Why You Keep Repeating the Same Patterns (And the Secret to Change)

Episode Transcript

Debra: 0:00 – Hello everyone, welcome back to Jung On Purpose. I am Debra Maldonado.

Dr. Rob: 0:05 – I am Dr. Rob, welcome to the program.

Debra: 0:09 – And we’re with Creative Mind and we are continuing our series on changing, like what makes people change, what gives us people a transformation. I mean, that’s what we’re all about. We’re not just here to just examine ourselves. We want our life to change. That’s what draws people to personal growth. And last episode, we talked about why insight is not enough and why so many people just stop at insight and they’re still stuck in the same patterns and how to get out. And so today, talk a little bit about how change happens in a Jungian model. But before we begin, I do want to remind you, if you’re watching us on YouTube, click the button in the corner to subscribe to our channel. That helps us a lot. As well as if you’re listening to us on any of the podcast services, make sure you subscribe to our podcast, Jung on Purpose, to get every episode. All right. So Dr. Rob,

Dr. Rob: 1:02 – Alright.

Debra: 1:04 – If insight doesn’t change us, what does?

Dr. Rob: 1:08 – does. I know. I mean, when I look back, right, the changes that have been through, I could have never predicted them. Right? Because you think when you’re in a certain point at a certain point in your life, you think, well, this is where I’ve gotten, and this is probably it, right? I’m going to remain in this psychological space for the rest of my life, but

Dr. Rob: 1:38 – That’s not the case. Great transformation comes.

Dr. Rob: 1:44 – through self determination, self inquiry, which means just questioning yourself instead of accepting everything you’re perceiving as a truth, you’re questioning all those truths or all the apparent realities that come your way. So in depth psychology, we’re not interested in just changing behavior.

Dr. Rob: 2:14 – Which is the aim of many, many models. And that’s fine, right? If it’s working for you and it works for you, keep, keep doing it, of course. But it is the integration of the psyche. Now, what does that mean? Yeah. So if you think about, what needs integration, it’s things that have been rent to Sunderd, meaning they’ve become two or they they’re conceived as two different things.

Debra: 2:28 – And what does that mean to, yeah, what does that mean?

Dr. Rob: 2:44 – So what is the most obvious thing that we see as two different things in our everyday experience? It’s that we feel our conscious mind is separate there than our unconscious mind.

Dr. Rob: 3:01 – and

Debra: 3:01 – Some people don’t even know they have an unconscious mind or understand it or have heard that idea.

Dr. Rob: 3:09 – Well, yes, yes. But a lot of people know and understand that at night they have dreams and that the dreams do not follow the rules of your waking consciousness or your waking awareness and that they’re completely different. That they represent something alien to us.

Debra: 3:35 – But we don’t connect, you’re saying we don’t connect ourselves to the dream. think the dreams are just like, yeah, separate thing. But also too, Rob, I think what separates us is that we think we’re an island in this world, that everything in this world is separate from us. Like the people in the world that we interact with have a completely separate

Dr. Rob: 3:41 – separate things,

Debra: 4:04 – motivations and desires that are like we’re only enclosed in our little bubble of our body. And that that other person isn’t showing me anything about my mind at all. We’re very, especially early in our life, are, our egos pointed outwards. So we’re always thinking the outer world is separate. And then we’re separate from this, even our spiritual nature and our deeper selves. And so integration is integrating with all.

Debra: 4:34 – And like kind of instead of being split amongst ourselves, it’s having some kind of unity with our experience.

Dr. Rob: 4:42 – That’s a way to it. yeah. And so Jungian psychology, you can say is the psychology or a model, depth psychology model of wholeness. That we’re moving towards our human experience as a whole experience, not fragmented into conscious versus unconscious. Yes, us versus them, et cetera, et cetera.

Debra: 5:07 – Inner versus outer. Yeah. Us versus them.

Dr. Rob: 5:13 – Yeah, because that’s a result really of an internal split in the psyche. You’re simply projecting that split onto the world.

Debra: 5:19 – Wha- wha-

Debra: 5:25 – Well, a really simple example is in Maine pop psychology and therapy, there’s always blaming the parents for your life. You know, the childhood and your parents weren’t the way they should have been. And that’s why I have these patterns. And in young psychology, he says that we project an archetypal image onto our parents. So we are the ones who are projecting onto them this divine, perfect mother.

Debra: 5:52 – And with all those expectations, and then the human person just simply can’t live up to that. And then we create an inner image of our mother based on our experience with our mother, separate from our siblings or other people’s mothers. And we have this kind of what we talk about the mother of Bago. And so we’re experiencing our mother. She’s not as separate from our mind. She’s a part of our mind. And that is really fascinating to think about. remember the first time I read that is that

Debra: 6:22 – we’re projecting that archetype onto the mother is that we’re contributing to our experience of that childhood. Like we are a part of our psyches involved in it. It’s not like everything happened to me and I’m this just helpless child. It’s like our psyche is interacting with the environment and unconsciously now helping us navigate.

Dr. Rob: 6:47 – That’s deep, pretty deep.

Debra: 6:50 – That’s deep. But when we talk about, we’re going to talk about complexes today and what they are. it’s the mother complex is one of those things. And we talk about in depth psychology.

Dr. Rob: 7:03 – Yeah. And so let’s pick it up where we left off on our last episode, which was the idea that insight is not enough as we want to change. We’re not after simply changing our learning or changing our behavior, but really creating structural change in that movement towards wholeness, towards integration, right? So we got to the point where we

Dr. Rob: 7:32 – understood the, at least in part, the role of emotion. The emotion is really the one that conditions us. And therefore Jung says without the emotion, there’ll, there’s no transformation because you have to turn the key the other way. Now you use that same emotional component that the mind has been holding onto since we were kids. Now help it help let it help us.

Dr. Rob: 8:02 – free our mind from that conditioning. Not by pushing it away, not by denying it, suppressing it, fixing it. We’re not doing any of those things. We’re simply acknowledging it, accepting it as, this is part of what created me up to this point, right? So it’s played an important role in my life. I’m not going to shame it. I’m not going to push it away. I’m not going to make it bad.

Dr. Rob: 8:31 – I’m going to integrate it, meaning accept it, ask the question of what can I do with it? How can I use this emotional energy to transform my life?

Debra: 8:44 – So I love you say a lot of that the outer conflict is pointing to an inner conflict. So you’re hitting a wall in that area of your life. You’re repeating a pattern. It’s, it’s corresponds to something inside again, beyond behavior fixing, we got to go inside as like, what is the root cause? It’s not what you’re doing. And it’s not what you’re saying. And it’s not just what you’re consciously thinking. It’s this energy that’s moving.

Debra: 9:11 – So let’s talk about the, we talked a little bit about the child last week of being very emotional and not very rational. So the function of that emotion is to keep us alive, keep us safe and read the room and make sure that we are conforming and aligning so we can survive not only physically, but socially. And so people had tougher childhoods than others. And so our patterns are all different, but I noticed that

Debra: 9:39 – even someone, I would work with someone who had very little drama in the childhood, but more of the parents just doted on them, but they were kind of made them almost expected too much of them, like, you’re so perfect. And they kind of had a conflict around that. And then other people who’ve had tougher childhoods were more resilient. So it’s not the harshness of the childhood that dictates the level of work you have to do.

Debra: 10:07 – For some people, it can be more difficult when you don’t have all that resilience and it’s the first time you’re really examining some of these things. So I know a lot of people and I used to think that like, if something really bad happened to me when I was younger, it’s gonna take me longer and longer and more work to really have a transformation. And I want everyone to know who’ve had that experience that it’s not necessarily so. And I’ve seen people who have had really tough

Debra: 10:37 – experiences turning around much quicker than some people have. So it’s not a depth of trauma or a tragedy or drama that happened in the childhood. It’s more of the person’s resilience and willing to, you know, do the work and break free.

Dr. Rob: 10:56 – Yeah, that’s right. We’re powerful beings in that regard that we’re designed to survive and we have great defense mechanisms externally and internally. We have a powerful immune system that protects us from all the viruses and bacteria in the world, as well as this internal ego that has ego defenses that protects our sense of self. The Eye.

Dr. Rob: 11:26 – You know, and these defense mechanisms, of course, are what prevent many of us that are interested in personal growth and personal development. It stops us because the ego sees the unknown as bad, as dangerous. That’s why a lot of people are afraid of their own mind, right? They’re afraid to meditate or to look inward or to examine their dreams.

Dr. Rob: 11:56 – there’s a lot of superstition about it. think, you know, there’s bad things in the unconscious mind. And Freud obviously didn’t help that with his formulation of the unconscious as a repository of, violent and sexual desire. The egg kind of stuffed in there. luckily for us, Jung gave us a different picture of the unconscious mind. It’s more a creative.

Debra: 12:07 – You

Debra: 12:11 – our sexual desires.

Dr. Rob: 12:26 – intelligence that lives deep in our psyche and helps us regulate our life in a creative way. Most of us are unconscious of it.

Debra: 12:35 – And so it’s very creative, the unconscious like as kids, like we wouldn’t rationally be able to figure out how to survive a situation. And the unconscious has this intelligence within it to help us with that survival. And I think it’s the stages of where we’re at is what we need as a child, our unconscious gives us what we need that ego needs, right? is the ego needs to kind of come up with these patterns. So there’s nothing dysfunctional about them.

Debra: 13:03 – They’re actually very healthy adaptation. But then at different stage in life, those patterns, those functions, don’t help us anymore. So we have to evolve out of them. And we can’t just evolve out of them, like you said, by just changing behavior. We have to go in and like almost untangle it, almost like I was thinking a tight piece of yarn that has all the thoughts and feelings and emotions and projections, and then also narratives and…

Debra: 13:32 – and archetypal energy that’s in there that is driving those patterns. And we have to basically unwrap them through the emotion. Because the emotion is really what locks it all together. almost like it constellates. All that stuff constellates emotionally.

Dr. Rob: 13:44 – Yes.

Dr. Rob: 13:47 – Okay.

Dr. Rob: 13:52 – Yeah, I remember learning about learning theories, learning about learning. So learning theories simply kind of create these models of how we learn to become human beings, right? To fit into the family and the tribe and the culture and all that. So we’re learning creatures, obviously. We learn really well through observation, through our own experience, through language, through culture.

Dr. Rob: 14:22 – through even through art, right? We learn just perception and things like that.

Debra: 14:26 – We’re always changing. We’re always adapting, you’re saying, right? We’re always, I mean, we don’t remain a child. We learn and we learn from our mistakes and we learn how to act in different cultures and different age groups and different environments, a business environment versus on the softball field. And so we’re always like, and then we’re evolving too, but it’s a very slow pace of learning.

Dr. Rob: 14:29 – Overchanging.

Dr. Rob: 14:48 – Yes.

Debra: 14:54 – It’s like built into us. We’re not meant to stay.

Dr. Rob: 14:59 – problem that I saw early on was that these models of learning are not taking into account our emotional life, which is what Jung emphasized, right? That’s what we were talking about last time is that the emotion is such an important aspect of how the world imprints in our psyche. How does it leave its mark on us? It’s through the emotion. It’s not just through the visual

Dr. Rob: 15:29 – language learning. It’s through this feeling that we have this feeling of meaning. What does this mean? What am I experiencing here? Those are the imprints that last forever and stay in our unconscious mind. So that when you know we were talking about let’s say somebody’s tendency to please to be a pleaser and therefore kind of not really get what they need or want from social

Dr. Rob: 15:58 – interaction. That pattern, we can pretty much bet was imprinted initially, emotionally. Because as young children, we’re not thinking through things, we’re not, you know, writing notes and then studying them and memorizing them. We’re simply experiencing the world directly. And that directness

Debra: 16:18 – and sitting and thinking about contemplation like I wonder

Dr. Rob: 16:27 – imprints on us emotionally. That’s what stays with us for the rest of our life unless we do this this inner work. It remains pretty much intact from those first nine years of life as the template for the way we do our life.

Debra: 16:47 – Would you say that the, like we’re kind of wide open and then around nine or 10, we start to, like the rational mind kicks in and starts to kind of be a better filter for us. And so that’s why people always say below nine is really the critical formation of our deep patterns. And that kind of like, we have that rational mind starting to kick in. We start to become more of a young adult trying to figure things out.

Debra: 17:16 – It’s a little, we’re not as open and exposed as we were. And so the key though is like, how do we change? we have the emotion. How do we change? do you, I don’t know if you want to just mention what complexes are as a way to kind of talk about that.

Dr. Rob: 17:35 – Yeah, so the Jung’s model of a complex or the complexes is really interesting because then it helps us understand and reverse engineer a lot of our conditioning, our early childhood conditioning. We’re not pushing it away. We’re not denying it. We’re not making it bad. We’re simply saying, I can now make my own decisions in a conscious way. I do not need.

Dr. Rob: 18:04 – my early training of childhood to respond to life now, which is what most of us do when we don’t do our work. We’re acting pretty much based on our first nine years of life as if we’re still back there. The original template, we’re playing it out now in our relationships, in our work.

Debra: 18:24 – The original template.

Dr. Rob: 18:32 – in our own inner life. It’s it’s when you understand this principle, of course, it’s it’s unacceptable. Why would we? Why would we choose to act as we learn to act in the first nine years of life?

Debra: 18:50 – And I think the insight part is interesting because when we talk about the emotion, emotions are irrational. Insight is the rational mind. the two of them are opposing in itself. And then the complex is like a group of systematic, autonomous programs that are happening in our life that kick in, in certain situations. But the core of it is that early life. So we’re reacting, rather than creating.

Debra: 19:18 – We’re always reacting to life versus making clear decisions. you know, it feels like we’re making conscious decision. It feels like I chose that job or I chose that relationship or I chose this path of work that I wanted to do. all unconsciously, it’s all choosing for us. It’s choosing every partner you’ve had, your friends, the people you surround yourself with, your coworkers. They’re all part of that.

Debra: 19:47 – field of collection of your mind and your psyche. so what we need to do to get to it is there’s a lot of ways, and we talk about this a lot in our coaching, but it’s really hard to do it directly for yourself because your ego is so easily helped you to get distracted or get that insight and feel like you’re done. And it doesn’t want to go deep. So it’s always like,

Debra: 20:16 – convincing you you’ve done enough work and you don’t need to go there and that’s not it. So it’s, it’s always important to have a guide and and to find someone to help you enter the unconscious sort of like a guide of a hero’s journey. The guide is taking you on a journey of your own inner life, not fixing you, not healing you, but, but helping you reveal what you can’t see what’s not conscious. And when you talk about integration, that’s what it is. It’s making the unconscious

Debra: 20:46 – It’s not healing the unconscious. It’s not reprogramming the unconscious. It’s making it conscious. And now the access you have to who you are is much broader because now it’s not hidden from you. Now it’s in front of you and now you can make a decision. But before that, it’s like running its own little party underneath the surface.

Dr. Rob: 21:11 – Yeah, so a simple definition of a complex, let’s say, just so we’re all on the same page. It is a constellation, meaning a kind of a conglomerate, right? A putting together of memories, emotions, like we’re talking about, you know, emotions, these early emotional patterns that we have, they can be part of a complex.

Dr. Rob: 21:42 – attitudes

Debra: 21:44 – Behaviors too, right? Like your condition patterns, your habits.

Dr. Rob: 21:48 – compulsions, compulsive behaviors, pattern of behaviors. So all these things together, the young identified them as complexes. So we’ve all heard of inferiority complex, Napoleon complex, mother complex.

Debra: 22:06 – The mother complex, father complex.

Dr. Rob: 22:12 – Those ideas are useful to us because now we can begin to understand.

Dr. Rob: 22:19 – where do these compulsions to act in a particular way come from? I don’t mean compulsive in a clinical way. No, I just mean like, yeah, that we develop habits and like we always say we’re creatures of habit and that those habits are so difficult for us to change sometimes.

Debra: 22:28 – like overeating or smoking cigarettes. Although that is a complex right there.

Debra: 22:44 – Because they’re the effect, they’re not the cause. So changing behavior, going, I was a hypnotherapist for a few years before I went into coaching full-time. I really saw that the smoking had nothing to do with them. I just stopped smoking. It was like a deeper emotional need eating the same way. I wish I could just stop. all of it had to do with relationships and the emotions.

Debra: 23:10 – and the childhood stuff that came up during those sessions, it really wasn’t about just thinking cigarettes are gross or don’t eat any fatty foods and sugar’s bad for you. It’s I’m choosing to feel to change my behavior. Those things, they may give you short-term, easy temporary fix, but you’re right back to the pattern again, every time.

Dr. Rob: 23:34 – Yeah, so we can say or think about this, these complexes as we’re embodying them. They became part of our or they were part of our environment, our emotional psychological environment growing up. And we internalize them, we absorb them into the structure of ourselves, of our bodies, of our psyche. Therefore, they’re very powerful because

Dr. Rob: 24:03 – It feels that that’s the way reality is according to the complexes in our psyche. In other words, our early experiences now become the shape of what we carry into the world and how we interpret the

Dr. Rob: 24:25 – That’s a powerful understanding, right? Insight of the nature of the psyche, which leads us then to, okay, how do we reverse that? Not again, not pushing away, not making it bad, but simply saying, if I’m ready now to decide and to make conscious decisions beyond my conditioning, beyond the structure of my complexes, how do I do that?

Dr. Rob: 24:54 – How do I make those changes? And that requires that getting to the emotional layer of the complex so that we can accept these emotions and transform them. here Jung says, this is how the emotion transforms the psyche from within. It communicates that the unconscious, that because it is an intelligence like he says,

Dr. Rob: 25:22 – It communicates through images and symbols with the conscious mind. So that it in dreams, what is it doing? It’s showing us these scenes that are powerfully symbolic. But because we interpret them literally, we miss the message. Once we start to decipher the symbolic meaning of these scenes in our dreams, it’s like a code.

Dr. Rob: 25:52 – that transforms your conscious life. So it’s being, yeah, that energy is being communicated symbolically in the psyche.

Debra: 25:57 – And that’s good.

Debra: 26:05 – It’s the, that’s the beauty of working with a coach because the coach will ask you a question, a young coach would ask you a question that is not a typical question that your friends would say. And you get advice from your friends or your mother. They would ask you, well, what’s so bad about that? And why, why, why, why resist that? And it’s like, like the, the complexes are like this, think of this metaphor is that you’re trying to.

Debra: 26:34 – like empty out like a pile of dirt, right? And you’re creating a hole and you’re digging and you want to create, you know, plant something and you’re digging and digging. But what you’re not seeing is another part of you filling up the hole again. So you’re like, you’re like trying to empty the hole, but this other part of you is filling it up and you’re getting nowhere. So it’s like rationally, you can work harder, you can maybe move it more, but that unconscious part of you is working against you.

Debra: 27:03 – And it feels as though nothing is getting accomplished. And so that’s why it’s so important to go into the unconscious and see what’s there. So you could say, Hey dude, why are you keep filling out my hole? I’m trying to empty this hole here. What’s going on? And it’s like really having those symbolic through dreams, young used active imagination, which is sort of like an open exploration of your unconscious and dialoguing.

Debra: 27:31 – exploring and spontaneous images appearing very intuitive. And then also just working and being with your emotion and what’s that feeling of frustrating what is happening. And so it’s a the complex is called complex because it’s not simple. It’s not as easy. I remember when I first started doing personal growth, it was all about limiting beliefs and you’re good enough and just think positive and I’m confident and I’m going to make it and don’t

Debra: 28:00 – don’t think negatively. Don’t be critical of yourself. You know, the self talk needs to change. And that was great. And you need to go take action. But it really wasn’t it was kind of like just skimming the surface. And I did feel a little better. It’s not bad. But it’s not the whole picture. It’s not going to get you to the promised land, which is empty in that hole. You want to empty

Dr. Rob: 28:25 – Yeah, so the image that we get then from Jung’s model is that these symbolic forms and communication that’s going on between the conscious and the unconscious mind is the fuel of the psyche. It’s the fuel, it’s what makes it move. It’s what, you know, motivational speakers talk about motivation, inspiration, creativity.

Dr. Rob: 28:52 – Where does all that come from and what does that mean? It means there’s great emotional energy in the psyche that’s moving it, that’s inspiring it, right? It’s like the spirit within us that activates our will and our creativity. All that is impossible without the complexes. The complex is simply, the question simply becomes, am I going to live my life unconsciously? Meaning,

Dr. Rob: 29:22 – Let the complexes do whatever they learn to do in those early years and repeat the patterns of course now with more learning or more persona and all this stuff. Or can I take the reins of my psyche and make decisions for myself? The kind of work that I do and the meaning that I derive from that work, the kind of relationships that I create, all that I can decide for myself.

Debra: 29:25 – Automation.

Dr. Rob: 29:51 – I don’t need the complexes to tell me, well, you know, what is the old pattern? Let me just repeat that. And that’s what happens with most people that they repeat these, the same old patterns. Therefore they think that’s as good as it gets, right? I don’t, you know, my life just turns out this way. They’re not taking the reins. They’re not consciously deciding who they are and what they want out of their life.

Debra: 30:18 – And I could tell you just working in, I’ve been the coach for over 23 years now. the first question people say is I know my pattern. know I want to stop this pattern. How do I stop this pattern? And, and I want to say that I think the biggest mistake I made early on is that resentment of the pattern. And I think we need to approach the pattern and the complex in a very friendly way, because it had a purpose at some point.

Debra: 30:48 – And instead of resenting or trying to run away from the pattern, again, you’re just pushing that in the unconscious again, and you’re resenting it versus let’s work together. Let’s make this conscious. Let’s bring illuminate this part of my mind. So when we have, we work with Eastern philosophy with our coaching. So it’s very different than just the traditional psychology. We bring in the Eastern philosophy, which is this wisdom mind that we have, this conscious mind, this

Debra: 31:18 – witness that’s always there, that’s untouched by our life. That powerful part of our conscious mind is like a light that can break apart the delusion and it can be witnessing to it. And in itself, when we start bringing it to that light versus our ego examining our patterns, but having this witness kind of bring space to it without judgment, it really does something really transformational, just even being the witness to it without judging.

Debra: 31:47 – So that’s our approach with working with the emotions and we’re working with our work. We’re not pushing anything away. We’re not trying to fix a bad habit. We’re trying to understand what’s the motivation underneath it. So it frees up so much more than just the one thing you’re trying to heal or fix. It’s your life, whole life changes. You see how this complex has ruled all parts of your life.

Dr. Rob: 32:13 – That’s how transformation happens. with this dissatisfaction, let’s say, with the status quo.

Debra: 32:17 – Make transformation happen.

Debra: 32:28 – And one thing too is that you need both intellect and emotion. So you don’t want to just dive into an emotion and have catharsis. And you also don’t want to be hyper intellectual. You want to have both come together, the balance of the yin and the yang, the anima and animus for that transformation. You need both. I know that a lot of people in the eighties, they would have people have catharsis and they always thought that that was

Debra: 32:55 – like release your anger and release your sadness, release your passions, but that just rewired your brain to be more angry, like it kind of reinforced it. What we want to do is something a little different. And I know that a lot of people, especially in now, we’re very in our heads. We look at our online, we’re maybe triggered about current politics and situations in the world that we’re upset about. And, but we’re really kind of in our heads a lot.

Debra: 33:25 – I think everyone needs to be invited to get back into their body and start feeling how we’re feeling and not running away from ourselves and how we feel. That’s an ego defense mechanism to keep you in intellect versus really feeling what you need to feel. we were at a call once and Rob you were like, that’s really true. When I said, we’re not really afraid of any event in our life. We’re afraid of how it’s gonna make us feel. And if we’re not afraid of feeling,

Debra: 33:55 – And we’re unstoppable. But when we were kids, we were afraid of feeling bad. We were afraid of feeling powerless. And so we found ways to cope. And so what if we open that up again and ask a different question to ourselves of, what is this really helping me do, avoiding this feeling?

Dr. Rob: 34:16 – I it.

Debra: 34:17 – Yeah. So the next episode, we’re going to talk about self-improvement to individuation and the difference from fixing yourself to becoming yourself. And we’re going to talk about individuation and how it’s a different model than most coaching models. So if you’re interested in something new, trying something new.

Debra: 34:45 – Or are you a fan of Jung? Always a great topic to learn about individuation. So we’ll see you next week. In the meantime, just check in with your body. Am I feeling what I’m feeling, allowing yourself to feel what you feel? It’s a very powerful experience to be inside your body and everything’s gonna be okay.

Dr. Rob: 35:06 – body of emotions.

Debra: 35:07 – embodied emotions. All right. Thanks, Rob, for a wonderful topic today. Good idea. And we’ll see you next week on Yong On Purpose. Bye.

Dr. Rob: 35:17 – See you soon.