20. Effective Ways to Find Resolution for Unwanted Feeling Responses

I want to follow up on my previous writing and focus on effective ways to deal with and find resolution for unwanted feeling responses we want to manage differently, such as anger, fear, and worry. It is useful to explore current patterns of what triggers a response in present time to determine possible areas for change.

A client I have been working with made progress regarding her issues of anger, but still, problems with extreme frustration kept creeping back in. We had a session the day after she reported an “out of control anger reaction episode.” She had sent her five children to school for the first time in one and a half years (due to COVID) and wanted “everything to be perfect." She found herself trying to control her children in ways that they rebelled against.

She inadvertently set up conflictual interactions, leading to feeling frustrated and losing her temper; then later feeling guilt and shame. We identified a Part of her that needed to try to be perfect. When her experience didn’t match her expectations, she became agitated and escalated her attempts to make everything go perfectly, which contributed to more frustration for everyone involved.

We worked on a process of her going within and communicating with this Part. She learned the pattern of trying to do everything perfectly that generated anger when she felt out of control was learned as a child, to try to help her to “survive, to feel protected and safe, to experience a sense of inner well-being, and ultimately PEACE!”

When she stepped into the experience of what it is to have what that Part has wanted (feeling peace), everything changed. She subsequently reported that she was able to approach her parenting with feeling more of a sense of calm (with a few effective parenting skills she learned in other therapy sessions and was able to put to use). She found her kids responding in kind, being more cooperative with her requests. She reported she was no longer getting angry.

Additionally, she said that after we completed the process and things started to change in her life, she realized the pattern of needing “to do things right” began when she was two years old and was beaten by her father for making mistakes.

In another article, I discussed how we have had the Attempted Solution of trying to understand “the reason” we have our problem experiences and figuring out where they came from. What we have been trying to do to help is actually creating and perpetuating the problem. What good does it do to understand “the reason?” What is the outcome as a result? Usually not helping us get resolution with the problem. In fact, this activity keeps us stuck, mulling over the past failures, and staying stuck in feeling bad. It is so useful and necessary to notice the results we are getting from what we are doing. If it is helping, keep doing it. If not, do something different.

In my training with Brief Strategic Therapy, we learned to interrupt the Attempted Solution and found change would occur. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something else will take over which it is usually going to work better. We have been stuck in the 2-point loop: do something, it doesn’t work, do more of it. (Repeat.) It is so much better when we can finally do what we need to do to get off the hamster wheel and out of the rut.

We don’t need to understand where the pattern came from; instead, we want to be able to work with the response to find out what it is trying to do for us now. We keep living based on this inner reality, pattern, program, tape that has played in our head, that does not relate to the “real” reality. The Attempted Solution of trying to understand where problems come from, in order to be able to get rid of them, has not worked. It has only made the unwanted feelings bigger and stronger, holding on tighter. These unwanted patterns continue on.

When we try to resolve feelings by focusing on where they come from and why, it is like looking for the car keys in the wrong place! (Please see my article, Our Attempted Solutions Only Perpetuate Our Problems). We need to explore more of what is going on now that contributes to and perpetuates the problem. When the client went within and asked what anger was there trying to do for her, she got a clear message that it wanted everything to be perfect for the kids on their first day of school.

The Part had a very useful positive intention; however, the outcome was really about 180 degrees opposite! When we were able to work with the Part and help it experience having what it had wanted (peace within), the need to try to be the perfect parent to have her kids experience a perfect life(quite unrealistic!), her feelings of desperation that had contributed to her anger responses dissolved and resolved.

Her experience was consistent with what I often see when I work with my clients: We often get insight into a pattern’s origin after change occurs.