Compassion: Honoring The Logic of Your Patterns
In my last post, I shared about how safety is a co-created, felt experience. As we start to feel safe in relationships and in ourselves, we can begin to be curious about our patterns of relating and being.
This can be difficult; we can look at our perfectionism, anxiety, people-pleasing, or shut down, with judgment and shame. We might ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep doing this? Why am I so broken?” or even say, “I hate this part of me.”
My view of clients (and a Core Value here at The Haven) is one of compassion for all that they have survived and the ways that they are attempting to cope and care for themselves.
Respecting Your Survival Strategies
I hold deep compassion and respect for the strategies you developed to get and maintain safety and security. These might feel like “problems” now or even a part of your personality, and they weren’t accidents. These strategies were smart and make sense as solutions to the challenges you encountered. They were the most effective way to navigate your world:
Your perfectionism might have been a great way to receive attention and feel valued when everything else felt chaotic.
Your anxiety might have been an amazing alarm system to keep you safe when your environment wasn’t physically or emotionally safe.
Your hyper-independence might have been a way for you to get your needs met when the people in your life weren’t reliable.
Your people-pleasing might have been necessary when others’ moods dictated your safety or disconnection.
Your tendency to shut down or go numb might have been a smart move by your mind and body to protect your heart when everything felt too much.
With this understanding, I don’t ask “What’s wrong with me?” but, “How did this strategy keep me safe?”
Holding Curiosity When You Can’t
The difficulty lies in that the strategies that were once life-saving might not serve you now. They might be making you feel “stuck” or exhausted in your current life. You might only be able to view them with shame. When you aren’t yet able to have compassion for the ways you kept yourself safe, I will hold that curiosity and compassion for you. Shame keeps us focused on old patterns and labels them as “broken”, but compassion allows us to witness the incredibly brilliant ways you survived and to gently begin to explore new ways of being. This exploration can bring peace to the war you’ve been having with yourself.
When you are no longer at war with your protective strategies, you can finally have the capacity to truly engage with yourself and others.
If any of this resonates with you, you can reach out today for a free 30-minute video consultation. You can email me at megan@thehavenwellnesscenter.com
Megan Hodges is a Licensed Professional Counselor Associate (LPC Associate) in the state of Texas and is supervised by Jonathan Todd, MA, LPC-S. You can learn more about her here.
