How Destructive Behaviors Help Us Feel Safe (Hint: You Are Not Broken)

If we’ve just navigated the hundredth relationship fail, job loss, financial start-over, unwanted relocation, or even addiction cycle, it can feel like something is truly wrong with us.

The voices that play in our heads might chant:

Why can’t I get it together? I’m a grown adult, why do I keep making the same mistakes? When will I finally figure out how to do this differently? When will my life finally take off the way it should? What am I doing wrong? Why can’t I ever be happy or satisfied? I’m exhausted by my life and the people around me.”

Today, let’s explore a different way to look at our  self-described “destructive” patterns, habits, and circumstances. What if all the same challenges that keep coming up have a purpose? What if they’ve kept you feeling safe and protected for a LOT of years?

This refreshing idea allows us to be kind to ourselves, even as we want to change our lives for the better, improve our income, finally find a relationship that works, be better parents, and in general have more joy and satisfaction we can actually feel every month.

If our existing patterns and beliefs are designed to keep us feeling safe, loved, and protected, they aren’t wrong. But, they might be outlasting their usefulness.

Often the inner voices and messages that don’t work for us any more come from:

• Wounds that we picked up in childhood—our little kid brains don’t have the skills or hardware to make sense of hurtful things that happen to us, so we tend to make ourselves wrong or develop baseline coping skills to compensate–it’s the only way our young brains can move through really hard situations, sometimes. We then keep calling in similar situations and events because it’s what makes sense to us and feels “safe” and known—even though it results in more discomfort and the same faulty outcomes over and over.  Our young brains created a functional playbook for how to handle those situations—and it stuck.
• Feeling safer in the familiar (a rule of the mind I share about in my book). Our brains LOVE what is known, even if the familiar is also miserable. It’s crucial to learn how to gently invite your brain to embrace new thoughts and actions in ways that don’t feel threatening to your system.

We unpack all this and so much more in  You Are Not Broken: A Compassionate Guide to Uncovering Your Inner Wisdom and Transforming Your Life With Hypnotherapy.

And once we discover where your beliefs about what’s “safe” in your life originate, we can tease out what no longer serves you and heal the wounded parts of you that generated those no-longer-useful beliefs in the first place!

Replacing old, outmoded inner beliefs about Who You Are is a practice, for sure. And we often need help to make those changes stick and stay. 

Books that help you learn about yourself + practice new thoughts and behaviors at your own pace are a wonderful start to creating lasting change. You can pick up the material as often as you like and put it down as needed. I’m ALWAYS here for you in those pages as you learn to walk a different and more satisfying path.

You can order your copy of You Are Not Broken by clicking the title anywhere in this post. 

Bonus: During the next few months, I’ll be publishing a series of meditative processes inspired by and supportive of the book, You Are Not Broken.  Here are the first two to kick off your journey with me through the book. Let’s find peace and joy together and sustain it all year long.

• Hypnosis for Inner Resilience and Self-Worth 
• Release Self-Doubt and Limiting Beliefs: Hypnosis to Embrace Your Wholeness
• Release Guilt and Self-Doubt: Guided Hypnosis for Inner Peace 
• Morning Meditation for Confidence and Presence

It’s time to work with all the parts of yourself to get where you’d like to go—with more joy and satisfaction in your career, finances, relationships, and adventures than you may ever have thought possible.

Sara