10 Unpacking the pain of our old destructive patterns

At some point along our spiritual path, we will come upon certain problems in our soul and it will happen. We will encounter our pain. So, let’s talk about pain. And more importantly, let’s discuss how to dissolve pain. Because we might have noticed by now, it’s not going to just go away on its own.

Why we create defenses

To recap, it all starts in childhood. This is where the child first suffers due to shortcomings in their parent’s ability to love. We not only felt like we didn’t get enough affection, but we also didn’t feel fully accepted as individuals. This is caused by the common practice of parents treating children as children, and not as whole people. We may never have thought about this quite in this way before. But being treated as a child can leave as much of a mark as being neglected or treated cruelly. It’s incredibly frustrating.

The climate we grew up in, then, affected us. It was like perpetually receiving a minor shock, which often leaves a bigger mark than enduring a single traumatic experience. As such, the latter is easier to cure than the former. Continually feeling as though we are unacceptable, coupled with a lack of love and understanding, created what we would typically call a neurosis.

We didn’t know any better, so we accepted the climate as being how it had to be. Eventually, we came to take it for granted. We suffered and believed our suffering was unchangeable. And this conditioned us to create defenses—highly destructive defenses.

Our ineffective pseudo-solutions

We repressed the original frustration and pain we couldn’t deal with, and we put it out of our awareness. There, it smolders in the unconscious mind. Then destructive images began to take shape. Plus, our defense mechanisms of aggression, submission and/or withdrawal fully developed.

These are really pseudo-solutions—false solutions that don’t work—that we use daily to battle the world and the pain it inflicts. Our images are also a form of defense. They are designed to fight against painful experiences by erecting a rigid inner wall constructed entirely from wrong conclusions.

For those of us who have opted for the pseudo-solution of withdrawing—from feelings, from people, from certain situations…in short, from life—we’re defending ourselves against being hurt. Regrettably, this is a very shortsighted and ineffective remedy. Once we start to suspect this is the case, we’ll want to change our ways. We’ll come to realize that pain feels far better than being alienated from ourselves and feeling numb.

Further on down our path of healing, we’ll go through times of resistance and becoming discouraged. This will happen until we reach the point when the hard shell inside us breaks open, and we are no longer dead inside. That, however, won’t exactly be our first reaction. It can’t be. Because the first thing we will become aware of will be all the dark, repressed emotions—and the associated pain—that we’ve been tucking away.

We were right, we’ll think, to have tried to withdraw. But now the only path open is to plow straight ahead. We need to keep going until we reach the reward of uncovering good and constructive feelings.

For those who prefer the pseudo-solution of submissiveness, we’re electing the route of weakness, helplessness, and the thrilling dependency of having someone else care for us. Perhaps not materially, but emotionally for certain. We’ll come to see the unsatisfactory nature of this option as well. For being dependent makes us fearful and helpless. And it causes us to not believe in ourselves.

So then we withdraw, deciding we’d rather be dead inside. This, however, makes life seem completely meaningless. Feeling robbed of our strength and the wherewithal to stand on our own feet, we arrive at isolation. We just followed a different route to get here.

We set out, then, with a plan to avoid feeling pain by finding someone strong to watch over us. But since it’s not possible to find such a person, we ended up causing ourselves far more grief. That person, it turns out, can only be ourselves.

How we hurt each other

To be sure, if our strategy is to make ourselves deliberately weak, we are actually wanting to lord ourselves over others. There is, in fact, no worse tyranny than what a weak person exerts over everything and everyone in their path.

It’s like saying: “I am so weak, you simply must help me. I am making you responsible for me. The mistakes I make don’t count because I don’t know any better. I can’t help it. You have to indulge me and let me get away with anything. You can’t expect me to take total responsibility for what I do or don’t do, think or don’t think, feel or won’t feel. I’m so weak, I could fail. But you’re strong and must therefore understand everything. You can’t possibly fail me because that would hurt me.”

This is essentially how lazy, self-indulgent people make self-pitying demands on others. They do it through unspoken expectations and immature emotional reactions. It’s plain to see that being weak is hardly harmless. It doesn’t hurt anyone any less than being outrightly domineering. That’s the harsh truth about all pseudo-solutions. In the end, everyone gets hurt, including us.

When we withdraw, we are rejecting others. We withhold from them the love we actually want to give them and that they actually want to get from us. When we submit, we don’t love, but merely expect to be loved. It’s lost on us that others have their own vulnerabilities, needs and weaknesses. We reject this aspect of them, and that’s painful for them. When we’re aggressive, we push people away and hurt them openly through our artificial superiority.

In every case, we hurt others while also inflaming our own wounds. Because thanks to the law of cause and effect, hurting others has ramifications for us. There will be consequences. So, not only have we done nothing to calm the original pain, we’ve invited more of it.

Seeing the damage we do

Rather than abandoning our limping pseudo-solutions, we wrap them into our idealized self-image. Here, the agenda is to make us feel better than everyone else. We use self-aggrandizing ways to separate ourselves from others. But this only isolates us and results in everyone feeling lonely.

The nature of the idealized self is falseness and pretense. In short, we act perfect since we can’t be perfect. This makes us feel alienated from ourselves, from others and from life. All this showers us in hurt and frustration and unfulfillment. For we’ve chosen a way out of feeling pain that has not only proven itself inadequate, but it’s also a pain-magnet. We won’t see all this through casual observation. We’ll need to do some sincere self-searching to expose all the elements of our ill-conceived avoidance strategy.

Armored by the deeply ingrained perfectionism of our idealized self-image though, it will feel like a heavy burden to accept ourselves as we are. This makes it incredibly difficult to cope with life. Therefore, we forfeit a lot of life experience.

In the first phase of our work, we have to realize the extent of the damage we do and have done. We’ll need to uncover some of our images and unmask our pseudo-solutions. We’ll need to see our perfectionism in action and feel our self-alienation. In the next phase, we must become motivated to actually give all these things up.

At this point, we’ll be observing our own immature emotions. This weakens their impact and automatically starts to dissolve them. When we’ve done this for a while, our psyche will then be ready to cross the threshold into letting go. But the first steps are going to be painful. Yet for something this important, would we really expect it to come so easy?

The payoff is worth it

Speaking of expectations, we need to check any belief about what will happen once we cross over this threshold. For we may think that better patterns of behavior will be immediately waiting for us on the other side. That’s not realistic and not in truth.

We have been running away from original pains and frustrations for a very long time. Consequently, there is much we need to now face and feel, understand and assimilate. Only after we’ve gone through all this, emptying our inner well of what is old and immature, will new constructive patterns find a solid foundation.

The longer we put this off, the harder it will be to pass from childhood into adulthood. Even if we were to die as a child in this lifetime, we will eventually have to cross this threshold. When we finally give up our resistance to this process, we’ll be able to see that adversity is nearing an end. Whatever we must travel through is a growing pain that brings us to our final destination. This is a strong, self-reliant, full life. In the end, the payoff is actually worth all the effort.

True healing takes time

This path is not a fairy tale. We don’t find our deviations and evasions and then suddenly know nothing but bliss. Over the long haul, of course, it’s true that we can live shackle-free. And living without the errors of our ways weighing us down will bring us peace and joy.

But we each have a long way to go before reaching that good life. Even after the acute pent-up pain is gone, life won’t always grant us all our wishes. But cheer up, because reality is thankfully much better than all that. For once we learn to cope with mishaps and missteps, they won’t have the power to break us.

Our past ingrained patterns set a lot of wheels into motion that won’t stop spinning in an instant. As a result, outer negative events will still come our way. But we will face them from a new stance. And we’ll see opportunities for happiness we overlooked before. More and more, the patterns will change. Then outer unhappy events will happen less and less. Along the way, we’ll learn to make better choices.

We can now see that no unkind God is punishing us or neglecting us. We have brought our problems upon ourselves through our own unrealistic attempts at running away. If we did that, we can do something different. Not through intellectual understanding but through the hard work of reorienting our inner processes and growing organically.

New pain meets old strategies

Let’s look at the anatomy of this pain we come across. Is it really just old childhood pain that’s been put on a shelf? Is it nothing more than the frustration we suffered at the hands of our parents? That’s not exactly the whole story. True, that old pain and frustration interfered with our psyche’s resiliency. And it hampered our ability to deal with our pain properly way back then. Indeed, it forced us to hunt for solutions that ended up not bringing us relief.

But what hurts so much presently is really the pain of not feeling fulfilled now. And this is a direct result of our unsuccessful patterns. The past matters only because it caused us to come up with unproductive strategies that have led to the despair we feel about life now. If we don’t shy away from this pain but get through it, we’ll become aware of what it’s really about. It is due to our unfulfilled needs.

We’re frustrated because we can’t find any satisfaction. And we can’t seem to figure out what to do about that. We’re caught in our own trap and don’t see the way out. This makes us dependent on outside intervention to help us out. And we have no control over that either.

But there is always a way out. This is what we will discover once we bring all our illusory maneuverings into the spotlight of our awareness. That will reduce our feelings of helplessness and revive our feelings of resourcefulness.

A word of caution, though, about what we’re going to find. That beneath all our various “protective” layers is a pool of unmet needs that we know nothing about. We might know some of our unreal needs. These are our demands and expectations. But our true fundamental needs have been held in check.

From evasion to reality

Ultimately, our goal is to come out of our current state of half-awake living. To do so, this next step will be unavoidable. We will find ourselves perched here trying to understand what’s real and what’s not, when it comes to our needs.

In figuring this out, we will first run into the part of ourselves that stringently wants love and affection with the one-way demand of a child. Realize, it is not childish or immature, by itself, to need to be loved. It’s only so when we refuse to grow in our ability to give love. For then we lock out and cover up our real need to receive love.

As long as our destructive patterns and unnecessary defenses prevail, we’ll feel the tremendous pressure of our needs not being met. Once we start doing our work of personal healing, we begin to release the old pain held in our being. Then we’ll start to dissolve these destructive levels.

In time, we’ll develop the stamina and resourcefulness to bring fulfillment of our need to receive love. Until we reach this stage, our need to love won’t be able to find an outlet. This is what creates a strong feeling of frustration in us. What’s so very painful is the tremendous pressure this creates. It feels like we’re being torn apart.

Of course, all healing requires that we become aware of what we’ve been hiding. Don’t think for a minute though, that this pain is now new. It’s what has been going on inside us this whole time.

Along the way, it may have found another outlet, like a physical sickness. Now, as we approach the nucleus where the pain is clustered, it will feel more acute. But that’s just part of the healing process. Knowing about this in advance allows us to prepare for it.

When we shift our attention to the root of the painful feelings in ourselves, we transfer our emphasis from evasion to reality. We can’t just give our pain a light tap and think that is good enough. We’ll need to feel it in all its shades and variations. Then we’ll become fully aware of our real need to both give love and receive love.

Creating new patterns

On the spiral of healing, we’ll pass by our frustration and accumulated pressure. We can notice that we are helpless in the moment to make this magically disappear. It’s likely we’ll feel tempted to slip back into the dark waters of evasion again.

But every battle won will make us feel stronger. We’ll learn to hold our ground and not run away. And we’ll take the apparent risk to really live. Then new opportunities will come our way. We won’t duck from those either. We’ll grow more and find new ways to fulfill our needs. We’ll change our patterns.

This interim state can be the toughest to travel through. It’s hard to feel our exaggerated need to be loved. For our demand has grown all out of proportion. Yet we’ve been unconscious about what has been driving us. As this surfaces, we become aware of our real need for mature love. But until new patterns are the new norm, effective results can’t fully arrive.

We’ve been running our old patterns like well-worn routines for years, even decades. In truth, we’ve probably done them through a couple of lifetimes. Now we are starting to face our problems and change inwardly. But there will be a lag before outer changes can come. That’s when the pressure can feel intense.

Beware of the folly of turning back. During this temporary period, we will face all the built-up pressure. We will also feel all the helpless feelings, and grapple with confusion. This is a tunnel we must pass through.

Once we do, we will discover new reserves of strength and a renewed sense of our own adequacy. There will be occasional relapses, which are to be expected. But each can also become yet another steppingstone, another life lesson. As such, they can motivate us to establish new patterns in how we negotiate our way through life.

We’ll find the courage to explore new possibilities, instead of rejecting them outright due to fear. That’s the way to work with pain. So then life can become the fulfilling adventure it has always had the potential to be.