04/01/2026
New Year - An opportunity for change!
2026 - A new year and the temptation to make new resolutions for how we are going to change or improve! A little word of advice - make only resolutions about how you are going to improve for yourself - not for others! Now this is not a call to selfishness - no, it is a call to self-awareness, which is something completely different!
When we make a resolution like “I will be more patient with my children, my partner, my parents, my workmates … etc.,” it is not going to work for more than a few days without a little self-awareness! Why do we need to be more patient with these other people in our lives? Why are we not patient with them now or in the past? What is it that they do that sets off our frustration, our anger, our flying off the handle?
Well you might say it is the way they don’t listen, or they shout or just keep on repeating the same mistakes and never keep their promises to improve! So now you’re going to be more patient with them when they do that and you’re not going to shout and lose your temper! So how are you going to do that - bite your lip, grind your teeth, kick the cat or take it out on someone else?
How long do you think that clever approach will work before the frustration just becomes too much and you have an almighty melt down - burn up loads of energy, feel totally ashamed when you calm down and abandon the resolution?
Just about now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, who is this smug annoying person who is mocking my attempts to change and improve? And the answer is, someone who went through this exact cycle of optimistic outlook for the future, resolution for change, failure to carry through and pessimism and deflation at failing once again.
The key to making resolutions for change work is to examine why we are currently behaving in ways we don’t like and want to change. Why are we getting so angry when we feel that people aren’t listening to us? Why do we feel that people never keep their promises to improve?
Doesn’t everyone? Well no - if you look around you I’m sure you will see colleagues and friends who seem to cope much better with things like that so why does this seem so personal to us. What sort of silent conversation are we having inside our heads about why this keeps happening? Are we linking this back to how others treated us in the past - how we were treated in a past relationship, in the last job, in school or when we were growing up at home?
Past experiences, the memories of which evoke strong emotional and psychological reactions in the present are nowadays often referred to as “triggers”! The popular approach to dealing with triggers or “being triggered” is to avoid such situations. Unfortunately, that approach is not open to most of us! We cannot change job every time we encounter a boss or a colleague whose voice or general demeanour reminds us of some past unpleasant experience or trauma.
Like dealing with persistent weeds in a garden, we need to trace the trigger to its roots and understand why it has continued to have such a persistent and negative effect on our lives. In the case of some previous unpleasant but not very serious experience a bit of quiet reflection and a conversation with a close and trusted friend maybe enough to de-toxify the trigger and enable us to move on.
In the case of more serious and traumatic experiences such as physical or sexual abuse or a previous life-threatening situation, tracing the roots of the trigger may be more difficult because of our human ability to repress memories. A repressed memory is one where we don’t consciously remember the experience but anything that threatens to evoke it will trigger a strong physical and emotional response.
A classic example of this is where we might be watching a film or TV drama and something happens or appears to be going to happen and we cannot look at the screen and feel we need to get out of the room!
Now, I don’t mean the scene in the horror movie where the guy with the axe is hiding in the dark behind the door in the empty house and the foolish hero tells her friends she is going to back for her umbrella and she will catch them up! That whole scene is designed to shake you up and make you want to scream!
No, I’m talking about a scene that appears perfectly normal to almost everyone else in the room watching it but has a much more powerful effect on you! In such cases, you may need to professional help through counselling or psychotherapy to deal with such trauma so that the trigger loses its power to disrupt your life.
So, let us say that you have had your period of quiet reflection and you have found no previous unpleasant or traumatic experiences which are triggering your emotions and making it impossible to attain your goal of remaining calm in the face of what you might perceive as other people stupidity - what then?
Well there are two other possibilities to consider - learned behaviour and displaced stress!
Are your reactions a learned form of behaviour that you absorbed from parent, a teacher, or a mentor in your formative years! Was the standard response to situations like this when you were growing up to have a melt down and shout and roar etc., Again, a period of quiet reflection will probably be enough to start the process of freeing yourself from this form of failure-inducing behaviour.
A dead give-away in situations like this is when we suddenly find ourselves repeating phrases we associate with a parent or teacher or mentor. Phrases we swore at the time we would never say and which we now hear ourselves - almost unconsciously saying aloud!
Finally, we come to displaced stress! Are the reasons for our over-reactions not directly related to the behaviours we complain of but driven by a much more serious worry or stress that we are in denial about. How often have we heard friends and colleagues declare “This job is driving me crazy” when we know that it is worries about their family, their financial situation, or their health that is really the source of their stress? Sometimes it is the job that is the problem but the family etc., is blamed instead!
Again, when we find ourselves stressed and repeating the failures of the past we need to ask ourselves what are we really worrying about. A good way to focus on this is to ask ourselves the question “If a miracle happened and the problem I am currently worrying about was solved what would I be worried about then?”
I hope I have given you food for thought about why you may not have succeeded so far with your New Year Resolutions and some ways in which even if you still struggle you will understand why. The first step to self-improvement in my book is knowledge of ourselves, the second step is understanding and the third and most elusive step is insight! Insight is where the knowledge and understanding gives us the self-awareness to be free to change.
In a future post, I will return to the topic of displaced stress in its most obvious form - denial! As I used to say to my students - Never underestimate the power of denial!
