By Maria Miller, MA, PLPC
We all have patterns. One of mine is to apologize before I know what I’m apologizing for. Did I accidentally brush your shoulder while passing through a doorway? Sorry! Is the room a touch too warm for my client? Sorry! Did I do absolutely nothing wrong but the look on your face says I did? Sorry!
I realized this pattern of mine in a kind of embarrassing way: My precious little daughter, who is not quite two years old, has started saying “sorry” quite regularly for no apparent reason. It’s cute, and I also found it a little perplexing. She’ll literally be enthusiastically eating her pasta dinner, look up at her father and me, and say “sorry!” At first, I thought, “well that’s weird… where did she get that from?” But as is often the case with the great mimicking-machine known as a toddler, she was just copying one of her favorite role models… ME!
Patterns are like that. They grab ahold of us before we are cognizant of them. It often takes an outsider to call attention to the fact that we enact them in the first place. So why do we do we behave in certain ways, even if they aren’t necessarily the best for us? Because our brains love efficiency. Think about it: What would it be like if you had to consciously remember how to drive home every time you did it? What if you had to stop a conversation every time you needed to check the time because you couldn’t process the numbers without thinking about them? Brains have very little extra energy to use, so they make do with what they can by making behaviors automatic. Once upon a time, my brain learned that I could say “sorry” and likely gain what I wanted: Approval. Then, it ran with it and never looked back.
Now that you know why your brain is a pattern-making machine, what’s a pattern you’ve noticed about yourself that no longer serves you? Maybe you interrupt your partner more than you’d like. Maybe you hold back your feelings, even when someone safe is inviting you to share them. Maybe you burst into anger the moment you feel accused of anything at all. Maybe, like me, you apologize more often than is warranted. Does it help to know that this pattern isn’t really you, it’s simply a habit your brain picked up along the course of your life to conserve some energy? Does it help to know that it’s simply a neural pathway that, while challenging, can be re-grooved into a new, more helpful pattern?
Patterns are a part of what we do, but they don’t have to permanently be a part of who we are. Being a therapist is so wonderful because we get to help people uncover who they really want to be, beyond the patterns and coping mechanisms they’ve picked up along the way. We get to hold the light of believing in our client’s potential, even as they seemingly fall apart. Being a therapist means consistently examining both our clients’ and our own patterns to find new opportunities for growth. And guess what? I’m not sorry for that.
