Cynthia Moore, MA, CCHT, developed and has been practicing Cognitive Repatterning for several years in private practice with groups, couples and individuals in Berkeley and Lafayette. Cynthia also teaches techniques in the Hypnotherapy Training Course at HCH, a Hypnotherapy Training Institute in Lafayette, also a longtime OPEN EXCHANGE lister, in our Schools & Certifications category.

Are there situations in your life where you shut down, you blow up, your blood churns, or you feel inexplicably shamed by a passing comment? Does your response to these situations feel excessive, even compulsive as feelings race through your body with a will of their own? You're not alone. These automatic responses to trigger situations are called "reactive patterns." Reactive patterns are reactions to stress or pain that worked for us at one point in our life, often as far back as childhood, but which have become uncontrollable in the present moment because they are knee-jerk responses. When we are caught up in a reactive pattern, we often feel helpless and possessed by our feelings. (Note that addictions can also fall into this category and also that reactive patterns can be addictive in themselves). Does this sound familiar?

This is where Cognitive Repatterning comes in. Cognitive Repatterning is a therapeutic process which I have developed that isolates the specific patterns you wish to change, and offers you alternative, healthier responses. It involves re-wiring the internal sequences that trigger automatic feelings and behaviors. Cognitive Repatterning is based on the assumption that beneath our conditioned responses (the False Self system) lies the unique spirit which emanates from the core of each of us, the True or Authentic Self.

How do we shift the agency of our responses from the False or conditioned self to the True Self? It's simple. Using meditative and shamanic techniques, I help you to awaken in that very moment of intense discomfort. Our most painful triggers are ideal opportunities for awakening consciousness and instigating choice.

Specifically, we select a moment in your day in which you felt that you responded to a difficult situation with less than a desired state of calm, equilibrium and detachment. We familiarize ourselves with your unique style of reactivity: do you get angry? Hurt? Withdrawn? What happens in your belly, in your chest? What thoughts run through your mind? What beliefs do you hold about yourself in that moment? These are your cognitive patterns. Rather than approaching them with disdain or judgement, we hold them with kindness and compassion. In the meantime we strengthen your capacity to stand in the larger self, the Core Self, which responds with wisdom and patience to the very stimuli that would ordinarily trigger fear and aversion.

By familiarizing ourselves with our patterns and through patient practice, we begin to recognize reactivity when (even before) it occurs and to implement a broader response system, one based on compassion for oneself and others, and on conscious choice. Not only is this a process of psychological growth and healing, but it's a spiritual practice as well, the practice of choosing to be awake in the present moment. Eckhart Tolle calls it "a higher dimension of consciousness", or "Presence."

So, you're standing there and your boss (your child, your mother) has just yelled at you and you can feel yourself tightening, your pulse quickening, the angry (hurt, withdrawn) answer trembling on your lips, and you pause. You take a deep breath. You acknowledge the feelings rolling inside you like storm clouds and focus on them with kind attention, and you step intentionally into a neutral zone deep within. From here you call upon your own skills of compassion, detachment and ancient wisdom, the silent place within you that knows exactly what you need in this moment. You attend to yourself, you calm yourself, you breathe, and you respond neutrally and quietly. You've interrupted your cognitive sequence and you've broken the reactive pattern.

In shamanic traditions, breaking a family pattern creates healing not only for ourselves but also for seven generations that came before us and seven generations yet to come. That's powerful medicine! What do you think? Is it time for you to re-wire some of your reactive patterns?