"I keep messing up"

Making peace with behavioural patterns

I remember it like it was 10 years ago, which is to say not that well, but some images remain intact. Her and I fighting about recess - me confessing that I wanted to go play football with my friends, her protesting that these were the only fifteen minutes we had together in the whole day, my staying, but watching my friends enviously as they ran towards the court.

I think about those fights often, because I think it was those fights that have defined all my relationships since. The particular issue might change, but the script in my head is the same: they are always wanting more, I am always giving less.

I don’t know that it’s valuable today to dissect my particular predicament, because I haven’t really found anyone else with this particular variant of attachment issues. What I want to talk about is patterns—the nasty problems that seem to keep coming up over years, sometimes even decades, even when the people and situations are entirely different.

Recently, I’ve started to get deeply anxious whenever I see the ninth grade dynamic replaying in my life. And it is really about the way I see it, not about what’s happening. My partner might ask “What’s your plan for the day?” and my threat response will get activated. Will I say some adultified version of “I want to go play”, and will I get an “but this is the only time we have” in return? Will it lead to a big fight where we ultimately conclude that I am not fit for romantic relationships, and hence destined to be alone?

I note myself responding this way. I note the anxiety and the inability to answer a straightforward question in a straightforward way. And I am now tired of it. It has been a decade of my brain responding this way. I am terrified that this will never change, that I am doomed to live my whole life inside of a threat response. That is a deeply sad possibility. What a tragedy it would be to have all this life to live, and spend it all afraid of monsters that (most probably?) don’t exist.

At some point, the anxiety that the problem will never go away overtook the problem itself. Suffering from time and space insecurities is hard, yes. But remaining optimistic that it will not always be this hard is a different ballgame altogether. Each time I start to feel as though I am unable to set my boundaries, I get more anxious that I will never be able to set my boundaries. A problem that is about a particular situation on a particular day expands into a deep sense of pessimism about my future.

I tried techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy. According to CBT, this cognitive distortion would be called the fortune teller error:

Fortune Telling, also known as Jumping to Conclusions, is a cognitive distortion, which is a type of thinking error that involves predicting the future with absolute certainty. This type of distorted thinking can lead to negative emotions and actions, and it's important to recognize and address it in order to improve mental health and well-being.

Examples might include, “I’ll never get that job,” or “I’ll never feel better.” The positive reframing might be to say “I’ve been making progress on this problem, and there’s no reason to believe I will always be insecure about it.” This type of reframing helps, but only marginally. If I have been struggling with this insecurity for a decade, there is enough ground to worry that I will struggle with it my whole life. I don’t think the fear is entirely baseless.

What I have found helpful is to flip this script on its head by accepting it. Maybe I will always have a threat response. Maybe it will never truly go away. But awareness is power. Knowing that this is a pattern, that this is my particular pattern, already charts a way forward. If the mind always writes the same script, there are also voices that can push back and restore some sanity.

I think my focus needs to shift to amplifying the right voices. I can note that I had a threat response, and I can wait for it to pass. Instead of wishing it away, I can just choose not to act on its basis. Breaking the pattern does not have to mean that the original inclinations are absent. It can also mean adding new inclinations that can take preference.

In this context, a scene from A Beautiful Mind comes to mind. The movie, a biopic about the life of mathematician John Nash, depicts his struggles with schizophrenia and hallucinations. He sees three hallucinated people who lead him into some dangerous situations. The last scene of the movie is him walking out of the Nobel ceremony with his wife. As he's leaving, he still sees them standing there. He just chooses not to engage, and turns towards his “real life”.

Alcoholics and addicts of different kinds also report this. The urges might lessen in intensity but never go away. They just have to choose to respond differently to them. In some sense, that is a consolation. I don’t need these insecurities to go away. That is not exactly in my control. I just need to learn to respond differently to them. Instead of going mindlessly on the path they tend to take me, I can choose to look, and then ignore them.

Maybe then, there will be a day when the voices of insecurity will vanish, and all that will remain is the voices I chose to put in place. What a glorious day that will be.