Old Patterns, Old Fear: Don't Go Back To Your Vomit!

When you're growing, the navigational systems that once protected you eventually don't fit the new direction. But the brain prefers the known discomfort rather than the unknown discomfort of what is not familiar to you....yet.

In this episode, Chelsey explores the pull of reverting back to old patterns of self-protection and how to steer-clear of returning to your vomit again (as Proverbs 26:11 so aptly warns us).

Transcript

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Welcome back to the High Level Wife podcast. I'm Chelsea Holm. I am the creator and founder of High Level Wife, a discipleship community for women who are learning and implementing full surrender to God to do marriage his way. Welcome back, or welcome for the first time. If this is your first time listening, today I want to dive deeper into these old patterns, which are evident of old fears. Because we all have patterns, right? We learn how to navigate based on our experiences. And we do this in order to keep ourselves safe from harm, right? We learn how to speak or not speak. We learn how to um protect ourselves when certain things happen, right? When certain people are present or certain uh we learn to avoid certain situations, right? Because we learn based on evidence that these are not safe. Well, here's the thing: we continue to do them because we get something out of them. But we get to a point when the Lord is working in us and through us, and it becomes very evident that these patterns are no longer serving us, and we have this inner conflict where we know in our head how it should be, but we continue to have these reactions in our body that say, I don't believe that. And you need to understand that this happens, it makes sense why it happens. It happens because you've learned how to do it, and oftentimes you've experienced it, you've witnessed it from previous generations, right? And so then you carry that along with you into your marriage. And then the biggest question, right? The world says avoid and get rid of your triggers and minimize your triggers, but that's not what the Lord says. The Lord says to do life in community, the Lord says, do not separate what God has joined. So, what do we do with some triggers? What do we do with them? They become our responsibility to learn what our body is saying so that rather than being reactive in stress responses, we can recognize, we can bring by the peace of the Holy Spirit, rooting and anchoring in truth, right? By simple tools of regulating our nervous system, moving out of that stress response, we can recognize those early signs that our body is telling us, warning signs, indicator lights, that we're about to freak out. We're about to move into an old protective pattern. And we can disrupt the pattern. So when you are growing, you'll notice that the old patterns are no longer serving you, right? Maybe your pattern in marriage has been your husband yells at you when he's trying to get a point across, and you, out of protection, shut down and you pull away, you withdraw, right? Or you just force yourself to respond a certain way because that's easier than trying to figure out how to say something or do something differently. Because our brains love the known discomfort rather than the potential and unknown discomfort of moving in a different way that is not familiar to us. Right? We do things because we get something out of them. So my husband and my uh dis well hurtful pattern that we engaged in was I would force myself to initiate to um to be present physically, to uh really perform when it came to physical intimacy. And he would tone his down, he would ignore it, and we we would compromise, right? And we would have these patterns where it wasn't comfortable for me to force things, so slowly I would kind of step back and withdraw because withdrawal was my safety net, and he would basically everything on his face would say what he was actually feeling, right? And it would get to this point where it's like we we had to something had to give, right? So I would take all this on, he would um lean in and be like, hey, and right, and it just what would happen is then I would try to regulate his emotions while ignoring my own and pushing him to the point where then he would get really upset, and then I would get really upset, and I would explode all my emotions that had been pressed down for so long all over each other, and then we would have the intimacy that we wanted, but the problem was the whole pattern of getting there was hurtful to both of us, it was dysfunctional, it was dysfunctional, and this pattern still likes to show up today. It's an old pattern and it's based on old fears. Now, I'm not gonna speak for my husband, but speaking for myself, it's old fears of performance come from I want to belong, I want to be accepted, I want to be um, I don't want to be forgotten, right? Like I don't want to be discarded. I I want to be important, so I'll do whatever I need to do to make myself um make somebody else happy, right? To perform, to do all that, put all that pressure on myself to be a certain way. And I'll do that at the expense of my own emotions, right? Not naming them, not feeling them, not letting them go, holding on to them, shoving them down, right? But that's not healthy, that's dysfunctional. It is, according to God's design, for us to be expressive of our feelings, not ruled by, do not mistake that those two. Do not mistake being emotionally expressive and being emotionally um emotions being the authority, because emotions are not the authority in our lives, they're not fact. But we have emotions, and we have to be able to identify them so that we can anchor in truth and we can be responsive in a way that honors the Lord and respects our husbands, right? Um when these old patterns start to resurface, what we need to recognize is that there's an area where the Lord is going to grow us and it's starting to get uncomfortable. And it's always safer for us to return to the old patterns than to actually look in the mirror and be like, okay, what is the actual fear here that is being exposed in this that I want to return to my old patterns, where I know I will get something out of it, but I also know that it's going to be dysfunctional and hurtful all around. And so when these old patterns show up, this is where we have to walk trusting the Lord and walking confidently in the identity that we have in Him and not in the old names, not responding to the old names that we once had from the enemy, and walking confidently that this is a practice, and I am walking in the spirit, I am walking by faith, and I am doing it in a way that honors the Lord and respects my husband. Right? Because so often we just walk through life tossed around by the waves, and we don't actually slow down enough to understand even what's going on under the surface. Right? We we don't slow down enough to even question why do I do the way why am I the way that I am? Right? What where is this dysfunction coming from? Is this something that I need to name to the Lord and surrender fully to him? The answer is yes, but we have to be willing to do that messy work in partnership with the Holy Spirit, in in submission to the word of God, examining us, right? Being the mirror that we we want to reflect, right? If it says, be slow to speak and quick to hear and slow to anger, but our reaction when challenged or afraid is to lash out in anger. Well, that's not being in a line or submission to the word of God. So what's actually going on under the surface here? Is this a learned behavior? Is this a self-protection mechanism? What is it that we're getting out of it? And is this the direction that the Lord is taking us?

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The answer again is no.

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So we need to be submitted to the Holy Spirit, refining us, regenerating us by his power. Submission to our husbands who wash us and present us as holy and blameless by the washing of the word, right? To have the right order so that what flows vertically can then overflow horizontally. You don't have to stay stuck in old patterns, you can expose the underlying fears in confidence that the Lord did not bring you this far to leave you here, and you can disrupt these patterns. Even if it's just you, even if your husband still wants to continue in the old patterns, what you'll find is as you walk in the new patterns that respect your husband and show reverence for the Lord and submission to the Lord, you can't fight again. Your husband is gonna start to feel awkward too, almost as if he has shoes that are the wrong size, and it's not it's not gonna fit, right? His chaos hits your rooted and grounded on the rock patterns, and they his can't continue. At some point, he will be uncomfortable enough to ask these questions and to submit to what the Lord is doing in him and through him to disrupt his own patterns, and then hopefully moving in the same direction on mission for the Lord multiplying that impact. So the question today is what are the old patterns that you have yet to name and identify and disrupt? Can you sit with the discomfort of taking ownership of that these served you but they're no longer serving you? And to sit with the discomfort of what is the actual fear? What am I actually afraid of here? Because very rarely is it a fear of what you're actually projecting, it's usually a deeper fear of identity or belonging or security, right? And once you identify the pattern and the underlying fear, you can then begin to move in the process of disrupting that pattern by recognizing the early warning signs of your body that pattern is getting ready to deploy. And because we don't move in that direction any longer, because we don't engage or submit to that pattern, we are now going to disrupt it confidently. So sitting with these questions, I would love it if you guys left a review and shared your thoughts on this. And because there's power in sharing the instances where you've had encounters with the Lord working in you and through you in ways that were never possible before, and how that not only increases your belief, but other people hearing that increases their belief, and also their confidence encourages them that they can also walk through this in partnership with the Holy Spirit and find true freedom from the dysfunctional patterns and habits and fears that once dictated how we show up in marriage. So I'll see you on the next episode.