The Pain of Breaking Old Habits

Old habits have the power to physically and emotionally destroy us, yet we remain aggressively addicted to practising them. Do we realise that we are doing it? Usually not! Usually, these habits are a subconscious reflex built from survival. I’m not speaking of why you may always tie your right shoe first before the left. I’m referring to the kind of habits that influence our perception of the world and the relationships we maintain within it—the subconscious agreements we make that create an immense amount of pleasure and satisfaction.

Consider the person who sees the world through the lens of a pessimist. He believes there are no good people, only those who take and would be taken advantage of. As he experiences the world with the belief that there are no good people, his reality bends to this perception. At every turn, he is rewarded with profound evidence to support his beliefs. He feels a sense of deep pleasure, a dark pleasure, born of his righteousness.

When we have been wronged or experience deep trauma, it is here, in that believed reaffirmation of our experience, that we feel a great sense of justification. We scream, Yes! Now I am free to experience my drama! Yes, life is unfair to me! See? I told you so! Let me hurt! Let me sit in the comfortable pain of my childhood trauma.

But this is a dangerous and slippery slope. When you seek justification for your trauma to the point that it colors the perception of self and the world, it becomes the measure by which you pass undue judgment. When you believe you deserve it, hurting yourself becomes justifiable. Punishing yourself becomes justifiable. Attacking the world and others. All of it becomes justifiable because on a deeper, more vulnerable level you’ve convinced yourself this is the truth. If you did not deserve punishment, then surely life would not have treated you the way it has. In this place, life becomes a battle which you know that you will always lose.

Because fighting with reality we always LOSE! But THIS is what I want ! TO LOSE! To experience failure. MY failure! To experience that I was right, that life is unfair—that I will always be wrong. You see!?? I am not good enough! That’s why mummy or daddy never loved me! What do you mean they were doing their best or that they were battling with their own demons?? IT WAS ALL ABOUT ME! I am a failure! I am betrayed! They betrayed me!

We unconsciously convince ourselves that this is what we want to experience, often going to great and harmful lengths to prove ourselves right. The people we befriend, the lovers we take—every relationship constructs a brittle structure on which we build a palace made of glass.

I have friends here to help me reexperience my whole life trauma, MY conditioning!  My conditioning is helping me enormously to prove these beliefs right! Yes I am a winner ! See!?? I am doomed!!! Finally I can feel it and I can scream it!  And it feels so good because I get to be RIGHT!

And while we wait for each piece to break, we rejoice in its destruction. Worse, we may become an active agent in tearing it all down. Our acceptance of this twisted world has allowed us to build an arsenal of our own, each tool used as a means for survival. Although the bullets are aiming primarily at the self—causing anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks, and all sorts of physical illness—we’re also recklessly firing at the ones we love and those who love us back. Our conditioning makes it feel good—very good. An ejaculation of emotional vomit. We feed the wounded inner child with a storm of anger! A wild teenage dragon, clueless about how to tame their blazing mouth—spitting flames in every direction, leaving a trail of scorched chaos. A psychological butcher.

This coffee tastes like shit! This was not the coffee I asked! Don’t put that plate there! I told you to drive on the other lane!

We can also kill without words. We can murder with our eyes—eyes filled with disapproval, disgust, anger, hatred. And we can do that very discreetly; almost politely. This kind of silent, brutal treatment allows us to feel superior.

See how civilized I am? I don’t need to use words. We are beyond explanation, so instead I will pierce you with my gaze. And killing you feels ecstatic. Better than an orgasm. Why? Because in that moment I GET TO PROVE MYSELF RIGHT ABOUT ALL OF MY PAIN, ALL OF MY TRAUMA. BY DESTROYING YOU, I MAKE MYSELF A KING!  A QUEEN. I AM FINALLY IN POWER. MY NEGATIVE POWER FEELS GOOD WHEN EMBODIED.

Yet, while this murder of an authentic self is taking place, an authentic self is waiting patiently to be discovered; one capable of experiencing even more pleasure.

Does this sound familiar? Or do you think that you have never felt this way? I invite you to think, and think deeply about a time in your life when harmful conditioning allowed you to feel powerful. And if you can’t remember, perhaps make a conscious practice of trying to stay present to allow any memories to return to you. Today and tomorrow, while doing simple things, make an active choice to embody presence: notice the way you are thinking and feeling; draw your attention to where you are looking while driving or riding the metro.

Once you start noticing your conditioning nothing will ever be the same. If you want to change the path you’re on now—the current negative or unfulfilling state of your life—it’s important to root out the brambles keeping you locked in a painful replay of your past. 

When someone, even unintentionally, shows us a different way to be—when we glimpse a life without those patterns—we feel vulnerable and we often get angry, as if we’ve been robbed of the opportunity to repeat our familiar limiting and self-destructive behaviours. Even when we’ve realized and proven to ourselves how damaging habits are to our lives, our creativity, and our freedom, the unconscious draw to fulfill them is strong.

One of the deepest patterns I carry is the belief that people need me in order to be okay—just like my mum once needed me when I was far too young to hold that kind of responsibility. I was constantly alert, emotionally available, trying to hold her up. That role became tangled with my sense of worth and love. And even though I now understand how draining and unhealthy that dynamic was, some part of me still clings to it. I still catch myself feeling disappointed—or even unsettled—when people around me don’t need me in that same codependent way. There’s a strange emptiness in that realization—sometimes even anger rooted in a sense of betrayal—because it means I don’t get to repeat the role that once gave me purpose, even though it also cost me so much. And so, in moments of desperation to feel this deep codependency habit, I will make myself available without clearly seeing who the other person is.

As long as they are in need of something I can provide, I am desperate to prove myself useful—to seek validation. I offer myself so completely in order to satisfy—not only the other person, but the part of me that requires being needed to feel worthy. My time becomes flexible, preferences for food negligible, sleeping with someone I feel no connection to—all of it is sacrificed for the deeply conditioned habit to please. My sense of self is discarded to make the other person happy.

It wasn’t until I realized this habit of people-pleasing that I began to see how it manifested in my life. Which relationships were genuine, and which existed simply because the other person required my constant giving? Were there any authentic qualities between us, or was I only finding where I fit into a harmful equation for the sake of feeling needed?

The toughest habits to break are those that cloak you in a false sense of security. After all, what is so wrong with being needed? For all the false relationships I had allowed myself to be a part of, we were all cruising comfortably—and painfully—down a conditioned, man-made avenue of lies.

All in comfort—the cosy comfort of familiar behaviour.

The presence required to live a truly free life is intense. It demands real work and daily practice. But the more consciousness grows, the less I find myself buying into those old thoughts and familiar traps. The more I invest in new ways of living, the more I reinforce new pathways in the brain—thanks to neuroplasticity, the brain’s innate ability to rewire itself through repeated experience and attention.

Still, that work is nothing compared to the heavier, more numbing toll of living a life that simply recycles our behavioural and mental patterns. One path is hard and liberating. The other is easier—and hollow.

Breaking habits is not easy work. To undo years of pain and trauma requires an equal amount of years exorcising that pain and trauma. It is a constant dance with the devil you know, chipping away at the familiar, until you realize you can stand on your own. The choice is yours: to recycle the patterns you’ve always known, or break free from the cycles of harmful belief to find the real person underneath. It’s a path most people never take, but it’s one that rewards the brave with an incredible amount of freedom.