Here We Go Again
There are some things you only have to do once before you think, Right. I’m not doing that again
And then, sooner or later, there you are.
Doing it again.
It might be something fairly small. Checking your phone when you’ve already decided to put it away. Eating when you’re not hungry. Putting something off until it has become considerably more stressful than it needed to be.
Or it might be one of those patterns that has been around for rather longer.
The same argument. The same relationship problem. Saying yes when you mean no. Taking on too much and then wondering why you are exhausted. Starting something with great enthusiasm and quietly losing interest once the difficult bit arrives.
You probably know your own version.
That is often the frustrating part. You're not unaware of what you're doing. In fact, you may be able to give a fairly detailed account of the whole thing.
You know how it starts. You know what usually happens next. You may even know roughly where it is all going to end up.
And yet somehow that knowledge doesn't always seem to stop you.
By the time you notice that you're doing it again, you may already be halfway through the familiar sequence. Which can leave you wondering why, if you know perfectly well what you are doing, you can't simply stop.
People are often rather hard on themselves at this point.
They tell themselves they lack willpower. That they should know better. That they are obviously incapable of learning from experience, despite considerable evidence to the contrary in most other areas of their lives.
But repeating a behaviour isn't usually a sign that you haven't understood the problem.
If it were, most of us would have sorted ourselves out years ago.
The difficulty is that many of the things we keep doing serve some sort of purpose, at least in the moment.
They might help you avoid something uncomfortable. They might give you a bit of relief, distraction or comfort. They may have become so familiar that you barely notice the point at which you make the choice.
Sometimes the behaviour you are trying to stop makes perfect sense once you understand what it is doing for you.
That doesn't mean you have to keep doing it.
It does mean that simply telling yourself to stop may not be enough.
If you've ever tried to break a habit by sheer determination, you will know that determination can work for a while. You make rules. You start again on Monday. You decide that this time you really mean it.
Then life gets busy, or stressful, or tiring, or simply normal, and the old pattern has a way of appearing again.
Almost as though it had been waiting.
This is where it can be useful to become a little more curious about the pattern rather than immediately trying to get rid of it.
What tends to happen just before?
What are you feeling or trying not to feel?
What does the behaviour give you in that moment?
You don't always need to know the answer immediately, and you certainly don't need to turn yourself into a full-time research project.
But once you begin to understand the pattern, you have something to work with.
Sometimes the change is surprisingly practical. Sometimes there is something underneath the behaviour that needs more attention. Sometimes the thing you thought was the problem turns out to be the solution you found to something else.
The point is that you don't have to keep having the same conversation with yourself.
You know the one.
This is ridiculous.
Why am I doing this again?
Right. That's it. Definitely not doing it tomorrow.
You can change a pattern without making it a battle between the sensible part of you and the part that apparently has other plans.
And you don't have to become a completely different person in the process.
You just need to understand what keeps pulling you back into the same old story and find a different way of responding when it starts again.
Because “here we go again” is a perfectly good place to start noticing something.
It doesn't have to be where the story ends.
If some of this feels familiar, we can talk about it.