[This post is very much for my patients as an aide de memoir, it may not make much sense to others.]

Three steps sit behind the process of changing our unwanted unconscious behaviours. These are patterned responses that are triggered by certain people or certain situations. Your partner makes a negative comment that is similar to the way your father did and click, you shut down. Someone ignores you the way you felt ignored by the kid at school you really wanted to like you, click, you feel dismissed and alone. After we come to understand these ‘dynamics’ we can then go through a three-step process to free ourselves from these patterned responses.

1. First, identify the unconscious motivation, the dynamic, behind the unwanted behaviour. This is the programming that makes us automatically behave in a given way. For example, when I’m criticised in a certain way I shut down/get angry; when my parents weren’t there for me, ice cream was the next best thing to self-soothe …
2. Practice mindfulness at the risk times (make the most of those ‘difficult’ people who are regulars in your life and typically trigger you – you can’t practice on those who flit in and trigger you unexpectedly) to decrease your ‘Lag Time’ to Zero. Your Lag Time is the time between when you behave in this patterned, problematic way and when you realise that your unconscious motivation was triggered into play. Your lag time may start at a few days before you realise what happened. But with practice, over time you can get it down to a few minutes (“damn they triggered me again”) and then a few seconds. The key is to slow things down when you feel triggered (or have an urge to drink, eat or use) to give yourself time to apply these principles.   Only then you can visit step 3.
3. Only after completing steps one and two, and getting your lag time to zero, can you now CHOOSE what you do next. You could do what your programming would automatically have you do, or you can do something else. It often helps to remind ourselves about how we will feel tomorrow about ourselves if we do not choose the healthier option i.e. if we let ourselves down. For this you need to have alternative healthier behaviours (that you have rehearsed) to choose from. Remember, the capacity to choose, as opposed to doing what your programming would have you do automatically, is what defines us as humans. Otherwise, we’re operating at the level of a friendly labrador.

Remember without completing steps 1. and 2. none of us can exercise our ‘freedom of choice’. That’s right, you can’t change if you don’t know what your programming is and when it’s triggered.