We don’t rise to our whys

If you’re trying to shift a behaviour or addictive pattern, you may have tried, as part of the process, to connect with your “whys” around the desire to change.

This is a useful exercise, but what often happens is that you do this work, feel motivated for a while, but then find yourself speedily gravitating back to the path you swore away from.

This is because generally, we take the addiction to be the primary pain, and we work hard at trying to fix it, when it’s actually a PRODUCT of that pain.

We often haven’t taken into account that there’s a depth of pain that we’re trying to move away from with the scrolling, chocolate, alcohol, drugs, or whatever else is your choice of soothing.

And this is why most often, we don’t rise to our “whys”. Instead, we fall to the path of least resistance that will get our immediate soothing needs met.

Our immensely clever system will make sure that we soothe the pain we’re trying to keep away from as quickly possible, in the most available and familiar way possible, in its gorgeous attempts to keep us safe.

So clever! And so infuriating when we feel even more like a failure because our list of “whys” hasn’t been enough to stop us eating the family sized bar of Dairy Milk, again.

The “whys” have an energy, validity, hope and positivity, but to get to the root of any behaviour we’d like to change, we need to do more exploration into the deeper level primary pain the behaviour is keeping us away from.

Until true primary pain is seen and felt, healed and cleared, no amount of positive thinking, “today I start again” vows, or lists of “whys” will be enough to drive a meaningful change.