterns
• Doing something different
• Making that an everyday practice so that new habits can bed in over time

Why address stuck patterns?

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.

Better for us

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.

Better for our close people

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.

Better for everyone else

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?

• On an everyday level our lives have the potential to be heaven or hell depending on how we relate to ourselves and each other. If we’re all relating to each other through our stuck patterns we’ll hurt each other and feel terrible about ourselves. If we can find ways to shift out of our stuck patterns then there’s the potential for everyday life – even a much more constrained everyday life – to be okay, perhaps even pretty good if we explicitly make this our plan and notice how we’re making progress over time.
• In relation to sickness specifically we know the toll that stress and trauma take on the immune system. If we’re putting other people – and ourselves – under stress and/or triggering them into trauma responses with our patterns then we’re making it more likely that they’ll get sick and struggle to recover quickly, not to mention the mental health crises that can result from prolonged relational stress or being frequently retraumatised.
• Just as our relationship to ourselves often mirrors the way we relate to other people, so too does the way we relate to the wider world. At a time when we urgently need to all be thinking and behaving collaboratively and collectively – and kindness, compassion and mutuality are essential – unlearning patterns which keep us locked in our own individual pain – and in stuck dynamics with close people – seems pretty urgent.

Addressing stuck patterns

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:

Stuck in alone.

Stuck in together.

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.

The post Stuck in alone or together: An opportunity to address stuck patterns appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

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.

The need for space

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.

Getting support

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:

• Peers who are also engaging in this kind of work to share how it’s going and support each other
• Small groups where you all have time to share what’s going on for you at the moment and be heard
• More explicit forms of one-to-one peer support or therapy (Time to Think gives one useful model for this)
• Professional support if you can afford it (therapy relationships are one place where it’s explicitly intended that you can notice your patterns playing out and practise different ones)
• Contact with people in your life who offer you care and/or protection 
• Engagements with authors and communities who are discussing how to do this kind of work – and supporting each other around it – at this time

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:

• Relationship therapy
• Systemic/family therapy
• Mediation
• Restorative and transformative justice

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.

Doing it together?

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:

1. Is everyone involved up for doing their own individual work?
2. Is everyone involved cultivating their own support system to help them through it given that it’s hard – if not impossible – to support each other within a relationship where this is currently playing out?
3. Are we broadly on the same page with this way of understanding things: acknowledging that we’re all part of these dynamics with our own stuck patterns, rather than trying to pin it on one person being the main problem?

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:

• Just to share how they are doing (where each person gets allocated time to share), 
• To address practical aspects of living together during this time
• To address emotional dynamics of living together during this time and what stuck patterns are playing out between people
• To deal with specific conflicts
• To relax and have fun together (because it’s hard to do this work if all your time together is focused on hard stuff)

Addressing our part when others are not on board

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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The study itself linked living alone to poor housing in women and low social support in men (something that has long been found to be a risk factor for single men). However they are understood, the findings clearly point to the vital social role in depression: a condition which is commonly understood to be both internally caused, and in need of only internal treatments (such as drugs and therapies). We need to move to more biopsychosocial (or even sociopsychobio) understandings of this experience.

The bounded self

Social psychologist Kenneth Gergen points towards one idea which may help to make sense of findings like these. In his book, Relational Being, he argues that in the past few centuries we have come, in the west, to see ourselves as ‘bounded beings’: as singular and separate from others. This is a culturally peculiar belief, according to Clifford Geertz, but one which we generally take for granted as a ‘fact of life’.

Gergen argues that if I accept this view of myself:

‘I must always be on guard, lest others see the faults in my thinking, the cesspools of my emotions, and the embarrassing motives behind my actions … I must worry about how I compare to others, and whether I will be judged inferior.’ (xiii-xiv)

He argues that this view underlies our education and organisational systems which evaluate us individually and encourage constant competition from the start.

Importantly, for our explorations here, Gergen suggests that depression can be located in this way of viewing ourselves The inner critics and overwhelming fears of failure which are so familiar to us are part and parcel of this view of the human being. As well as the relentless self-evaluation, toxic comparison and defensive withdrawal of depression, the familiar sense of meaninglessness and pointlessness can also be linked to disconnection from others since meaning, for most people, is associated with their relations with others.

Speaking specifically about living alone, Gergen proposes that this is something which only really makes sense under this view of ourselves as fundamentally isolated. Alongside statistics on the numbers of people choosing to live by themselves, he cites evidence for decreases in close friendships and increases in loneliness in recent years.

Gergen proposes that an alternative way of seeing things is to regard ourselves as fundamentally relational rather than bounded. This is a view which is common to Buddhist and existential philosophies (which question the separation between self and others and stress interconnection), and constructionist and constructivist approaches (which point out that we become different ‘selves’ in our relationships with different people, and that our self is something that we construct in interaction).

Bounded selves and living alone/together

Returning to the issue of living alone, we could see this as a situation in which the sense of ourselves as bounded and separated is exacerbated, especially in situations where we are also out of work or retired and have very little human contact day-to-day. It is possible to become very inward focused: listening to the loops of self-judgement and critical commentaries that go on within our heads. A vicious cycle is easily set in motion where our negative view of ourselves makes contact with others a frightening prospect, due to fear that they will confirm our self-perceptions, and we withdraw further into ourselves.

Such challenges are not absent for those of us who live with others. The bounded self view is pervasive and we also relate to other people accordingly: looking to our partners, children or parents to affirm and validate a positive view of ourselves, and fearing that they will do the opposite: seeing us negatively in a way that confirms what we dread is the real truth of who we are. This is what Sartre was talking about when he said that ‘hell is other people‘.

However, given the findings on living alone, it seems that – for many of us – contact with others goes some way towards loosening the tight grip on the self. Perhaps when we live up alongside others we have times when the self-and-other distinctions are blurred: as we share a moment, or physical contact breaks down the barriers, or we recognise our own pain or joy in the eyes of another, for example. Maybe we realise how much our own projects in life are bound up with other people, and how much they need us for their own projects, and a kind of mutuality and reciprocation comes from that.

Also, as we relate to different people in our lives we may notice that they, and we, have different sides in different situations, and also that they, and we, change over time. The recognition of our plurality and fluidity both provide relief from the grip of the bounded self. It makes far less sense to judge and evaluate ourselves (or others) when we know that we are multifaceted, and less sense to compare ourselves against others who are constantly shifting just as we are. If we can find the courage together, intimacy with others may even enable of us to reveal our vulnerability and recognise it as something that connects us rather than being something we have to defend so desperately.

Implications

So what are the implications of such findings on living alone and depression, and this way of understanding them? Clearly they point to the importance of human contact – but importantly contact which encourages a softening of the bounded self rather than further judgement and competition. We should be cautious, as a society, of policies and practices which leave people even more isolated and withdrawn. Such research should feed into current discussions, for example, of benefit systems and of how we treat older people.

Also it would be good to provide more real alternatives to living alone. At the moment, for many people, the decision is between living as a couple/nuclear family and living by yourself (if you are single or separated from such a unit). We need to expand the options and make it both socially and economically viable to live in other arrangements.

It is not that being alone inevitably reinforces the sense of the self as bounded. We can all probably point to moments of solitude in which we felt connected to others and the wider world, and this is something that can be cultivated in meditation and other solitary practices. It is quite possible to respond to the pain of the bounded self by surrounding ourselves with busyness, people and distraction in ways that become equally problematic. It is useful to consider the ways that we all relate to solitude, to being with others, and to wider community. At all levels we can operate as bounded, separate, units, or shift into a more relational, interconnected, mode.

Find out more:

For another perspective on living alone, based on a qualitative research project on those who live by themselves, see I want to be alone: The rise and rise of solo living (The Guardian, March 30th 2012)

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