Are you REPEATING the same PATTERN over and over again?

Have you ever had a Groundhog Day? With your spouse, significant other, children or coworkers?

Groundhog Day can happen in interactions with your loved ones, coworkers or friends. Sometimes it’s a repetition of feelings, ideas or points of view. To give you a clear example of a repetitive interactional pattern:

This example is just one of the many interactions we are involved on a daily basis in our interactions with others. Sometimes our patterns work for us, sometimes they do not. This is truly one of my favorite things to work on with my clients. Together, we figure out, based on your value system what works and what does not work for you. The basic premise of our work together is to repeat or increase more of what works and/or eliminate the patterns that do not work for us. Always trying to be proactive, instead of reactive.

Would you be surprised that a very typical issue

when working on patterns of thoughts/feelings or behaviors is

that at times, the repetition of patterns sometimes

has been with us for so long,

that we don’t even question it?

All of us have learned to handle reality in a particular way. Based on our cultural, family or personal belief system. We all have patterns of behavior we repeat over and over, and the same thing happens with how we choose to respond to life’s challenges, how we choose a partner, how we interact with our children, how we handle conflict, how we analyze and process new information, etc.

One of the main challenges we all face when we have and repeat negative feelings, ideas or thoughts: Not only do we not recognize them but we do not, at times, know how to reframe them differently.

Here is the ironic part, we might even repeat how we solve this particular problem: sometimes we deny there is a problem, sometimes we avoid thinking about it, sometimes we acknowledge there is a problem but we can’t see a way of reframing or solving this issue or we simply wash, rinse and repeat familiar conflict resolution strategies.

Together, we work on the following:

A good therapist works not only on the content presented by their clients, but our ultimate goal should be to work on the actual patterns of behavior that lead the client to respond in this particular way.

The client is the one that determines the content, and the work should be based on their value system

but the recognition of these patterns,

looking for blocks & new ways to respond

should be the ultimate goal of the intervention.

Plan + Action = Results

#elizabethguinea #You2.0 #recognitionofnegativepatterns #behavioral patterns #betteremotionalsystem #bettersystems

#peoplethattakeaction #change #longtermvision