When childhood emotions don’t complete their natural cycle back to homeostasis, the body recreates scenarios over and over to try to feel that emotion and return to regulation. This is what Joe calls “the Matrix” — the repetitive life patterns we can’t seem to escape.
The person who keeps dating emotionally unavailable partners isn’t making bad choices — their nervous system is trying to recreate the conditions for a feeling that never completed. The person who keeps having the same kind of boss, the same fights, the same criticism — all attempting to return to an emotional homeostasis that was interrupted in childhood.
“If somebody keeps on dating somebody who’s emotionally abandoned them, when they fully embrace the abandonment feeling, they fall in love with it and recognize the signal that it’s actually sending them, then they stop dating people who emotionally abandon them.”
The solution is counterintuitive: fully embrace the avoided emotion rather than continuing to avoid it. When the feeling finally completes its cycle, the body no longer needs to recreate the scenario.
Related Concepts
- Avoidance of fear invites the feared outcome
- Resistance creates the feared outcome
- Fully feeling an emotion stops the pattern
- We recreate pain to finally welcome it
- Feeling the held-back emotion ends trauma repetition
- We engineer heartbreak to avoid the heartbreak we haven’t felt
- Resisting an emotion is exactly what invites it back