You certainly don’t enjoy it for the most part, but you find that the same patterns repeat themselves as if you’re stuck in a loop.
Despite how hard you try, you always seem to end up back at square one. You encounter the same obstacles that have withstood the test of time, and which appear to be an inseparable part of your existence.
Deep down you know that something needs to change, you just have no idea what that thing is.
That’s going to change now.
It’s time to get off the hamster wheel and look at why things aren’t changing in your life. Let’s look at what you can do to gain a broader perspective of these negative patterns, and learn how to finally put a stop to them!
What Are Negative Patterns in Life?
A negative reoccuring pattern is a familiar, but painful situation you regularly find yourself in.
Whether the situation is a painful breakup, being taken advantage of, or sabotaging a good opportunity, if it keeps happening, you’re attracting it one way or another. This is why it becomes a pattern because you continue reliving a particularly painful experience.
If there seems to be a negative theme in your life that just keeps happening in different forms, then there is a reason why it’s happening. You may be aware of this reason, and you may be oblivious to it.
After all, all situations are teachers.
That’s why you’re doing this human thing in the first place: to learn. As with school, you’ll have to repeat the same class until you pass it. With life, you will repeatedly attract the same experience in different forms until you overcome it.
Why Do I Perpetuate Negative Patterns?
When you aren’t aware of the negative patterns in your life, they will continue happening because the root cause has not been addressed.
There is a wounded part of you that is unconsciously seeking out these painful experiences because they’re familiar. Even though you want these negative patterns to end on a conscious level, the unconscious may wish to seek them out because they’re safe.
Your external world is a reflection of your inner world. If that inner world is wounded, the gears of reality will spin to bring about the same situation as a mechanism for you to become aware of the deeper underlying issue.
Until you take radical self-responsibility and stop pointing the finger at the external, you’re not going to make progress.
Whether it’s a long line of bad relationships, being victimized, or sabotaging good jobs, your awareness of these negative patterns is the first step towards breaking them.
Without cultivating an awareness of the reocurring situations in your life, you stagnate because you’re not learning from those experiences (and mastering the lessons they’re trying to teach you).
You Attract Situations That You Need to Learn From
I always had a negative pattern around money, which we can call a money block. I would often be stolen from, robbed, left unpaid by jobs, and continuously lose sentimental items that meant a lot to me. Often, when I started getting ahead, I would be hit with fines or unexpected costs.
This seemed to happen like clockwork.
I believed it was out of my control and that I was just unlucky, so my response was to play the victim. All this did was fuel the pattern because I wasn’t looking at why this was happening.
This negative pattern continued like clockwork for many years until I ruled out the possibility that it was a coincidence. So I wondered, how is this possible? Why does this keep happening to me?
Inspecting this negative pattern brought me to a deeper realization that I always believed I was undeserving. Metaphysically speaking, the universe obliged. This pattern slowly started to dissolve as I worked on my self-worth issues, changed my energy around money, and believed I was deserving.
It takes time to change the negative patterns in your life because the unconscious mind has layers. Sometimes, the root cause is deeply entrenched, and it can be hard to weed out.
The deeper you go into the issue, the more layers you reveal. Unconsciously, you are causing all the negative patterns in your life, whether they appear to be within your control or not.
Without taking a hard look into the patterns that you blindly operate on, you have no way to break the negative cycles. This is why it’s important to realize that there is always an underlying cause, and the situation won’t stop occurring until you heal the root wound.
Where Do Negative Patterns Come From?
Negative patterns are often the result of unresolved childhood trauma. These unconscious patterns are manifestations of hidden wounds that will dictate your life until they have been healed.
Look at reoccurring situations as beacons. They’re illuminating an unconscious wound, and until healed, these painful situations will reoccur. Therefore, negative patterns are not your enemy. They exist to serve your best interest, despite how painful they are.
Every time the painful situation repeats itself, you are a little bit wiser, a little more healed, and you react a little differently until it has been overcome completely. This is the way you need to treat them.
Look at the wound as the cause and the situation as the manifestation. Unless the wound has been healed, this problem will continue showing itself in your life.
The situations that repeat themselves are proportionate to the severity of your underlying wound.
If your vibration is generally low, you’re going to attract all sorts of situations into your life that are on the same frequency. If you’re stuck in a low state, the universe is going to give you some big kicks up the ass to motivate you to change, otherwise, you probably wouldn’t.
Identifying Negative Patterns in Your Life
Now that you know what a negative pattern is and why it’s happening, you can start identifying painful trends in your own life.
Here is a table of common negative patterns that people face, what they believe, and the root cause. If you have a look, often what you think about the situation isn’t what’s going on. This is why it’s important to dig into why these situations keep happening and why they do.
Now it’s your turn. I suggest reflecting on your life and writing down some common themes within it. Here are some questions to answer:
- What are the common themes in my life?
- What situations seem to repeat themselves?
- How do these situations make me feel?
- What is the common denominator of these experiences?
- What signs are present before the situation happens?
- What will I do next time it happens?
Look for the Common Denominator of Your Experiences
Think about the reocurring themes that happen in your life.
The common denominator is always present when the situation occurs. It could be a certain emotion, a trigger, an action, a place, or a person. It’s important to identify the common denominator of your experiences because it is the trigger.
Once you’ve identified some negative patterns in your life, think about what you usually do when the occurrence happens and what you can do differently.
This cycle can be broken by training yourself to see the signs that you’re spiraling into another pattern and taking a different path.
Consequently, your awareness of these situations will flush up the underlying wound. You need to keep a mental notebook of what works and what doesn’t. This way, you can begin adjusting your approach until these old patterns deteriorate.
Think about what the situation is trying to teach you.
What lessons do you need to learn to heal the internal wound and move past this situation? You need to do a little digging here because each person’s wounds are different, and the situations that manifest from them are unique.
It may be a mindset, belief system, or energy that needs to change. Perhaps the situation is trying to help you accept something in your life without combating it or letting go of something that happened in the past.
How to Break Negative Patterns in Your Life
By taking alternative courses of action to dissolve those stubborn patterns, you can begin reconstructing healthier courses of action that serve you.
Create better habits by noting what works and then consistently doing it when the negative pattern reemerges. The more you create a positive shift in your emotions, attitudes, behaviors, and responses, the more you will break out of the negative pattern until it doesn’t happen anymore.
Something important I’ve learned on my path is that nothing changes until we take responsibility for it. Often, this means taking responsibility for things that we believe are out of our control.
The first step to breaking these painful patterns is to stop playing the victim and take full responsibility.
After all, the situation is happening to you, so you’re creating it in one way or another. When you truly take responsibility for what happens in your life and stop playing the victim, this is when things start to change.
When you find yourself walking into a repeating situation, make different choices. Even if you don’t know what the solution is, just try something else.
Responding the same way to situations is a sure way to ensure they keep happening.
If you usually get triggered by someone when they bring up a certain topic, stop and focus. Instead of perpetuating the cycle by lashing out and getting defensive, try talking about it. Try understanding their perspective, even if it’s really difficult to do.
Do something out of the regular every time you catch yourself in the same situation, and gauge the results.
If things turn out bad again, then you can cross off that alternative path. If you did something a little differently and got a better result, then focus on taking similar approaches if the situation arises again.
Keep working on yourself and be aware of these negative patterns, and you will slowly move in the right direction until you no longer need to relive them.