Nick StumboExecutive Director driving healing from sexual brokenness

What Is Your UNHEALTHY Pattern? #puredesirepodcast #podcast

2 Feb 2024

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A single-speaker reflection about recognizing personal unhealthy behavioral patterns (e.g., wasting time reading innocuous content) by noticing the self-talk excuses ("I just need this for now"). The speaker explains that linking the action to the internal excuse functioned as an early trigger warning, revealing deeper patterns and prompting steps like reaching out for support or adding guardrails to change circumstance and behavior.

Let's say I'm wasting time online reading sports articles, which in and of itself is not bad to read about sports. There was nothing particularly triggering or provocative about those articles. But for me, if I was wasting time, the excuse was, oh, I just need this for now, or I just don't feel like hard work. And what helped me is that when I would hear myself making those statements in my own thinking, that began to be like a trigger warning or a red flag alert of, hey, this is your pattern. Not only the behavior you're doing, but what you're starting to tell yourself of, I just need this for now. I can control it. I won't go too far. And connecting the specific action and excuse just, I think, exposed a whole system that had maybe been there a lot longer and deeper than I realized, but also gave me some checkpoints much earlier on the journey to say, I need to reach out to someone, I need to change my circumstance, I need to implement a guardrail here.