Pattern Modification

I was ready to be done torturing myself and had come to the end of a thing.  Now my mind was trying to bring words to it.  Fortunately, there was a good person on the other side of my conversation.  I was fumbling and mumbling, which is especially frustrating to someone like me who sets so much store in the power of language.  In trying to find the right words I was, instead, finding a lot of them.  Most of them weren’t the right ones.

Thankfully, he is a patient man and allowed my brain to eventually settle into pace so I could explain the catharsis I had reached.  There was a thing I had wrestled with.  I had forced myself to confront it and realized it needed to be addressed.  It was a change I needed to make to a pattern I had repeated too many times in my life—many enough times that I knew that, unaddressed, this pattern led only to resentment and misery.  My most recent iteration of this familiar pattern was leading me toward the place it had so many times before—and I didn’t want to be there again.  I knew the damage that waited if I followed that same path as I had so many times before.  I recognized where I was heading and I’d had enough. 

I explained to him some of the ways I was trying to intervene in my own situation.  After all, I’m trained as a therapist.  I should be able to come up with my own treatment plan.  In fact, I had devised my own treatment plan and put it into action.

“Joel,” he told me, “I’ve been waiting for you to get to this place.  You’ve been holding on to patterns from your past and letting them affect your future.  I think it’s time for you to let them go.  Are you ready to let them go?”

Sure, I was ready to let them go.  That why I was here.  I didn’t want to keep reliving the destruction.  I had become mired in patterns that held no benefit for me, but I kept returning to them because they felt familiar.  Familiarity is a form of comfort.  Comfort is a death.

“Yeah,” I shrugged, “I’m ready to be done with it.”

“Then tell me that.  Tell me you’re ready to be done.”

I balked for a moment.  What was the point of me telling him something I had already told him?  I realized, then, that it was the sort of thing I would have asked me to do if I was sitting in his chair—there’s a certain power to declaring things out loud.

“I’m ready to be done.”

“Great,” he nodded, “but it’s not going to be enough to just be done.  You can’t just unlearn a pattern.  It’s been living inside you for a long time, so you’re not just going to be rid of it because you want to be.  We’re going to have to modify it—we’re going to have to change it from what it is now into something different.”

“It’s not going to be easy,” I grimaced.  “I’m not good at this.”

The pattern I had developed had been developed over years and involved people, healthy mechanisms, unhealthy coping strategies, relationships, tendencies, and proclivities that were nearly intertwined into my very identity.  It had become part of me, even if unwittingly so.  It was a pattern of ways I had allowed myself to be treated by others and the way I had allowed myself to treat others.

I had become quite good at that pattern.

Patterns are born out of flows that serve a purpose, for a time.  But when their time is come and they remain they become ruts—ugly grooves that one naturally falls into without even knowing.  Patterns develop out of practice until they become second nature.  They don’t just go away because I want them to.  If I want to defeat the old pattern I have to create a new one—or, at least, modify it.

I was trying to explain this to him with my loquacious but scattered style when he stopped me in mid-sentence to ask a seemingly unrelated—very unrelated—question.

“What’s the thing in Jiu-jitsu you need to work on the most?”

I was taken aback for a brief instant, but it wasn’t a hard question to answer. 

“Heel-hooks.”

“Good,” he said.  “This is a good place to start.  You’re going to work on your heel-hooks.”

This had nothing to do with my emotionally traumatic catharsis.

“Every time you work on your heel hooks,” he continued, “you’re going to tell yourself that you’re working on this new behavior.  We’re going to attack this problem the same way you learn heel-hooks.”

Honestly, I walked away from that conversation not just a little bit confused.  I knew he was trying to speak to me in a way that I understood, and much of my language is centered around combat sports.  But learning heel hooks is not the same thing as learning to leave past patterns of behavior behind while modifying them into new one.  They’re completely different.

Or so I thought until a couple dozen hours later.

I stepped onto the mats with every intention of getting some sweaty rounds in.  I had already trained once that day and rolled some good rounds. I was looking to get some more—it’s a kind of therapy to me.  People were starting to show up and filtering into the room, and I was sizing up the sort of night it was going to be.  It was a good crew—tough rounds but winnable rounds, every one.

 Then I heard my name yelled from the other side of the room.

“Joel,” one the young competitors waved to me, “want to come work some leg sparring with us?”

It was strangely coincidental that this opportunity to learn was presenting itself so shortly after I had been given my assignment.

I looked at the group he had collected.  They were all respectable grapplers who had become enamored with lower body submissions.  With just a couple of exceptions, I could defeat every one of them rather soundly (size and experience do matter) in a classic match.  However, when it came to specifically sparring leg-locks—heel-hooks, ankle locks, toe-holds—every one of them held a notable advantage over me.  They trained them a lot more than I did.

I don’t like leg-locks and I don’t like heel-hooks.  They’re not my game.  God designed me for pressure and upper-body control. It’s how I was taught and how I learned.  That’s how I like to play.  That’s my game.  Leg-locks are not my game.  I’m bad at them.

Sometimes I need to make myself do hard things.

So we must not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don't give up. (Galatians 6:9) 

To be clear, I don’t love doing hard things.  I like doing familiar things in the familiar ways that worked for me all the times before.  I tend to want to do things the way that feels…comfortable…to me.

I don’t like working my heel-hooks and I don’t enjoy building new patterns of behavior.  My old ways are familiar, comforting to the point of self-destruction.  I can’t grow so long as I remain in those ruts.  I can’t get better—I can’t be better.  I almost have to convince myself that I want to do it a new and better way—I have to make myself believe that I want to do it.  Obviously, I’m not going to be able to fool myself into thinking I like it, so I just have to set myself.  I have to make myself do it.  Maybe it’s like a form of discipline.

My emotions and my spirit are both things that lack tangibility.  I can’t touch them.  Sure, the can be changed and, even, transformed.  But the thing I have the most control over is the me that exists in the physical world.  To change I must take some authority over the me that physically exists.  I have make myself do the physical thing and patiently wait for my spirit and emotions to follow along.

Doing my best to remain nonchalant, as if I didn’t care, I shrugged.  “Sure,” I say.  “I’ll jump in.”

The rules were simple—two grapplers start in leg entanglements and spar until one either gains dominant position or submits the other.  Winner stays and the next fighter jumps in.  It was an easy enough concept, but I was terrible at it.

My first try got me subbed in just a few seconds—with a heel-hook.  I tapped to a grappler who, under normal circumstances, I would have absolutely crushed.  But his heel-hook was better than my heel-hook defense and my attempted heel-hook barely phased him.

I was bad at it the next time, too.  When my chance in the rotation came once more, I lasted a bit longer—but not much longer.  I hated starting in leg-entanglement positions.  Most of my leg defense involved prevention—I was pretty good at keeping fighters off my legs.  But, in this case, I was forcing myself to fight somewhere where I wasn’t comfortable.

I was terrible at it.

The only way to get good at new things is to do them.  My previous behaviors—the things that I feel like I have always done—they don’t reprogram themselves.  The process of pattern modification is a difficult—and often—painful one.  It takes effort and involves a fair amount of discomfort, maybe even pain.

Brothers, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God's heavenly call in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14) 

I’m going to fail a lot, but there’s a destination at the end of the perseverance.  If I stop now I’ll never find the freedom that lies on the other side of the challenge.

I was losing a lot.  To clarify once more—leg-locks are not my game.  But it is something I need to work on because it’s a weakness of mine.  Due to my lack of success, I found myself standing to the side and waiting for my turn to come around. 

In the meantime, my eyes started to stray to the rest of open mat.  By that time the room had filled up.  Lots of grapplers were having a good time training without parameters.  They were just rolling, much like I wanted to do.

I started to feel the temptation.  It would be so easy for me to fade out of this line and go find a different training partner.  I could get a few good rounds in before things ended.  Nobody would miss me.  They wouldn’t even know I had gone.  I could easily go back to doing the things I did well and leave the leg stuff behind.

But I would miss me.  I would know I had quit on the hard thing.

So, I started to fight in my mind—and to fight against my mind.  I silenced the temptation and turned my eyes away from the rest of open mat.  I focused myself on where the heel-hooks were—on the thing I knew I needed to get better at.  I started to pace, circling the active grapplers.  I refused to let my eyes stray to anything but the problem I was looking to solve.  I put my eyes in the place where they belonged and forced my mind to see nothing but the leg-locks and the heel-hooks that were the moment I was living in.

The behaviors I evidence—the patterns I’ve developed—are manifested in the physical world.  They can be seen in what I do.  That’s not where they begin.  They begin in my mind and in the deep mystical places that I cannot understand.  The physical world where these things are ultimately expressed is, in fact, the last link in the chain that brought me there.

Every one of my behavior patterns serves a purpose.  They were all born out of necessity.  Many of them are the result of damage, pain, and hurt and the ways I learned to contend with and against those things.  Some of those patterns were birthed out of positive moments that I seek to replicate.  After massive numbers of repetitions, those patterns reinforced themselves until they blended into my very personality.

If I want to change them, I have to intercept them before they become action.  I have to detain them while they’re still thoughts.  The hardest part is teaching myself to recognize those thoughts before they can transform into behavior.

For though we live in the body, we do not wage war in an unspiritual way, since the weapons of our warfare are not worldly, but are powerful through God for the demolition of strongholds. We demolish arguments and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to obey Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:3-5) 

I was having a frustrating time.  We had moved through the rotation a number of times and I was pretty sure that I was the only one of the group who hadn’t racked up a single win.  But, finally, I had a chance.  I was engaged in a protracted battle with on of the fighters as we vacillated back and forth exchanging offense and defense.  I’d tried to snag an ankle-lock, but he defended effectively, which left me in position to pass the leg and shift to my knees and out of the leg-entanglement.

But that wasn’t what I was here to do.  I already knew how to prevent leg attacks.  I wasn’t here training to learn how to do what I already knew how to do.  I sucked the ankle back in, looking for the knee-line and reaching back for the heel-hook.

I wasn’t smooth enough.  I missed the setup by a fraction.  In that short moment he hooked my heel, instead.  I remained un-undefeated.

Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to do the easy thing.  My patterns are stubborn things that refuse to let go of their grasp on me.  Relearning how to be me—how to be free—requires that I remain immersed in the challenge.  It wouldn’t be hard to stop trying, but it would be a celebration of futility.

There’s this thing my mind does.  It begins to celebrate my old patterns and create narratives and stories around their anticipated success.  My mind is so powerful to me that it can almost convince that those stories have actually happened.  The thing I have always done has a vicious hold on me.  It holds me back and it holds me down in a way that I cannot overcome on my own.

Once more—once again—I was at a loss.  I fought but I still lost.  After some spinning and rolling, he locked the heel-hook onto me with minimal effort.  It was almost embarrassing.  After all, I’m a black belt.  I’m supposed to better at this stuff, I think.  But he isolated my leg, controlled the knee-line, and scooped my heel almost effortlessly.

But he was a good training partner.  He felt me tap and stopped.

“Wait,” I said, “don’t let go.”

I paused for a moment to analyze the way the submission looked—the anatomy of what made it work.  I checked his hand position, the orientation of his hips.

“I defend by rotating that way?” I asked as I pointed.

“No,” he said, “roll that way and you break your knee.”  This time he pointed—the other way.  “You roll that way.”

Maybe the hardest thing in this whole process is the part where I swallow my pride and ask for help.  I’m not able to change these things on my own.  Left to my own devices I remain in the rut.  My maladaptive behaviors are never going to change if I fight them by myself.  Victory requires that I invite others in—others that I can be fully honest and fully vulnerable with.

I can’t win by myself.  Anyhow, even if I could win by myself, it would be hollow to win a victory with nobody to share it with.

Brothers, if someone is caught in any wrongdoing, you who are spiritual should restore such a person with a gentle spirit, watching out for yourselves so you also won't be tempted.  Carry one another's burdens; in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:1-2) 

I wasn’t “winning” anything.  I was getting beat at every corner by every grappler in the group.  But I have a good team and they treated my vulnerability with immense respect.  They recognized that I was working at something difficult for me.  They allowed me space to learn and constantly provided input—where to put my hands, how to shift my weight, when to turn my heel up as opposed to down.  In short, they began to coach me.

I chose to trust their guidance.

I didn’t trust my technique yet.  I wasn’t good at it and I knew it.  So I chose to trust the wisdom of those with me.  I didn’t know what to do, so I did what they told me to do.  I chose to trust those who were wiser than I.

My behavior patterns—the choices I make without realizing that I’m making them—are so engrammed into my selfhood that I might not realize their presence.  I’m too immersed.  I’m so close to the problem that I can’t see it.  That means I need to listen to something—someone—on the outside.  I am forced to choose humility, but only if I want to be free of this weight that is holding me back.

Before his downfall a man's heart is proud, but humility comes before honor. (Proverbs 18:12) 

It was a rough session for me, but I did learn some things.  I chose to let myself enjoy the process.  I had gotten some sweat going and picked up a few tricks.  I’d bonded a bit more with the competitors I was working with.  It hadn’t initially been my preference, but it had worth my time.

Just a few days later I was in a much less cooperative match.  Something of a last-minute arrangement had landed me in a match against a skilled opponent who outweighed me by nearly 100 pounds.  We were in the middle of a war, nearly eight minutes into a ten-minute round.  He was trying to pass my guard, and I was doing everything I could to prevent him.

I must have been doing something right, though, because I could sense a little frustration in his movement.  He stood up, wrapped my ankle, and sat back to the ankle-lock.  It wasn’t necessarily a heel-hook, but it was a close cousin of the heel-hook that I had been training and drilling.

I felt that feeling I used to get when I took tests and knew that I knew the right answer to a question.  I won’t say that it was easy, but I absolutely knew what I needed to do.  I shift into a safe place, built a base, and transferred my weight.  I stood up and now I was past his guard.

I guess I can learn new things—eventually.