Heroes in Business - The Nature and Importance of Pattern

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

We describe what patterns are, why they are important, types of patterns, and examples of why knowing about pattern is important in this episode of Guided Self Healing Fearless Living with Dr Andrew Hahn.

Hi, this is Dr. Andrew Han, and this is episode 42 of Guided Self-Healing, Fearless Living. And this episode is called The Nature and Importance of Patterns, which is in our book, it's chapter six. And I want to just give you an overview of why patterns are important and what patterns are. So what are patterns? Patterns are universal themes that play out over and over and over again. We hear them in myth, we hear them in our lives, but they're themes and they're sort of like fractal in nature, which is they have a an underlying theme and then they build out in terms of the content of them but the underlying theme upon which all of that is based is the same even though the surface may look different so a pattern is anything that

is thematic in nature and which you will see holds an awful lot of different symptoms in them for reasons that are clear because the underlying nature of the pattern is the theme and then all kinds of beliefs or feelings or boundary issues or physical problems can play out in these patterns if they're traumatized so um so that's essentially what they are and why they're traumatized. So that's essentially what they are. And why they're important is often we'll have some kind of problem. And we think that the problem is really the problem, but it's not really the problem. It's a symptom of a deeper problem. And so if you work directly on the symptom, you'll get some relief, but you won't get as much relief as if you could find the underlying cause. And there are a couple of metaphors that I think are useful for this.

The one I use because I'm in the Northeast and because it showed up one day for me is like, if you think about an ice dam, if you know about ice, some of us deal with it all winter. dam if you know about ice some of us deal with it all winter and you have a gutter on your on your roof and there's a problem with that and you have water coming down in different streams in your wall you might think that the water is the problem you can call the water know, your OCD and your ADHD and your chronic pain and whatever. But what you might not know, of course, is that there is an ice dam in a roof that you didn't even know existed. And sort of like when something happens and something triggers it, the water comes down being all these symptoms. But in fact, they're not the problem. You clean up the water and then it comes back. You say, well, they're not the problem. You clean up the water and then it comes back. You say, well, I did come back. I cleaned it up. And it's because

you didn't know there was a roof. You didn't know there was a gutter. You didn't know there were ice dams. So you don't have the name for the problem. You just see you have a name for the symptom of the problem, right? So that's what it's like. Or a different metaphor would be, let's suppose you have a lot of houses you want to build, right? This one's more generic. And underneath all of those houses, there's a foundation and there's a crack in the foundation. Well, of course, you can try to work on the house. But if you haven't taken care of the crack in the foundation, the house will not, it won't stay up. It will be weak and it won't have a good foundation.

So you'd have to take care of the foundation and sometimes then you have to work on the house but sometimes the only problem is the foundation and when you take care of the foundation amazingly you know the houses are easy to work on because the only problem with the house was that there was a crack in the foundation and sometimes you're just working on one house and underneath it there's a foundation and it has a crack in it so like that will give you a clue to what the problem with that house is using all these metaphors so sometimes you have to work on a pattern first well let me give you there are three possibilities one possibility is the most important thing to work on is the pattern that's you have these symptoms, but you have this pattern, it's affecting all the

things you're thinking is the problem, and it's affecting other things you haven't even thought of at all as being related to the problem, because it never occurred to you that all these different things all were about one theme, and they all were were they all were enfolded into that theme so that's one possibility the second possibility is you have to do something about the pattern first it's like it's a predisposition you could say it's like if you don't take care of the pattern before you take care of the house then the house will be weak so you have to do something and then you can work on the house and sometimes if you take care of the pattern it's it's an exact replica i mean it's sort of like the house and the foundation are all one thing and it gives you a clue about what's

going on that's keeping your house from being built so you can use patterns in all kinds of different ways so that's why we have them is because it will tell you a theme right that's one reason you have them it will tell you what you might need to do about something because if the problem is betrayal then you might have to make amends or if the problem is you know unfinished death you might have to go through a death process i mean so some of these patterns built into them sort of intrinsically are the way you resolve them. And so you hear a theme, you'll know there's a pattern there or it'll tell you what to do. Or sometimes it will help you go deeper into some problem because you may not have been aware of the theme.

So you can use these patterns in all kinds of different ways. Now, in our work called Life-Centered Therapy, we've identified three basic categories of patterns. One of them, and we're going to go through each of them in subsequent podcasts because this is an overview, one of them we call single-center patterns. And single-center patterns are traumas that affect one of our three centers, our head, which is about beliefs, our heart, which is about our feelings and our bellies, which is about our boundaries and sometimes about our little bodies. So, you know, when you have a trauma to one of those three things you know then you you're kind of in a compulsion so what we're of course looking for which we'll talk about more later is you know you want your beliefs to be aligned with what you know you want you your feelings to be appropriate

in the context and you want to be able to experience them and be a choice about expression and of course with boundaries you want to have choice about what goes in and comes out and if you're traumatized none of those things are true and we're going to as i said in my next podcast we'll talk about that in more detail then there are what we call triple center patterns um and their their their themes are universal themes that affect all three of these centers. So you'll have some kind of theme and it will affect your beliefs, it will affect your feelings, it will affect your boundaries. And literally one pattern and your particular variation of that pattern can create

all kinds of different things that if you worked on them separately would take forever and you wouldn't be that effective anyway because you'd be working on the symptom and not on the problem. So that's the second category is these universal themes, you know, and some of them say come in the material realms which we'll talk about and that just means you can experience them through your five senses. you know even if you're in a mythic story or another lifetime and your head gets cut off you can experience that through your five senses you can see the guillotine coming down and then you know you can know what happened but non-material patterns are themes that are not in sort of normative western reality however you want to make sense of them because we just care if they're useful not if they're literal or true or not that's up to you because you know what you believe is your business but there's

stories of curses or there's stories of dark energies that people can't see that take you over or there's stories of abductions from aliens or anything like that they're they're not in what we said normative western reality is and uh you know whatever you want to think of them if you heal them and they make your life better, then that's great. And then the third category are called, we call them identity patterns. And really what we call them that, although it's true for all of these things, is when you have an identity pattern, what you're focusing on is not the trauma itself, but the way we protect ourselves from ever experiencing it again, which creates a very limited identity, because we believe we are the protector. And the protector, you know, comes at some great cost, because it keeps you from experiencing your

authentic self, because you believe if you really were who you truly were you'd get annihilated so you say that's a bad idea so i'm going to protect myself in some kind of way that limits me but at least make sure i never get end up in the situation that got me stuck in the first place so let's see why pattern is important and we have an example of this in the book which i will just repeat um but you can get a sense of it, and it's fun to read it, and it's fun to hear it this way, and it's, you know, you can hear it in all kinds of different ways, and you can extrapolate. So let's take one symptom, which is a panic attack, and this is what we spell out for you, and so let's say you have a panic attack in my office

because a motorcycle backfires. Now, if we're going to work directly on that, what I would, of course, say to you is when you're having a panic attack, I'd say, well, what's happening in the body as you're having panic attack? And you might say, oh, my heart pounding fast. So of course, then I would say, well, what you're going to do is you're going to bring all your attention to someone whose name is heart pounding fast because it's the one who's having the panic attack and we can work on it directly and so you're going to choose to bring all your awareness and so you become aware of you allow you bring all your attention to when you accept heart pounding past then you ask you can ask heart pounding past what do you come to share

about panic and it might say uh i'm a soldier in a war, and bombs are going off near me, and I can't handle this, you know, having a panic attack right now. And so of course, you get stuck in that moment. And then when the motorcycle backfires 20 years later, you have no perspective, and you're still living out the war. And as soon as, of course course you choose to become the body sensation then you no longer unconsciously identify with heart pounding fast but you consciously identify with the one who is choosing to be heart pounding fast and then bearing witness and holding it sort of like an actor who's now saying you know heart pounding fast isn't who i am it's just a role i'm playing and i'm going to be with whoever that is and that would be no pattern there that would just be a direct relationship

between the sound and the memory and you go directly from the motorcycle backfiring to the bombs going off and that's the problem is the bomb's going off and your reaction to it so it's an exact parallel process but let's take a different example with the same symptom motorcycle backfires you have a panic attack but this time that's not the problem that's a symptom of a deeper problem and we can determine that problem let's say we determine it's a betrayal and so i say you know that that your reaction betrayal. And so I say, you know, that, that your reaction to the sounds going off might get you to know what the real story is, but there's a quicker way, which is we've determined that the problem is betrayal. And let's suppose then I have to focus on betrayal and not just the sounds. The sounds are a symptom. So it's part of it. You can

focus on that, but you're also going to focus on I betrayed a trust. And when you say I betrayed a trust, then you feel throat closing up and you feel this inexplicable pain in your foot. Okay. So we still have your heart pounding fast, perhaps, but we also have two other symptoms that you wouldn't have found necessarily. One being tightness and throat closing up, that sensation sensation and the other being pain in foot. Now let's suppose we're going to have you bring all your attention to the one who said I betrayed a trust, whose other name is tightness and throat and pain in foot. When you come there, you say, oh my goodness, have fun with this, okay? We'll make it a different different same kind of scenario but slightly different let's say you say you know this is funny i'm wearing this strange uniform

i think i'm in world war one and i'm leading a group of troops and i'm not paying you know i'm distracted and uh you know i should be paying more attention and suddenly i because i wasn't paying attention i walked them into an ambush and i am uh watching the bombs go off and my men are dying and i'm feeling incredibly guilty about it and i'm sort of wishing that I were the one who's dying and not them because I feel like I didn't protect them the way I was supposed to as the leader and I'm cursing the fact that I'm a leader and I don't want to be a leader anymore so I watch what's happening to all of them and I can't stand it and I in a moment in an impetuous moment I shoot myself in the foot so that I'll be wounded as a way of assuaging my guilt and as a way of getting out

of the battlefield so I don't have to be a leader anymore or whatever it is and you know when they come and find me and they bring me to the hospital or something let's suppose that's the story. let's suppose that's the story now we're going to see of course that you're in a very different relationship with the motorcycle backfiring now because the problem isn't that you couldn't handle the bombs going off because of your fear the problem is you couldn't handle it because of your feeling so ashamed or something about the fact that you betrayed all these men and that you believe that you know you should be better so if we could then say okay your real problem this time isn't just your trauma because of the bombs going off and you have what you know that kind of trauma the war but your trauma is very different.

Look at what might be associated with that, which you would never have thought they all had the same thing. Suppose not only, and you didn't even mention these things because the motorcycle backfires and you're aware of the panic attacks and you wanted to work on the panic attacks,

but it never occurred to you. You also have obsessive compulsive disorder and you have to work on the panic attacks, but it never occurred to you. You also have obsessive compulsive disorder, and you have this strange fear that if, you know, you're not paying total attention and doing everything right and not missing any details, it's like something horrific will happen. And you also have attention deficit disorder, but not just attention deficit hyper activity disorder, ADHD, but you also have some kind of guilt about the fact that you can't pay enough attention. And you also have this strange limp in your foot because, you know, you had an accident and something very heavy fell on your foot. And they said, you know, you shouldn't still be in so much pain, but you're still in a lot of pain and it doesn't make a lot of sense. And you also tell me that you hate being in roles of leadership. And you say, you know,

every time I get near being in a role where I get to lead, I shoot myself in the foot, metaphorically speaking. And, you know, there could be all kinds of other things that are associated with it. So let's say you have strange feelings whenever you come into anything that reminds you of where this took place for reasons that made no sense to you. So what happened in the woods, you might have fear of woods you know i mean there could be in one of these situations my colleague and i counted 263 different potential problems that came out of one betrayal look at the same thing here it's really quite extraordinary because all of them get enfolded into that one storm so they can balance if you can take care of that and that's the only reason they're there,

which often is the case. So of course, in this case, we're gonna find out that the reason this person still has their pain in their limb isn't because of the accident that happened in this lifetime. In fact, the accident that happened in this lifetime could just be an unconscious reliving of what happened in World War I. It wouldn't have been an accident at all.

It would have been sort of like something that you chose unconsciously, subconsciously or unconsciously to bring into your life as a way to help you master this other story. But of course, you wouldn't know that. You would just think you were a victim of fate as opposed to co-creating a destiny at a soul level. And it's really quite extraordinary that, and you wouldn't, you'd say, well, you know, I shoot myself in the foot every time I want leadership.

And you'd think that you were speaking metaphorically, like I shoot myself in the foot. But that would literally be, of course, an indication of what's going on here because you betrayed a trust. You literally shot yourself in the foot. But that would literally be, of course, an indication of what's going on here because you betrayed a trustee, literally shot yourself in the foot. And you play that out over and over and over again. Now, the interesting thing, of course,

is if those are the primary reasons all those symptoms are there and you find a way to make amends for your betrayal, which there are various kinds of practices of forgiveness you might be able to do and you can let go of this sense of i betrayed a trust which you may have been playing out you know your fear of betraying trust all over the place or you may have people betray trust with you and that could be just i wanted to know what it was like to be those soldiers that i

wasn't paying enough attention to when you could find that, you know, in this lifetime, you get yourself into situations and people betray you and it would be just like I wanted to find out what the other side was. All of those things could be unfolded into this one enormous theme. So, this is why pattern is important. So this is why pattern is important. And we all, of course, know about pattern because there's some very famous patterns. The most famous probably is what we call the Oedipal. The Oedipal is just a pattern. Freud said it was a universal pattern.

I actually don't think it's the only universal pattern. I think it is a pattern. And I think it spoke something about matrix personality, which I think, you know, had all the joys and beauties of somebody who, you know, saw the world as being, you know, a place of a lot of doubt.

Now he comes up with this universal pattern. What is it? If you take the Oedipal, you know, the Oedipal story, you know, myth, but also his understanding of it, well you can bear, you know, you can hierarchically bring it well you can bear you know you can hierarchically bring it down to one theme which is i have this wish right this unacceptable wish which in this case in his story would be if i'm a young boy i want my mother and i literally want

her you know erotically you know i want to possess my mother but i have a problem which is that i have a father and he's gonna know you know he's gonna be able to read my thoughts and you know he's gonna punish me in the most horrific of ways of course which would be physical you know violence so that i won't be his rival anymore and so what I have to do is I have to deny my wish and I have to identify with him and be like him and then find someone like my mother, but not have my mother. Now, of course, if that works out and there's no trauma around it particularly,

it will get resolved and you will, in a psychoanalytic way, you'll resolve it and you will not be neurotic. But of course, if there's trauma around it, let's suppose that your mother and father are having a bad relationship and, you know, your mother kind of eroticizes her relationship with you and your father, you know, gets clearly you and he have a lot of fights and, you know, realize why that's happening, but it's playing out of a traumatic version of this a compulsive version you know it can play out in all kinds of symptoms right problems with authority problems in relationships problems with sexuality you know uh sabotaging any relationship that you

are coming into literally you might get sick whenever you think about you know going on a date where you think you might be having sex i mean there are all kinds of symptoms would come out of it you know but really what it would be would be an unresolved pattern and if you could heal the pattern and heal the triangular dynamic because it's a triangular pattern all of those things go away so what can we say i mean it's like knowing about pattern is really powerful and being able to determine if you're stuck in one of them and that your symptoms are really symptoms of a deeper pattern as opposed to the actual problem you need to work on can really, you know, make your healing work more effective and more efficient.

Now, of course, if you don't know about these things, you'll get there. It's just a question of how quickly and how elegantly you do it. But if you're aware of it, if you're aware of patterns, then the worlds open up because now you've heard this song. It's like, I wonder if I'm in some kind of pain.

And we'll go through all of them, you know, what these potential patterns is in a subsequent podcast. But at least now you know there's something to look for. So thank you very much for listening. So thank you very much for listening. And again, I'm doing this, our 42nd podcast, you know, this nature and importance of pattern. It's on March 31st, 2022.

Our book comes out on April 5th. Probably by the time you listen to this, it will have come out. And please buy it. It's called The One Hour Mir miracle, but really what the miracle is, is when you become more aware and more free. And that's really miraculous because anything you do makes you more free from suffering and more choice in the world is truly remarkable. And meanwhile, if you want to be in touch with me, you can do that easily. It's A-H-A-H-N-A-H-A-N at lifecenteredtherapy.com. And if you want to know more about us and our online trainings and our

live trainings or more about our book or anything, you can just go, of course, to lifecenteredtherapy.com. And I always love hearing from you. I love your comments. I love your reflections. I love your questions. I love you think if I'm, you know, think what I'm saying is crazy because I love skeptics. You know, I love it all. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. And when you're doing your own healing work, just ask, am I in some kind of theme? Betrayal, neglect. I believe something that isn't true. I feel like I've been taken over. I'm protecting myself because if I was who I really am it's too dangerous start asking worlds open up

and I invite you to open to all of these worlds because everything is possible so until our next time I wish you happy healing and happy evolving and a wonderful day bye