Setbacks

Once you have noticed that something is not going well in your life, your personality usually is quite helpful to look for solutions, ask other people for help, change things etc. And he will start enthusiastically with this new approach. Only to find that your commitment to it is decreasing considerably after only a few days, and it usually takes no longer than two weeks before you have fully returned to your old habits. Now how is this possible?

As long as you experience a problem, your personality understands that he has to do something to help you solve this, since you are not happy, and the last thing that he wants is that you will doubt him. So on the outside it seems as if he is working consciously to find new ways. However, when you start to implement these and your original unpleasant feelings start to disappear, he will make you believe that from here on he knows how to continue, since before you had these problems you were doing fine, did not have these unpleasant feelings, it worked for you the way it was, and there, before you know it, the old habits are back into your daily pattern.

To your personality, change usually is very unpleasant, a.o. since the need from it arose from a situation (and you identify with that) that seems 'wrong' simply by your wish to change it alone, the uncertainty and unfamiliarity, the chance of failure etc, and your personality usually wants to limit this kind of experiences as much as possible. On top of that, the patterns that you are dealing with usually are replacement mechanisms for unpleasant feelings, which deprives your personality of an easy and convenient way to hide and distract your attention from what are unpleasant situations according to his judgment, which doubles the unpleasantness for him.

Doing things differently actually always causes some form of tension within you. You uphold the cause and concentrate on the symptoms, therefore you only change the effects. Becoming aware of the true cause of your problem (which always involves some form of judgment or interpretation), letting go of your investment in it, and let yourself be inspired to either do or not do things differently, is the only way in which change will come natural to you and without tension, and which leads to true letting go of your investment in the outcome. There is nothing wrong with you when you work with the issue in the old way, that is what personalities do. However, when you are fed up with the endless repetition of this same-old pattern, you can use this to realize that you have a choice in this mechanism which only seemed to be an automatism.