How Old Painful Patterns Re-Emerge in Times of Stress
This winter, I have been hearing again and again from clients and friends that for them, the holidays are not easy. What should be a wonderful, heartwarming time of togetherness is sometimes experienced as lonely and alienating, or other times as a sense of stress and overwhelm.
Many of us have friends and family who are absent or have passed away. Childhood memories of harmonious times often lead to a longing for what once was. Painful, sad, or even traumatic memories often come to the surface to haunt an individual or family.
Old painful patterns emerge like ghosts from a distant past. They exist as knots within the core, which can leave a person contracted, aching, or cold and numb. LRPPs (long-standing painful patterns) feel just like they sound: “lurps.” They wrap us up as if with a slimy invisible consistency when they take possession. We become “lurped."
LRPPs can be intensely challenging, even crippling. A person’s early experiences, especially the painful ones, pave the way to a heightened sensitivity to certain kinds of problems and to reactivity to those difficulties in self-defeating ways over and over again.
There LRPPs feast on a person’s heart and soul, especially during times of heightened expectations such as the holidays. Being alone, one often feels like others should have extended an invitation. Ancient sentiments of feeling left out or abandoned pop up seemingly from nowhere with even the slightest trigger. A feeling of being overwhelmed often reminds a person of a time when one was small, and adults had too-big expectations. When one’s parents had been very stressed, they often wanted their children to be their little saviors. In later years, those saviors from the past are left to feel either over-responsible or avoidant.
Long-standing painful patterns and trauma
At the core of a LRPP is trauma. Trauma is the response to a deeply distressing event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope, it causes feelings of helplessness and diminishes a person’s sense of self. One’s ability to feel the full range of emotions and experiences may contract, leaving them feeling numb.
One may think that trauma is only a story about the past, but trauma continues to exist in the present. Trauma rewires the brain and causes a person to experience the world differently. The body chemistry changes and one comes to live in an altered world and in an altered body. As the biologist and scientist Charles Darwin declared, trauma is lived out in heartbreak and in gut-wrenching experiences.
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A person may continue to feel a sensation of dread and helplessness in their body long after actual traumatic experiences. Trauma may damage a person’s capacity to have close, trusting relationships. Drugs, alcohol, and food are often used to mask the unbearable sensations, emotions, thoughts, and memories connected to past trauma. The holidays present innumerable triggers, such as excess alcohol, food, and a tendency to overspend. Addictions often re-emerge and may get out of hand. A LRPP can be understood as an unconscious pattern of coping with the old, undigested suffering of trauma.
When there was strain and trauma in the parents’ relationship, children often became their mediators or protectors. This is a feeling that often emerges later as feeling overly worried and torn by tension in the environment. Emotionally overwhelmed parents may project forward these feelings, leaving the children averse to the burden of close contact with others.
As children, we may have felt the tension or friction between our parents and other relatives. Then we may have felt that we were at fault, or that we had to fix what was wrong. No surprise that this overwhelms our ability to cope. Emotions become contracted and we feel numb. A child or young person might have frantically felt as if they had to hold things together, often they had to keep smaller siblings in check. The price of such conflict or trauma can be felt decades later as body feelings of unease, psychosomatic symptoms, and a propensity to get sick over the holidays. Often then, a person is left feeling numb with a contracted heart.
Ultimately people can obsess and ruminate over these experiences, sometimes 20, 40, or 60 years later. Many people end up blaming themselves for not being in control and with a sense of ease.
Mindfulness tools
Upon realizing that one has been LRPPed, mindfulness tools allow a person to attend to what is going on in their mind and body. However, at times like these, when what we see in ourselves is painful, shameful, or embarrassing, mindfulness practice must often be paired with self-compassion practice. When a person is compassionate towards oneself, something in body, heart, and soul calms down. Self-compassion allows a person to experience empathy for herself. I will conclude with a brief self-compassion practice which might be especially helpful in this time of year.
It helps to do this practice regularly, not only in times of need. This practice and many others can be found in Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom at Last and are recorded as guided meditations here.
Lie down on a flat surface, such as the floor or a couch, with your legs extended and your body comfortable and warm.
Relax into the felt sense of the contact between your body and the surface below you.
Place one or both of your hands on your chest over your heart.
Feel the touch between your body and the ground and between your hand and your chest.
Stay with the felt sense of touch for a little while; feel the comfort that the touch gives you.
Feel breathe moving your hand and chest ever so gently, rising with the in-breathe, letting go with the out-breathe.
Savor the felt sense of body and breath and surrender to its natural movement.
As you return to normal consciousness, notice the difference in how you feel
Post at Psychology Today
