Joe names a precise mechanism for why patterns repeat: the emotion you’re trying not to feel gets invited back into your life in the exact way you’re avoiding it. He calls it the golden algorithm.
“That which we resist persists. And we have this thing called the golden algorithm, which is the emotion that we’re trying not to feel, we invite in the exact way we’re trying not to feel it.”
The examples are everyday. You avoid anxiety by powering through your whole to-do list—and end the day hyped and anxious. You avoid sadness by stopping your child’s full emotional release—and it leaves you in low-level sadness all the time. The avoidance strategy is itself the delivery system for the feeling.
Joe gives his own: fearing emotional abandonment, he’d either armor up (“fine, I don’t care”) or go needy—both of which made people abandon him. By trying not to feel abandonment, he produced it. The pattern only broke when he started looking forward to feeling the emotion, because the body recreates the circumstance over and over until the avoided feeling is finally felt. Once it’s felt, the experience is no longer needed.
“As soon as you feel it, then you don’t need to have the experience.”
Related Concepts
- Resisting an emotion is exactly what invites it back
- We recreate painful circumstances to finally welcome the avoided emotion
- Loving an emotion transforms it; trying to get rid of it doesn’t
- Feeling the held-back emotion ends trauma repetition
- Fully falling in love with the avoided feeling is the quickest way to stop a negative pattern
- Three steps to see your emotional matrix
- We engineer heartbreak to avoid the heartbreak we haven’t felt