Your mental strongholds hold you back from righteousness, peace and joy- your birthright. Emotional patterns are what you play out unconsciously in response to certain stimuli. Sometimes, you inherit mental strongholds from your family. You can also carry generational patterns and traumas through your DNA.

We know that a pattern is an encoding in your nervous system that you play out unconsciously in response to a certain stimulus. Another way of saying that is a pattern is like a mental stronghold.

They are neural networks of a tangled mess of trauma, experiences, and beliefs that have been passed down and programmed into you. Our work when we are looking at patterns and trying to begin to heal and unwind these things is to look at the data and not the drama. To set the emotions aside for a moment, look at the science of the brain and apply logic to a situation is helpful to gain self-awareness around your patterns. It is the process of just becoming an observer.

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Set Yourself Free From Core Wounding And Mental Strongholds

This show is all about our core wounding and the belief system that we form around that. By now, hopefully, you have heard me talk a lot about emotional patterning. We know that a pattern is an encoding in your nervous system that you play out unconsciously in response to a certain stimulus. Another way of saying that is a pattern is like a mental stronghold. When you are growing up, you come out of the womb. In Freud’s language, it is a tabula rasa, which is a psychological term for a blank slate. We know now that there is so much more.

There is a lot of trauma that can be encoded in utero, as well as generational patterns and traumas that we carry through our bloodline and our DNA cellularly as well as spiritually and emotionally. Patterns are the software that your computer is running. It is like an input-output. Stimuli happen, and it triggers a pattern. It is your personality, the way that you show up or your style of relating. It is a survival mode. A pattern is a way that you learned to be in the world to avoid pain or gain pleasure but mostly to avoid the pain of rejection.

Another way of saying it is, this is from the Bible, that patterns are mental strongholds. They are neural networks of a tangled mess of trauma, experiences, and beliefs that have been passed down and programmed into you. Our work, when we are looking at patterns and trying to begin to heal and unwind these things, is to look at the data and not the drama. To set the emotions aside for a moment, look at the science of the brain and apply logic to a situation is helpful to gain self-awareness around your patterns. It is the process of just becoming an observer.

It is powerful to become the observer of your thoughts so you can see what is going on inside your head rather than experiencing what is going on in your head. It is the difference of walking around on a street in a city and going up in a helicopter where you can see the whole city and all the streets. When you are down on the street, all you can see is the one that you are on and you are in it.

 

When you come up to the bird’s eye view with logic and observation, it’s called coming conscious. You can see what is going on and what the patterns are. We extract the data without the drama. We can see this like, “I lose my mind when people do not listen to me or when I am ignored.” We can start to follow those threads back to our core wounding.

Let’s observe the pattern instead of letting our brain get us lost in the story. The story is easy to believe because you have been telling it to yourself your whole life. We become conscious of our patterns when we step back and observe ourselves in the way that we react and respond in certain situations. We can easily see how our chaotic and dysfunctional behaviors fit together. We can identify a common theme and trace it back to what would be the core or primary wounding. There is something called Occam’s razor that states that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. The easier way to say that is that the simplest explanations are usually the most accurate.

My doctor in diagnosing illness would say, “If you hear hoofbeats, you do not look for a zebra because it is going to be a horse.” That is the simplest explanation. It is not multiplied beyond necessity. We do not need to overcomplicate this. We need to ask the question, “What do all of my behaviors have in common? What is the common theme? What is the through-line in my behaviors and the patterns?” I promise there is one. By now, if you have been tuning in to at least season 2 of the show, we are on episode 24 now, you are most assuredly seeing patterns hopefully begin to emerge into your awareness.

In this episode, we are going to get clear on what they are so that we can begin to rewire them. In the last episode, I covered a primer on trauma. In this episode, I am talking about patterns and core wounding. Next episode, I am going to talk about how to begin to rewire those emotional responses. Remember that your brain’s main job is to keep you safe. By safe, your brain’s main job, according to itself, is to keep you alive. It perceives anything unfamiliar as a threat. This is where we get the concept of our comfort zone. Our comfort zone is our zone of familiarity where we feel safe, comfortable, and there is nothing unfamiliar.

You have the authority to govern yourself and be a self-contained individual. Click To Tweet

Anytime you try to change, like shift out of a pattern, try something new, expand or grow, your brain clicks on a protective mechanism that will try and sabotage that. There is a way around it but I want you to be aware of that. It comes in the forms of all kinds of scary stories and programming about all the awful things that are going to happen. That is brain science.

Let’s talk about how a pattern is formed. A pattern is laid down over many years of interactions. It looks like this. Number one, you experienced a negatively perceived event. That is trauma. We covered that in the last episode. The second thing is you received a wound from that. The wounding occurs, so you feel a highly charged emotional sense of pain.

When trauma happens, you feel that. That is human emotion. The human experience is emotion. You feel a highly charged emotional state of pain. That is the wounding. Here is where we get in trouble. Your brain, with some outside adversarial assistance whispering to you, tries to make sense of the event. It gives it meaning. We are meaning-making machines. We had a trauma, we experienced an emotional wound, and now our brain is going to go, “Here is what this means. Here is how to avoid it in the future.” There is the story that shows up.

Let’s say that our dad was mean and angry. We grew up and began to date a boy. He was mean and angry, too. Those interactions hurt us. Our brain says, “I know what this means. Men are jerks.” You begin to form a belief system around that by agreeing with that suggestion that your brain offers you or sometimes something negative, evil, and adversarial outside of your brain is whispering to you. When you agree with it, that is when you give it your agency, power, and sovereignty. You can go back to the episode on sovereignty. Sovereignty is your authority to govern yourself, choose and be a self-contained individual.

 

When you join your agreement with a suggestion, whether it comes from your own brain, your parents, or the realm of darkness, you give your power to it. You give your power away to that belief and that meaning. Step number five, your brain uses this belief to order your thoughts and behaviors. If I believe that men are jerks, I am going to stay away from them. I am going to be mean back to them. I am going to play some power games with them to try to get the upper hand. The trauma happens, the wound, creates a meaning, belief, you agree with the meaning, and then your brain uses the belief to organize your thoughts and behaviors. That becomes a pattern.

There are four main categories of core wounding. The first one is rejection. Rejection says, “I am not worthy of love.” The wound is rejection, so the traumatic event is experienced as rejection. Remember, patterning is based on perception. There is an example here that I tell a lot in my Rise to Reign course, and with my coaching clients at the time, my earliest memory was walking down the hall into my parents’ bedroom. My mom, dad, and sister were all in the bed, tickle-fighting, laughing, and watching cartoons. It was a Saturday morning. I felt so on the outside looking in. My dad noticed me walking up, he said, “Here comes sister trouble.”

I do not for a second believe that my dad meant that as insulting or rejecting. I do not for a second think that my sister, mom, and dad had malicious intent but I experienced it as extreme rejection in that heightened emotional state. Patterning is based on perception, which is your subjective reality. What you experienced versus what is objectively true. The rejection is the wound.

The traumatic experience was walking into the room and experiencing that scene. The rejection is the emotional charge that was felt. The meaning is, “I do not belong. I am not worthy of love.” That is the rejection pattern. The pattern is fearing and resisting receiving feedback, direction or love from others. As I go through these, you will begin to see them and how they play out in your own life.

The person with a primary wound of resignation believes that life has no meaning. Click To Tweet

This, in the Rise to Reign archetypes, is the prisoner and/or slave archetype. The second one is abandonment. This abandonment is the wound, and the belief that goes with it is, “I am not worthy of belonging.” The abandonment core wound is highly mistrustful of others in combination with a high and toxic degree of self-reliance. They will not let anybody come through for them.

They will not rely on anybody. They sabotage all efforts of support because they do not believe they are worthy of belonging and the support that comes along with the community. This is very typical of the prisoner and slave but also the prince and princess. The toxic self-reliant is behaving like an orphan. The hallmark of the prince and princess is, “I do not need anybody. I can do it all on my own.”

The third one is that trauma is a failure. The wound is experienced as a failure, and the belief is, “I am not worthy of success.” Here we see a repeated pattern of letting others down and self-sabotage, especially those whom they desire the most approval. This is very characteristic of the prisoner and the slave. There is a fourth but this is basically giving up on life.

The person with the primary wound of resignation believes that life has no meaning. They usually are suicidal and highly addicted. It is not the focus of our work right here because it is far less common. Most of us whose lives are not completely train-wrecked by extreme trauma or dealing in some combination or category but of abandonment, rejection or failure core wounding.

Usually, it is a cocktail of all three but there is one that will stand out predominantly. That, my friends, is how patterns are formed and how they are laid down in your central nervous system. They are problematic because they are not true. The, “I am not worthy of love, belonging or success,” are total lies. None of that is true but if you have that running in the background or that is the software that you are running, remember that your brain organizes your behaviors around that belief.

That is problematic because, as a powerful co-creator, you will create situations, and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. My guess is you probably experienced that. Next episode, we are going to get into how to actually begin rewiring these. Thank you so much for tuning in. That is it for this episode. I will see you on the next one.

 

Important Links

• Episode – Take Back Your Power by Embracing Personal Sovereignty Past Episode
• Rise to Reign

 

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