“What do you know about it, anyway?” my brother asked, with all the gracelessness that decades of practice could produce.

He was asking what I thought gave me the right to adjust the height of my mother’s walker.

I refrained from asking him what kind of idiot he was that he couldn’t see that the handles were too low and she was bent over far more than she needed to be. But I did point out that I was better informed about mobility and posture than he was from my training and years as an Alexander Technique teacher.

That little exchange was a first for me.

My brother  – and the rest of my family – had routinely questioned and belittled my abilities throughout my childhood and beyond.

That had led to decades of procrastination, anxiety and Impostor Syndrome on my part.

Old patterns die hard

Old patterns really do die hard.

Even recently, when my mentor asked me,

“How can you break down what you do to help people heal from emotional abuse into a form that they can use to heal themselves?”

I had found myself sliding into a very damaging old pattern.

I just  froze.

The old freeze mechanism

When asked for clarity, my tendency was always for EVERYTHING to slip out of focus.  It was as if my brain would just FREEZE.

For the longest time, I didn’t have very much confidence in myself, at all.

Emotional abuse does a great job of eroding your confidence.

It makes you feel that you are the problem when the truth is that the abuse has made you freeze.

I thought it was because I was stupid. (That was another old pattern at work.)

The reality is that that happened because the primitive part of my brain felt hugely threatened by bullying treatment.

The response to perceived threat

Any perceived threat could cause my rational brain to shut down – in an instant.

Oftentimes, the conditioned response is quite out of proportion to the threat involved.

But that is not a great help when your rational brain seems to go into shutdown.

I decided that I couldn’t afford that kind of instant brain fog any longer. So, I did some thinking about it – and not a little healing work.

While I wouldn’t necessarily say that all survivors of emotional abuse suffer with that kind of brain fog, I do know that being triggered by old patterns is one of the biggest ongoing challenges that they face.

A lot of the time they struggle to think clearly.

Too often, they simply accept that as par for the course.

But here’s the thing.

It needn’t be.

The two things you need to free yourself from old patterns

You can free yourself from those old patterns. You just need two things to make that happen.

1) A clear awareness of when those old patterns kick in and

2) Effective tools for breaking them.

Over the past couple of months, I have been putting a lot of thinking and energy into creating an affordable toolkit that will enable you to do just that – in the simplest and most effective way possible.

That will leave the way open for you to trust yourself more and show up in the world as your authentic self without fear of criticism so that you can deal more effectively with difficult people and awkward situations.

I’m now putting the finishing touches on that toolkit. You can read more about it here.

The power of mood mastery

Until January 21^st it will be going at a special pre-launch price that makes it even more attractive.

Plus, it comes with a Mood Mastery Bonus that I would have killed for, when I was struggling. Maybe that is why I had to create it. (I lost so much time feeling close to despair because of not knowing how to break that old pattern.)

So, if you would like 2021 to be the year when you really break with the old patterns of not feeling able to show up confidently as yourself, check out the Breaking Old Patterns Toolkit.

It will give you all the tools, information and techniques that you need to break your old patterns –  and to do it faster than you might believe possible.