How old stories keep us imprisoned and how we can break free

The last few days, I fell back into my “old” patterns. I was lazy, procrastinated, got lost in my thoughts and tried to have a plan to follow and “get my life back”.

When I first fell into that trap I did not realize it. “I am tired” did I tell myself. And I was tired. I yawned the whole day. And then I watched movies and then I had a panic attack. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like getting sick. And I was remembered of times where I had panic attacks regularly.

Thank god I was able to get myself out of that panic motion rather quickly by remembering what helped me years back. After I had that attack, I fell into a an unmotivated motion of “I think New York was a stupid idea, you will fail anyways” and “let’s just stay here” and “that is all way too complicated” state. I started wearing boring clothes again, I started eating more pizza than I normally do and I started to watch more movies than I normally do. I immersed myself into all those behaviours that neither did they bring me forward nor did they make me happy.

But in that state, I did not see it. At least not at first. I just simmered in that weird state of “I don’t care”. My mind was in full mode though. “Oh, we need a plan, but I don’t know which one”, “Let’s bring your life in order”, “Why are you so stupid that you cannot deal with that stuff right now”, would it tell me. Puh..

It was exhausting to say the least. And it took me 2 days to realize that I was in that state and then another 2 days to get myself out of it.

And I asked myself:

What is the trigger of these phases?

I started wondering: what is the trigger of these phases? Why do I have them? Why do they push me down with such a strong push that it is almost impossible to resist the urge?

I first thought I have any kind of mental health condition, then I came to think that maybe it is a neurodivergent way of thinking that brings me into these states. It is all possible. But then, today in the morning, I had another hunch of what it may be.

What if it is the old pattern? Again? Again after I thought I came over it? And it is now happening again? And that this is normaly, that I would know that it happens? But that sometimes it is so strong that it is difficult to find out in the moment it happens?

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And I realized that this is what happened. I fell back to an old pattern of behaviors and strategies to “survive”.

The intensity of old patterns

And I realized how strong these old patterns are within me. It is so deeply ingrained within me that whenever I take several steps out of that old pattern, it tries to push me back to the “normal way of doing things”, meaning the way it has always been.

The way of me being silent, hiding, withdrawing, being self-centered and not “available” for the outside world, me sitting there and watching movies, dreaming of a beautiful life, but not living it, being depressed and unhappy and confused about the next steps. Me eating unhealthy food and not moving and doing sports. The extreme and negative site of my old me.

As if the moment I move in one direction, it pushes me back with the same force in the opposite. Like Yin and Yang but more extreme, Like push and counter-push but more extreme. Like I take some steps in the direction that makes me happy and feels amazing and then the old voices try to hold me back, try to take me back in the “safe heaven of how they always knew it”.

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What about these voices in our head? What if they are ours but not really ours? What if we hear them, as they have been ingrained in ourselves when we were young and had no chance to differentiate or know altogether whether what became ingrained in us is something that we like to get or not? Whether it allows us to grow and live and shine?

What if these voices come from an external source. From the world. From our family, from our ancestors, from what happened to them and their strategies to deal with what that was? What if these voices are there, for sure, but what if we take them for what they are — voices that tell us a story about ourselves, our family, our history? But that are stories? And even though they inform our story, they give birth to our story, it is still such that we have a choice. We can decide whether we want to continue that story or if we want to deliberately choose a different story?

Learning our Story

When I think about the story of my family and bigger stories as well, those of the society they were born in and then times of life they had to deal with, I see that my grandfather was fighting in World War II. He had to see things I do not even want to imagine what he has saw. And as this was quite the norm — no one talked about this war, about experiences, feelings and what it did to a generation of people that lived through these times.

It is only two generations ago. And still deeply ingrained in our society. What does it do to someone fighting in a war in cold Russia, knowing that you are fighting for a leader that turns out to be cruel beyond words and that many of your friends, family and those you loved died, you got injured and had to start building life from the ground up?

What does it do to a whole society? How do they go about life? What is important to them, how do they live? Many had to build their life from the ground up. Eating cans of beans and potatoes for weeks, because there was nothing else, walking for miles to get food altogether, building businesses and finding work in building up what was destroyed by the war.

And then. A generation later. It was a prosperous generation. A generation of wealth. Still building but mostly preserving. Preserving what was built by the generation before. And for my family, they preserved what has been built before. And as it was the case in traditional, patriarchal systems, men were the ones that made the decisions, they were the ones that would do business, they were the ones that had the power, women were accessory for many decisions but those surrounding family and kids.

There are many details, stories, experiences and moments that I remember that for sure formed many of those voices that I hear in my head. Those voices that tell me to be in a specific way, and act a specific way.

Like as if the figures and people from previous generations, family, friends, want to talk to me and tell me what I have to do, how I should behave, what kind of questions I should ask and what kind of problems I should solve.

What if it is their story? What if it is their hope? Their strategies? What if they have put that into me at a time where I was purely learning without deciding whether I want to have what is put into me? I was only accepting. And with what went into me, I started life. And started to interact with life.

But what if we do not like our story? Can we change it?

When I was a teenager, I sometimes hoped to be able to re-start life or have a different story ingrained within myself. To live life differently, to experience more and differently. But for sure, that never became a reality.

The more life progresses the least I think that we can change our story. It is ingrained within us. Everything that happened till that date — today — is part of our story.

The story that was ingrained into us when we were growing in the womb of our mothers and the stories, feelings and ways of acting and thinking that were ingrained into us when we were too young or too immature to push back those that we would not want to accept are within us. They are there and they won’t disappear.

But over time, we realize that there is a different layer of life. One that is not part of these voices, one that is still there, irrespective of these voices — our being. In the moment. The body that moves around the world and feels. With its sensors does it feel “is that good for me”, “does that bring my body joy?”, “is it feeling good?”. The body realizes — what do I need right now? I can taste the mushroom and the moment it touches my tongue, I can feel whether it is good for my body or not. I can touch a skin and feel it. I can hear a sound of a bird and feel whether it is good for my body or not, does it sound good or does it sound weird and too jarring? What about my eyes? Do they like what they see? There is immediate feedback, immediate resonance with what happens.

And then there is a self that emerges. Another part of us that learns over time. Where everything within comes together. The voices, the stories, the feelings, the experiences. Whatever we lived through so far, connects it all together within. And we can decide — is it the voices I want to follow? Is it the feeling I want to follow? Is it intuition, hunches, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and else to follow?

Through experience we learn and by looking back we learn. We learn what brings us joy and what brings us wonderment. What makes us sad and what makes us regretful. And we can deliberately decide — what is the next best step to take.

Some of us will decide on voices and mind, on rational thought and irrational one. Some uf us on our intuition and feelings. And others on a mix.

For me and my story? For a long time, I followed the stories. The stories that were ingrained in me. The belief that I was not strong, I was the woman that was sent to the kitchen while the important guys were working on important business decisions, I was the woman that thought she was less valuable than the guys, I was the woman that brushed away her own innate value, that made herself small, that deliberately told people she did not know even though she knew, that thought others laughed at her, that started acting like having to prove her value to others, that became overly rational and so on.

I built a life on those stories and on those voices. And at some point those stories became my life. They were over-the-top there, only the negative ones, the bad ones, the problematic ones. The stories I built my life upon.

Up until one day, one week and one year. In glimpses of moments, I realized that there are other ways of life too. That there is not only one story that we need to continue and simply follow, but that we can take a detour, choose a different one, one where the senses react differently, where the body is in a more fulfilled state.

But is it that easy to just “walk away”?

No, it is not. Simply following a different path. Maybe it is easy. But do you really think it is? I thought so, I hoped so, but I soon realized that it is not easy. Any quick win is great, but for a deep change to happen, it takes time. It is not easy. It is like sitting in a cage like a bear. An analogy and real life story I came across in Vietnam.

The bears were kept like pets by people that believed they could take a specific aphrodisiac liquid from these bears and thus they kept them on a leash. They would get food and water and reguarly they would take this liquid from the bears’ body.

A conservatory freed the bears and gave them a new home in the forest jungle in the middle of Vietnam. A beautiful place for the bears. The idea of the bear nurses was to feed them, get them back to a normal shape and then release them into freedom after some months.

But the bears? They did not leave. even though they had the freedom to leave and live life on their own terms, they preferred being captivated. And most of their behavior till that date when we saw them, did not change.

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Even though we all have an innate drive to find moments that give us freedom and the choice to make our own decisions, it is not that easy.

And the main reason why I saw my early change trials fail were because the strategies and beliefs and ways of thinking that were so deeply ingrained within me either through the voices or my reactions and strategies based on those voices, did hold me back.

There is a famous quote by Albert Einstein about problem solving and that we cannot solve a new problem with the old tools. It won’t work. I do not like that quote in the context of change, as I think it is not a problem with us and I do not like to problem solve in the context of being, but the main tenor is what rings true to me when writing these lines.

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It is those voices that holds us back

When we want to change, it is those voices that hold us back. They have a different way of living. And it is those that want to bring us back to “normal” state to living. We know the “normal” state, the state that we lived in for such a long time. Adding there the behaviors and strategies and belief systems we built upon them, and we have such an within-itself-coherent-system, that the question is: Why do you want to break out of it? It is comfortable here. It is as it always was.

And these questions are often those that hold us back. And they are ingrained within us too. The system wants to be coherent again. And it can achieve that easily, when it holds us back. And it can do that most easily when it reminds us about the beauty of the “normal” system, the “easiness”, the “comfortableness”, the “why do you want to change, isn’t that ok as it is?”.

For these strong powers, it does not matter if the other, new way of doing things may be more fruitful, more helpful. No, it does not care. It looks for coherence and even if that coherence is (just an example) abuse, or loneliness, or pain or suffering, it does not care too much. It is what it knows and it wants to go back to it.

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That makes it so hard. And that makes many quick pills, 2 day manifestation programs and 5 day yoga retreats effectively useless unless you are at a point in your life where you can let the new in and are ready and willing to make a change and use it as one tool to make a change. If you hope it will do the change process for you, it is much more likely that you will fall back soon after and unfortunately often more intense than before.

For real deep change to happen it needs an awareness of what is going on, learned new strategies to deal with the new, a big self-acceptance that this won’t be easy and that it is ok if that is painful, a glimpse of feeling and knowing about the new direction and the vision of where to move towards, a deep understanding of ones triggers and what they do to oneself, strategies to recognize those triggers quicker and a presence to not fall back to “default normal mode” too easily.

And then it is practice. Deliberate practice. Being aware, realizing. Not being overly focused on “a goal” and pushing oneself and saying “why are you stupid that this is not working?” and being kind to oneself.

I have a feeling that this is a lifelong journey, that is not “finished” anytime soon. And that is ok. Maybe that is life. More and more experiencing those moments that bring us joy and that let us be coherent. Coherent by all means. Not only by the voices of the “normal” old life, but including our body, our senses, our feeling, our being in that moment.

And then to feel. To be. To simply be in life.

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Sometimes I wonder. Do we need change? Do we need to be free of our cage? Isn’t that comfortable? In these moments, I know that I am not in a good state. Because life is too beautiful as to be caged. Even if the big real world out there — all the pieces that we do not know, the unknowns — are frightening at first, they show us a world we do not know. And when we do not know what we do not know how can we know what it will unfold for us?

So when you have found something you love, your eyes are sparkling and your body wants to move towards it, follow it. In baby steps if needed. And then embrace the new and dive into a new, exiting, different life. And when the old way comes back, holds you back, gives you an anxious feeling and a punch in the face, take it, thank it that it wants to take care for you and let it go. You however, move forward, go and take that path towards the things that are dear to your heart. Those things you want to do. And experience what they hold for you. They will change you. And that is a good thing.