Dear Therapist:

I’ve done a lot of work on myself over the years. I feel like I’ve become more mature, more grounded, and more aware of my patterns. Baruch Hashem, I have my own family now and I generally feel like a different person than I used to be.

But when we go back to family for Yom Tov, I sometimes feel like I fall right back into my old self. My family is wonderful, and nothing bad is happening. Still, I become more sensitive, more defensive, and I notice old habits or reactions coming back that I thought I had worked through.

It bothers me that I can feel so grown up in my regular life and then suddenly feel pulled back into old patterns.

Why does this happen? And how can I retain the growth I worked so hard to build no matter the situation I am in?

Response:

What you're experiencing is in no way unusual. Even people without significant childhood trauma can revert to old patterns of emotion, thought, and behavior. Childhood is a time of development — as we move through early childhood, later childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, we work through a variety of psychosocial stages.

Erik Erikson's stages of development don't stop at young adulthood; according to him, we continue working through stages throughout our lives. In childhood and adolescence, we grapple with conflicts like "Industry vs. Inferiority" and "Identity vs. Role Confusion." In adulthood, we deal with conflicts like "Intimacy vs. Isolation" and "Generativity vs. Stagnation."

But many of the conflicts we strive to resolve later in life have roots in earlier ones. How we handle adult conflicts depends, in large part, on how we worked through the conflicts of childhood and adolescence. So we're not only working through present-day thoughts and emotions — on some level, we're also still addressing those from our earlier years.

To a large degree, once an issue is largely resolved (I say "largely" because we always retain some vestige of any emotional issue), we typically continue to revisit it only on a subliminal level. We're still addressing it — it's just mostly automatic by that point.

Sometimes, though, something triggers us, pushing an issue through the veil of the unconscious into our conscious mind. This doesn't necessarily mean we've failed to resolve that conflict; it may simply mean it isn't fully resolved — as no conflict ever truly is.

It isn't an all-or-nothing proposition; we don't either resolve our emotions or remain immersed in them. Like most things, resolution exists on a spectrum. The goal isn't to completely resolve an issue — it's to keep advancing in that direction.

I specifically mentioned the three aspects of your experience — emotion, thought, and behavior — because they're inextricably linked. When we get triggered, we experience a negative emotion. This can easily lead to automatic negative thoughts, which in turn lead to maladaptive behavior. For instance, if something makes me feel like there's something wrong with me, I may convince myself, in that moment, that it's true. I then react defensively — and my defensive reaction reinforces my negative feelings and beliefs, continuing the cycle.

As with any cycle, the first step is identifying its parts. Once you recognize the pieces of the cycle and how they affect one another, you can choose to work on one or more of them individually.

When we don't really understand our issues and the ways in which they affect us, it can be hard to properly address them — it can feel like there's no way to even grasp the issue, let alone work on it. Acknowledging how you're feeling, thinking, and acting can help you begin to change all three.

-Yehuda Lieberman, LCSW

 psychotherapist in private practice

 Woodmere, NY

 adjunct professor at Touro University

 Graduate School of Social Work

 author of Self-Esteem: A Primer

 www.ylcsw.com / 516-218-4200