Joe describes a fundamental mechanism: if we were never allowed to feel something, our system will recreate the conditions that produce that feeling over and over — like a cell trying to return to homeostasis. The pattern persists not because we enjoy the pain but because the unfelt emotion demands to be felt.
Joe shares his own example: taught that emotional abandonment was inevitable, he would get angry whenever he sensed abandonment approaching — a strategy to avoid feeling the abandonment itself. But the anger drove people away, recreating the very abandonment he feared. The pattern was self-reinforcing precisely because of the avoidance.
“As soon as someone fully falls in love with the feeling they’re trying to avoid, the pattern stops. It’s the quickest way to stop a negative pattern in your life.”
The solution isn’t managing the pattern or understanding it intellectually — it’s sitting with the avoided feeling, making friends with it, falling in love with it. Once the feeling is fully welcomed, the system no longer needs to recreate the circumstances that produce it. Brett offers the metaphor of an electric fence: the dog won’t cross even after the fence is off, though the shock was never actually harmful. With emotions, it’s even better — they become increasingly comfortable when welcomed.
Related Concepts
- We recreate pain to finally welcome it
- Avoidance of fear invites the feared outcome
- Welcoming fear over conquering it
- We engineer heartbreak to avoid the heartbreak we haven’t felt
- Resisting an emotion is exactly what invites it back
- Emotional avoidance creates the very pattern it fears
- Fully feeling a pattern ends it without figuring anything out