Shining Light On Addictive Emotional Patterns

A quote written in my 5 year old journal:

"When struggling with defiant, unconscious, self-destructive selves we must realize that these selves are activated when we fail to take action; when we fail to make necessary changes in our life. When we fail to give birth to a more mature self, to begin deeper unfoldment.

One's destructive aspects can serve to force change, breaking up ordinary lifestyles, routing one into chaos, suffering, new possibilities. The unconscious is extraordinary in it's capacity to orchestrate events in outer reality to achieve it's ends.

Equally destructive inner selves are those which represent the perfect models of what according to society one's life should be. What always lurks under such behavior is is the need to feel loved and accepted."

I have been reading an old journal and I have been looking at the advice I was giving to myself 5 years ago and is the same way I have been avoiding growing into now. I have been trying to change in the same way for 5 years.

I can see I need to shed light on my repeating emotional patterns. David Schnarch Phd. writes: "Many people assume we are our feelings. It sounds like a validating and accepting of feelings, but it creates other problems - that is if you get your identity from your feelings then you cannot afford to have them change. You'll feel like you won't know who you are. When you have a stable sense of self, your feelings can come and go like the weather. I've seen people who have an identity  a "hot head" start to get angry even though they are not really mad. Getting angry reinforces their identity and organizes whatever is unfamiliar into familiar patterns.

Rereading my old journal I can see that in my ego defended self - I continually maintain a baseline of anxiety that prefers the familiarity of busyness and that I feel my identity in feelings of overwhelm and being unbalanced. It is how I keep myself small and distracted from the bigger purposes of my life. How can I possibly take more on and be greater in my life if I feel overwhelmed?

Years ago I wrote that the qualities I am called to be are:

-Intensely alert, present, activated and organized.

-Balanced, rested, well paced.

-Fully surrendered to my life as it is - fully accepting of all of myself.

It is very interesting to me that I can now activate these unfamiliar, quiet, solid, measured qualities in myself for about 3 days and then I do not know myself anymore and I have to start spinning my own darkness hole of busyness and overwhelm (like the drawing above) to feel familiar and known to myself.

5 years ago I could not sustain a calm, activated presence for more than a day and only once in a while...now such an organized, accepting, calm presence is sustained weekly for about 3 days at a time. But I still fall "off the wagon" into old patterns of overwhelm each week as well. I can see that emotional patterns of staying small are like an addiction that we all universally turn to again and again to comfort ourselves with familiarity.

Good questions to ask yourself are:

1.) What emotional patterns do you use to keep your self small and preoccupied?

2.) What are the higher qualities that are opposite of your addictive emotional pattern?

3.) How long can you sustain them in your daily life?