Mental health articles

If you can recognize a particular pattern of yours, then you have a good chance of changing it. If you cannot recognize it yet, then you will not be able to change it. Try to see what patterns of thinking and feeling happen, or what takes you into a bad mood, or what you usually go for either to stop yourself feeling so bad, or to make yourself feel a little bit better. Ask yourself when this seems to happen: “Has this happened before?”; “Do I always react like this to this/ that set of events?”; “Is this familiar?” These are good initial questions. If this is the case, and you can identify a pattern, then this gives you a potential choice of doing something differently when it happens again. You might need to step out of your pattern for a while—maybe by looking at yourself through another person’s eyes. This is where therapy (or a good, honest friend) can be really helpful. It is then easier to be able to say: “That is my pattern—and it isn’t working for me any longer.”

Tags: feeling, patterns