The Game Afoot: Repatterning Old Patterns

The Friday Edition | No. 14

The Game Afoot: Repatterning Old Patterns

There is a game afoot! It is there lying in wait for the next time you do something or act a certain way that mirrors an old pattern from the past. It is ready to rise up again and get you to turn on yourself in a way that you have been trained to do. Like a marionette on strings, you will hop to another’s tune, and move in the same way that you have been taught and habituated to react. Except now you are the one pulling the strings and are the puppet herself. You are in both roles now.

Oftentimes, the way in which we were made to jump through hoops as a child or with a long-standing abuser or abusive parent, guardian, sibling, or toxic extended family structure remains intact as we get older. Complex trauma does not let go of old wounds, patterns, and the sickening games we were made to play out with dysfunctional others just because we reach adulthood.

Until we heal our past – life patterns and relationships will continue to be the same – it is just the faces that change.

If you are dealing with CPTSD you know all too well the layered onion, and seemingly endless areas of wounding and places within that hold trauma. When repetitive abuse occurs, especially as a child, the entrenched patterns created by toxic abusers can be a minefield to navigate for the rest of one’s life. Throughout life, triggers and old patterns arise that throw us into flashbacks, dissociative episodes, and long periods of mental and physical anguish. Help is never quite sufficient, thorough enough, readily available, or affordable. Any stop-gap measure we might reach for never quite alleviates suffering or fixes what is wrong. The band-aid approach is never enough to heal the wounds faced in a day, a month, or a life. They become frustratingly inadequate, and a reminder of how broken, unhealable, and like an unfixable project we feel.