What's running your life from the shadows?

Growing up we learn how to get our needs met. As babies, crying usually gets attention and so we cry when we need something. As we age our strategies become more sophisticated and covert. These strategies may serve us well as kids but they don't translate well into our adult lives where they create problems in our relationships.

Our strategies become our modus operandi as adults, held in place and run by our covert conditioning. They operate in the shadows through our subconscious and unconscious minds. This means that even though we may use them regularly, we may not be aware of using them at all.

Breaking free of such strategies is key to forming genuine relationships in our adult lives, but if we don't know we're using strategies, how do we stop?

Trusting that we indeed have strategies is the first step. Few of us make it through our childhood without any strategies at all because we have needs that must be met in imperfect or perhaps chaotic settings. Once we accept that we have strategies, we start to identify where and how they show up in our lives. Then we can begin the process of shifting out of those old strategies to embrace new behaviors that allow us to meet our needs in healthy, useful ways that make for more harmonious relationships.

Since our strategies live in our subconscious and unconscious minds, it can be dang near impossible to identify them ourselves. But there are a few ways we can start flushing them out. Many times we can trace a strategy back to a conflict in our lives, one where things got emotionally messy. Or we can ask people we trust what they see because they may see the patterns playing out in our lives where we don't. And we can get help from a professional to identify and transform them to behaviors that help us instead of sabotage us.

We may not have had the power to manage our lives well as kids but we certainly do as adults. We can ditch old strategies for new behaviors that create more harmony and fun in life. It doesn't matter what our background is. No matter what we've endured, we are capable of changing how we get our needs met to cultivate more fun and fulfilling relationships.

Remember if we change nothing, nothing changes.