A few weeks ago I was flooded with anxiety. I was feeling scared about a particular relationship and repeating old paterns from our past. I was focused on all the things the other person was doing, not necessarily wrong and still was distressing to me. I stayed focused on them and the pattern, their part of the pattern, and didn’t slow down to consider my part in the pattern.
Eventually I did slow down, but not until I repeated my side of the pattern.
When I did slow down, recognized what was happening, I felt immense frustration with myself. I knew better - I know better. I know that we can’t control others, only ourselves.
When we focus our energy on what others are doing, we aren’t paying attention to what we are doing. When we stay focused on how others are impacting us, we can lose sight of our own autonomy and agency. When we are only paying attention to the actions of others, we don’t see how our actions are contributing to the situation.
Part of the work of change is being able to recognize when we are falling into old patterns. And. Our focus needs to be on ourselves, on our actions, reactions, understanding the root cause of our own distress (which probably stems much deeper than the current situation).
Staying focused on the other person, and what they are or aren’t doing wrong relieves of us our own accountability. It is easier, and far less self-confronting, to point out what the other person is doing, how they are repeating a pattern, what we want them to do to change it. When we do this, we are trying to make them responsible for our actions and reactions. And a thing is, only we are responsible for our own actions and reactions.
(Side note: I want to be clear that we do impact each other. Sometimes those impacts are beneficial, sometimes detrimental, sometimes neutral. And when someone does have an impact on us, we are still responsible for how we act and react toward that person or in the relationship. In cases of abuse, it is our responsibility to recognize the abuse and to remove ourselves from the situation - which I understand is very simple to say and harder to live, because trauma, logistics, etc. I am not saying that people choose to be abused by staying in harmful relationships either. Abusive relationships are complex and complicated and it is still true that we are only responsible for our own actions, we can’t force another person to change.)
When we are able to shift our focus from what another person is doing in a dynamic back to our own part, it requires us to be in the uncomfortable feelings we are experiencing, to actually feel them, to process them, to work through them, and to find new ways of being to break our part of the pattern.
When we are in dynamics that are stressful or that activate our own wounding (and any relationship is probably going to activate our wounding because that’s being human), and want to break our own harmful patterns, we can find it frustrating and challenging to change. Systems, and relationships are a system, don’t like change.
When we introduce change into a system, one of two things can happen. Either the system adapts to the change and so the system changes, or the system rejects the change, pushing out the new part and continuing on as it was without it. For example, in family systems we have the person who is the Identified Patient (IP). The IP is usually considered the “problem child” in the family, the one who acts out because of the dysfunction within the family. The IP is the flag that the whole family dynamic is harmful. When the IP goes into therapy, starts learning new ways of being and responding to the harm of the family dynamic, either the whole family can also do their own work or change, or sometimes the IP has to limit their interactions with the whole family, sometimes leading to estrangement. Those are the choices when one part of the system wants and does the work of change.
Again, we can only change ourselves. As more and more of us do our own inner and outer work of change, slowly, sometimes too slowly, the systems of harm will adapt. First however, they will marginalize those who want change, who are doing the work of change, trying to push them out of the system. However as we continue this work, individually and in our own interpersonal relationships, the ripples of change will move out, and eventually the systems will collapse and become obsolete.
Putting this in perspective of our own personal relationships, it means doing the work we need to so that we can change our own part of any harmful patterns that may exist. It may seem like our friends or partners, or whomever we have the dynamic with, will try to make us come back to the old pattern. Sometimes this will be successful, and with more and more practice we learn not to fall into those “traps”. Eventually the pattern will change, either because the other person will also start to change or because we end the relationship.
In the immortal words of Audre Lorde, which also has become my personal mantra, “For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” This means, unless we are doing our own inner work of change, changing our own parts in harmful patterns, dislodging our harmful indoctrination around relationships, we will always end up in the same dynamics, causing and receiving the same harm, over and over again.
One of the master’s tools is blame and shifting focus to what is wrong with everyone and everything else. When we learn to move our focus back to ourselves, back to what we can control and change, when we take accountablity and move in the agency of our own autonomy, we are creating new ways of being and doing in the world, causing and receiving less and less harm as we do so.
I currently have a few 1:1 spots available, if you are interested in starting this work. You can reach out to me here, or at the links below. Note I have a sliding scale, so please do not let finances stop you if you are interested in working with me. xoox
This is the first publication of this essay.
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Thank for sharing this, Gwynn.
I really needed to read this, as I am currently stuck in this pattern with my husband and also navigating a difficult dynamic with my family of origin as I try to break patterns from my childhood.
It's hard and painful, but I am determined not to continue the cycle for my own family and daughter.