You are trying to make a change that feels easy and obvious, yet you just can’t do it.  You become frustrated and blame yourself for being weak or lazy.  “It doesn’t make any sense,” I frequently hear, “What is wrong with me?”  It’s easy to get caught up in diagnosing yourself with all kinds of problems, everything from just not being smart enough to having a multi-syllabic mental health disorder.

When feeling stuck in a pattern it’s often helpful to take a step back.  A broader perspective may reveal a hidden answer to your dilemma.  When working with people in therapy I usually assume that people have very good reasons for why they do what they do, but these reasons may not be obvious to the circumstances at hand.  Frequently these reasons stem from the past and represent a pattern of coping that was necessary and helpful at one time that our unconscious minds are reluctant to let go of.

We learn early on what is necessary for survival.  While most of us, fortunately, were never in real danger, children are perceptive to what is needed to fit into the environment in which they are being raised and to preserve their esteem or “emotional survival.”  They learn to adapt to their environment and develop ways of coping with stressors without ever realizing what they are doing.  For example, a young woman I worked with had been avoiding talking to her boss about an idea she had that she thought would help her company.  She hated speaking up in meetings, even though her co-workers were kind, and despite promising herself before each staff meeting that she was going to do it, she just “couldn’t.”  She was sure she had a social phobia and was doomed to forever be relegated to secondary roles.  In shifting her focus from how her behavior was problematic, to how it might have served her, at least at one time, her behavior began to make sense.  She was the sixth child of her busy family.  Her parents and siblings always had advice for her and being younger, whenever she gave an opinion, she was lectured by someone about how she didn’t really understand or how her opinion was wrong.  She learned early on that expressing her opinion was not “safe.”

“But that was so long ago,” people say.  That may be true, but our early experiences are foundations for our development and have years of reinforcement behind them.  The good news is that once you can acknowledge how your behavior served you, you can accept it as a pattern that was learned and had a positive role for you.  Once you do this, you can separate the child you were, who had few resources or choices, from the adult you are now.  The adult woman can take care of the little girl inside of her who was criticized so that she can handle the risk of presenting her idea to her boss.