Where is the love?

We’ve simplified humans’, we’ve created categories where they are either good or bad. We us these same categories to judge ourselves. We base our judgments on what we are conditioned to believe is good or bad, this conditioning comes from our attachment figures, peers, media and wider society.

The trouble with this is that the conditioning is very rarely trauma informed, its very rarely based on neurobiology, its very rarely coming from a foundation of compassion and understanding.

Don’t get me wrong there are many people who do awful things of course that are beyond comprehension but I’m not speaking about them here. I’m speaking about the majority of people who are doing things that are ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘unhealthy’ that come from the ways they have adapted to challenges in order be able to get through life.

These adaptations can look like things such as emotional avoidance, addictions, eating disorders, compulsive behaviours, workaholism and self harm.

The aim of these behaviours is often to avoid the overwhelming discomfort of emotions that the person does not have the ability to regulate, so they instead find ways to suppress, numb or distract.

The problem is without an understanding of the purpose behind these behaviours they are often labelled as ‘bad habits’ or ‘poor choices’, stemming from a ‘lack of will power’ or ‘selfishness’. These explanations carry a lot of shame and are not effective for any meaningful behaviour change.

In order to create sustainable change we have to first understand what role the behaviour is serving. Without this understanding we only look to change the symptom without addressing the root cause. And while occasionally sheer determination can induce change it is likely a replacement behaviour will take place.

For example let’s say someone is determined to lose weight and they work hard to change their diet and implement an exercise routine, they may then find that they become unsatisfied with another aspect of themselves, they find that no matter what they do or change they still remain deeply unhappy. In this case the symptom is the constant drive for self improvment which on the surface may not appear harmful but when it’s coming from a belief that the individual is worthless it dosen’t lead to growth, only more self judgment and pain.

In order to create real change internally we have to understand these parts of ourselves that we are so keen to get rid of. Instead of pushing them away we need to turn to them with love and compassion and really get to know them. They no doubt serve a valuable purpose, one that at some point was in our favour.