Relationship coach John Kenny explains why people return to painful relationships using a spiky versus cotton wool metaphor. Your brain learns to tolerate familiar pain, making it feel normal, while actual safety feels strange and wrong. Breaking the pattern means choosing discomfort over what you know.
Hello, I'm John Kenny and welcome to this video.
Today I'm going to talk about spiky versus cotton wool. Now I'm just going to explain to you what I mean by spiky and then I'll talk a bit about cotton wool. Do you ever find that you You are drawn towards certain people or certain situations which you know may not be the best for you. Perhaps your relationships show a certain pattern where you keep getting hurt. Maybe you are a self-sabotager at work. Maybe things go really well for a while, but actually it's not really what you want. Uh, and then you walk away. I like to call these spiky situations or spiky people. What happens is, is your brain is drawn towards this pain. So we go towards this pain and we know that we're going to get hurt. So it's like going towards some spikes, but your brain tells you that you're used to this kind of situation. You're going to survive this kind of situation. And therefore it knows what that's going to feel like, so it feels like it's okay for you to continue living these same kind of relationships and being in these same types of situations. Your brain learns this because as you grow up and you experience certain things, it gets used to the certain type of pain. Now, once it starts to recognise that this pain is something you can cope with, that you can come out the other side of, It has a tendency to feel like it's okay for you to keep going there because it recognises this as something that eventually is going to be okay, even though it's going to be painful. On the other side of things, we've got cotton wool. So let's think of somebody as being cotton wool who can offer you love, offer you all the affection that you want, make you feel safe and secure, but your brain has not really experienced that a lot in the past, so it doesn't know what this feels like. So if it doesn't know what it feels like, it doesn't know what the outcome is going to be, so therefore it has a tendency to avoid it. Now, if you're going to avoid those situations, you're going to miss out on so much positive stuff in your life, and your brain will tell you to go back and do the spiky stuff because it knows what that feels like. When you think about this now, does it remind you of situations that you've been in, relationships that you've been in Do they always seem to be the same types of people? You know that you're going to get hurt. And do you avoid certain situations because they feel uncomfortable? Or maybe now is the time in your life to see what's uncomfortable and just go with it anyway and see what it turns out like, and try not to go down these spiky pathways again. If you'd like some more information about spiky versus cotton wool, or how coaching may be able to help you in your life, then please do visit www.johnkennecoaching.com. You can fill out a contact form on there or just give us a call and we can arrange a complimentary consultation. I hope you've taken something from this video today. I look forward to seeing you again soon.
