Childhood shapes us – all behaviour serves a purpose!

All Behaviour serves a purpose

Anyone else watching the re runs of the classic “Birds of a Feather”?

Tonight’s episode is about Sharon and Tracy getting an invite to a school reunion. The invite comes from a lady that used to bully Sharon at school. This bully put Sharon in a dust bin and sat on the lid for hours. Classic comedy but very good.  Sharon declares that she eats so much due to that trauma, her subconscious is protecting her by making sure she can’t fit in a dust bin again!.  Class!

But the thing is, she could be a client that has come to me for help with comfort eating and weight loss. Only by working with a client and getting to the initial emotional event that caused the issue can we deal with it. This is just comedy but the truth is, just by uncovering an event from your past, that you may not connect to, allows you to look at the event and subsequent behaviour as an adult and realize in Sharon’s case that its highly unlikely anyone is going to try and put her in a bin today.  So she really does not need to eat so match to make sure it does not happen again.

Comedy moment!  Comedy explanation of comfort eating but a very good example of how your subconscious joins the dots and creates behaviours that made sense to you as a child but are completely inappropriate and unnecessary today.  And often the memory is blurred if the event was a negative one.

This sounds very, very simplistic but a client comes to me with a phobia or a habit that is holding them back in some way. Working together to get to the memory of the event that created the presenting issue is amazing to watch.  It’s a real light bulb moment for a client and often just understanding why they do what they do is enough to stop the behaviour permanently *.

All behaviour serves a purpose

Obviously some early year traumas cannot be dealt with so lightly.  But even in those cases, once a client understands why they react or behave in a certain manner it’s like watching a huge cloud lift off them. *

Birds of a Feather – one of my better memories.

 

  * Disclaimer:  results may vary from person to person