Maladaptive Behaviour Patterns
Client’s can become stuck at times and this article helps us to assist client’s in becoming unstuck. Also, they will learn to recognize how to disengage from maladaptive patterns, that are no longer serve them.
As therapists and clinical social workers, how do we help client’s become unstuck from long-standing patterns?
Initially, we will look at how our client’s become stuck in the first place. Client’s meet the needs for safety, receiving rewards, becoming nourished, and having a connection with others. When an individual has unmet needs, they end up becoming stuck in unhelpful patterns by trying to take care of ourselves. What may have served them when they were young, no longer serves them when they grow up. Client’s can become stuck in the same pattern because it gives them enough sense to believe that maybe they are going to get what they want, so they keep repeating it.
Survival Mechanisms To Meet Unmet Needs
Throughout their lives there may be challenges to get the love they need, or the respect, or the safety they require. Client’s learn different ways to protect they themselves go after what they want to get, and that’s part of their ego strategies. Over time what happens is they identify with that; their habits and their patterns of protecting themselves and defending themselves, they forget who is really looking through the mask.
If they want to become unstuck it’s a matter of getting identified with the same thought patterns and habits, to take care of ourselves that we’ve been doing over and over again. and from a kind of neuropsychology viewpoint – neurons that fire together wire together and we become hooked on those patterns.
For those that are more adaptive, the more we will be able to see that what we are currently doing isn’t working for us and from there we will learn to try something different. It’s the same with species that adapt they evolve, multiply and flourish. Species that don’t evolve become extinct. Individuals that recognize that they are in a stuck pattern and let that discomfort of that stuckness then provides resilience and creativity to try something different is able to get unstuck.
Judgement in Stuck Patterns
When we become stuck we judge ourselves for being stuck and don’t typically like ourselves that much. It’s critical to forgive ourselves for being stuck because if we don’t we become imprisoned in it if we’ve started to shame ourselves too.
An example of this would be when someone becomes stuck in procrastination and but they’re embarrassed and ashamed of it because of it. They are not really being who they would want to be and sabotage themselves, it’s not until they begin to sense, them being stuck comes from a place of fear, and that the stuckness is coming from a place of self-doubt and become very kind towards what’s causing the stuckness, that there’s a possibility of change.
Steps To Change
The first step towards change is to forgive the fact that we became stuck and then to be willing to dig beneath this to the presenting pattern – whether there is a competing kind of thought or behaviour – what’s the unmet need? What the want or the fear that’s driving us, that’s keeping us caught? And when we can bring our mindfulness and our kindness to that, to that vulnerability, then we begin to get unstuck. This is only the start of the process…if you would like to learn more about how you can become unstuck please contact us at: admin@ovcs.ca.
