Change Your Patterns of Behavior, Change Your Life

Everything you are, how you think, how and why you do the things that you do, are all one big collection of Patterns of Behavior [or, PB’s]. You began creating them the moment you were born, or maybe a bit earlier, as you began to become aware of things while still in the womb.
At this beginning, the mind is a blank, a clean slate upon which any thing may be written, not in words, but impressions. The Earthly conciousness, the Beta Mind, is emerging. Exposed to each new experience, this awakening human must react to each and every one. This has been referred to as Action/Reaction, Stimulus/Response, Trigger/Behavior, or any combination of these terms or others, and interchangeably, it seems.
That first response or reaction to any experience that occurs will probably be the same immediate response to which the mind will go first, and for a long time to come…
Example:
Little Mary has just left the only world she has ever known [the womb] and, with no small trauma, entered ours filled with bright lights and loud noises. She mentally ties these new experiences to the new emotions that her responses seem to bring with them, [fear and pieces of other negative emotions associated with it, etc.] and finds this can all be easily filed away in her, as yet, mostly untapped and empty memory banks, for future reference.
A few minutes pass and the birthing-room is much quieter now. The screaming, crying, laughing and Hoo-Raying is over. A nurse has cleaned up Mary, wrapped her warmly, turned down the lights and is quietly rocking her to a softly hummed lullaby…as an orderly hurrying by them, knocks over a metal stand with a tray full of metal utensils and bowls.
The resulting crashing/banging clatter mentally sling-shots Mary’s new mind scrambling for her newly acquired memory banks to see what it has in stock as the Number One response to loud noises. There is only one, of course, so it has to be the #1 response. It is to respond with Fear. “Well”, Mary’s mind concludes, “the last time I needed a response to this, I used Fear and I survived. There may be other responses that would work as well or even better, but a Fear response is the only one that I know for sure can help me survive.”
So, Mary reacts with an “I’m-terrified” fit. And every time she reacts to that particular trigger with exactly that same response, it strengthens the connection, it reinforces it, over and over, hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, until eventually it becomes second nature. It requires no thinking. In fact, it becomes an unconscious act.
It becomes so ingrained in us, so much of a habit, that whenever that particular trigger presents itself for us to experience, an unconscious part of our mind just automatically takes over and MAKES us perform the one response that IT requires.
This Trigger/Response is now a Pattern of Behavior.
Every experience you have ever had occurred a first time some time in your life, usually early. That’s why your “Formative Years”, the ones that make you who you are, are in the first 5-6 years of your life.
Most of our Primary life experiences come to us during this time. And being a brand new experience [or trigger] means there is no pre-selected response, yet. We can now invent, on the spot, a totally new response to this new experience, or select and immediately use one of the other responses we have been using for all the other triggers we have run across up to now, and that we have been filing away on that clean slate with which we started, and to which we have been adding from day one.
Whatever we choose in that split second we have, the subconscious only wants to know if it brought us through the experience alive. Not well, not unscathed or bleeding, not even if it was a good response; just alive. To the subconscious, that’s all it takes to be a good response. It looks no further.
But you can.
All of your life you and your subconscious have collected primary responses to every thing that could happen to you. There are whole categories of experiences for which the subconscious has but a single response. Other categories have other solitary responses for their collective.
Every action you do has a corresponding reaction, already programmed by the subconscious to be instantly inserted and played out.
I, you, we are all living Robots, programmed by ourselves to react to every action in our lives in a particularly unique manner; our manner and only ours.
Frankly, we can make better choices for ourselves. The subconscious is only after survival and if a response accomplishes that, then it has no incentive to look for anything better. You can.
By the time a response has reached a Pattern of Behavior level it is now a habit, one that the subconscious has made unconsciously performable. You perform them without even having to think about them. In fact, you don’t. A PB has no middle for you to even be aware of. It’s like a mental video machine; A trigger is perceived, causing the response video to be started, and runs all the way to the end with no stopping or interrupting.
The best example I know of is shaking hands. The trigger is seeing someone present a hand to be shaken, the common response is to reach out and grasp the hand, shake it, and let go, retrieving your hand.
Try offering your hand to someone and when they bring their hand forward, put yours back by your side, leaving their hand just hanging there by itself. Don’t move or change your facial expression. Just wait and observe. Because a PB has no middle, if interrupted, the subconscious doesn’t know what to do. It becomes confused as to what other response might be used, but it has none listed as backup so it does nothing, eventually letting the hand return to the person’s side, possibly commenting that it was kind of weird…[Do it again to them. See how many times you can do it.]

Part II on PB’s will give you ways you can change these and select much better responses to a trigger. Yes, Mary, you can change your life for the better. All it takes is willingness to practice and a commitment to consistency.
See ya’ then,
Peace, Jerry

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