You know you need to have a difficult conversation, but you keep putting it off. Every time you think about bringing it up, you anticipate an uncomfortable response. So you decide to wait until another day.
For a little while, you feel better because you don't have to deal with the conversation. But the issue remains unresolved, and eventually you're facing the same decision again. Before long, avoiding the conversation is your familiar pattern.
Understanding Vicious Cycles
In The Trauma-Informed You and the Renewing Your Relationship With Yourself training, we explore how behaviors can become part of vicious cycles. These cycles help explain why we sometimes keep responding in familiar ways even when we recognize their undesirable consequences.
Consider someone who repeatedly agrees to things they don't want to do. Saying yes helps them avoid the immediate discomfort of disappointing someone. Later, they may feel overwhelmed, resentful, or frustrated because they've accepted another responsibility they didn't want. The next time someone asks for help, the same discomfort appears. Saying yes provides immediate relief again, and the cycle continues.
Within a vicious cycle, the short-term benefit helps reinforce the undesirable behavior, while the longer-term consequences create stress and anxiety. Understanding both parts of the cycle helps explain why simply deciding to stop a behavior may not be enough to change it.
What Is the Purpose of the Pattern?
One way to begin examining a vicious cycle is to consider what happens before, during, and after the behavior. The goal is to understand how the situation, your response, and the consequences relate.
Think about a behavior you've repeated even though you want to change it. Consider these questions:
What typically happens immediately before you respond this way?
What are you trying to accomplish or avoid?
What immediate benefit do you experience?
What consequences follow?
How does the behavior influence your relationship with yourself?
These questions can help identify what continues reinforcing a familiar response. They also give you information to use when considering different choices.
Moving Toward Self-Authority
Recognizing vicious cycles is part of developing a better understanding of your relationship with yourself. As you identify patterns and examine their consequences, you can begin considering whether your responses reflect your current needs, preferences, and circumstances.
The Renewing Your Relationship With Yourself training includes exercises that help you examine survival responses, defense mechanisms, and vicious cycles as part of developing self-authority.
