A Trick For Transforming Undesired Behavior

Throughout our lives, all of us will encounter behaviors in ourselves that we don’t particularly like and wish to change.  It could be escapism, rage, inability to follow through with things, addiction, you name it. An effective approach for self-improvement is essential. In our society, there are many widely varying ideas on this issue. In this article, I would like to share with you a paradigm and an approach to transforming negative behaviors that I believe is optimal.

For me, things really changed when I realized that underneath the behavior is an internal need, often an emotional one, that hasn’t been met.  On some level, I always knew this. To understand an approach that does work, I think it’s important to look at the paradigm we are shifting out of.

How do we deal with a need that’s yet to be met? Well, often in our world, we make the need wrong and shame or coerce the person into changing their behavior.  This conditions them to constantly try to modify themselves, which is exhausting, costly, and painful.  It’s sort of like animal training.  In my opinion, “rubbing their nose in it” is counterproductive.

This approach also reflects a lack of depth in the environment. There is an inability to deal with the underlying issue and a lack of awareness that there even is an underlying issue that needs to be explored. And there is an inability to see how this shallow, manipulative approach might negatively affect someone’s inner world.

Instead, I like the idea that these behaviors are born of pain and, thus, it’s the pain that needs to be addressed. But it takes great courage and skill to address things at this level.  And it takes an awareness that those that shame or attempt to modify the behavior probably can’t provide.

Personally, I’ve had a lot of emotional pain and a lot of undesirable behavior born of that pain.  For a long time, I would basically try to modify this behavior, because that is how I was taught that self-improvement works, and that programming was so deep in me.  This felt empty and wrong, and it never worked very well.  The problem with this approach is that it fuels the same dynamics that are causing the problem in the first place. For example, this approach is essentially sending the message to ourselves that “I’m unworthy or unlovable because I do this behavior, so in order to be worthy I have to stop this behavior”. But the behavior is fueled by feelings like unworthiness. So the approach to stopping the behavior is actually feeding it.

Another element here is that we believe that the behavior makes us unworthy because the environment believes that and communicates that. And an environment that believes that this thinking is the path to self-improvement is likely an environment that can’t provide the kind of understanding and support we truly need, which is a big part of what causes these behaviors in the first place.  So this approach just requires more and more control and use of your will, which just makes the problem worse and worse.  So it seems to me that all of these things are related: the approach to dealing with the behavior, the level of awareness of the environment, the cause of the behavior, the persistence of the behavior.

To put it a different way, emotional pain (which comes from our interaction with our environment) causes the behavior. The culture projects shame onto us for the behavior and tells us to deal with the behavior by modifying ourselves.  This makes the issue worse, causes more undesirable behavior, which begets more of the same response from the environment.  And the environment can’t see the underlying issue, because it hasn’t faced its own depth, which is the cause of the problem in the first place. If there were ever a reason why there shouldn’t be a stigma around problematic behavior such as addiction, I think this is it.

There’s another element to this. If the unconscious environment is focused on the behavior and not on understanding the underlying cause (emotional pain), what does it think is the cause of the addiction or behavior? The assumption would probably be that it’s some kind of a flaw or defect in the person. Well, how do you think being regarded this way will affect someone?  It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see that the answer is: not well. So there’s a particular level of unawareness here that shows up everywhere, and transforming negative behavior requires transcending that.

Just to be clear, I don’t think we should blame the environment, per se.  The more we have compassion for our own dysfunction, the more we can have compassion for the dysfunction of our environment.  First of all, it is hard for anyone to upgrade their awareness out of these dynamics. Also, there are a whole variety of reasons why this occurs, including stress, trauma, lack of tools, etc.  At the same time, it is essential to see the truth of it, if we ever want a chance at transcending it.

So it’s these dysfunctional dynamics that keep us locked into these cycles for a very long time until we see through it and break free.

So my trick for self-improvement is built on this awareness.  I explicitly do NOT make a harsh rule for myself to not engage in a particular behavior, though I do have a firm, clear intention to transform the behavior.  I simply ask myself that before I do it, I pause and recognize whatever feeling is in me first, and take a moment to nurture that feeling.  For me, I like to feel it in my body and see how it shifts around in me. I stay with it for as long as I need and return to it later if need be.  At that point, I figure doing the behavior or not is somewhat less relevant because I’m addressing the underlying issue, which has a plethora of benefits.  Having that attunement to what we feel is what we needed all along. And rather than being driven by unconscious feelings of unworthiness to change my behavior, I bring awareness and nurturing attunement to those feelings directly.

In addition to being more effective, I also find this approach very rewarding and motivating. In fact, just when I think to myself about this practice, it feels doable, relatively easy, and empowering. Whereas when I think about the approach of “I HAVE to stop doing this or else I’m unworthy, shameful, etc.”, it feels dreadful and unsustainable.  Our awareness is a far more powerful faculty than our will.

The other cool thing about this approach is that it is precisely how we transform the systemic dysfunction we found ourselves born into.  As we do that, we start to see that there really was never anything wrong with us. We only got that idea due to a misinterpretation of our behavior, which was born out of the lack of awareness of the environment. Our behavior was just surfacing the underlying, systemic issue.

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