Why Do I Use Poor Behaviors to Change My Mood or Protect Myself?

I have counseled thousands of people and one question I am frequently asked is:

 “Why do I use poor behaviors to change my mood or protect myself?”

You developed specific coping skills through many avenues. Life experiences have produced messages, core beliefs and thought patterns that drive what you feel, speak, and the behaviors that you choose. Your family dynamics and learned behaviors, your natural tendencies of your unique temperament, and physiological influences have also added to the mix.

Many of my clients have told me of their life experiences with family, community, and peer groups. In these environments you have experienced anything from relatively healthy, loving environments to horrific experiences. Although your families may have been good people who loved you, all people are flawed and send messages that have affected you.

Some of you had very performance based families that sent messages of rejection if the standards were not met. Some of you grew up with emotionally unavailable families, addictive behaviors, or abusive parents that taught you the dynamics of distorted thinking and faulty life skills. Even if you had a wonderful family experience, you may have received negative messages from your community or peer groups that produced negative expectations, and a faulty personal identity.

When you make a choice to isolate from relationships, use anger to protect yourself, use alcohol, porn, or drugs, you embrace faulty thinking and life skills. You have an internal conflict, pain, and grief; you are trying to self protect, receiving pleasure, or turning to something to escape from stress.

You embrace negative life skills and faulty ways of meeting your needs to change your mood. You have learned to trust in a behavior pattern, substance, or event to make yourself feel better. This is the beginning of trusting in an “illusion” that promises comfort, while embracing the “deception” that your perceived need is being met. The problem isn’t that you don’t know you should do something different; it’s that you don’t know how to do something different.  You don’t have to settle for less than in your life. Skills and tools are available, and when you seek you will find hope and freedom. You are not alone and with Christ centered, biblical help, you can be more than a conqueror.

“So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law;  but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” Romans 7:21-25

Copyright © 2013 by Michele Fleming, Ph.D.