Marni welcomes Adele Spraggon in the Life Check Yourself studio, where they get into the nitty gritty of how to train your brain and break down patterns that have been influencing your relationships. Adele is an award-winning author, an international trainer and the recipient of the 2022 Women of Inspiration accolade. In this episode, Marni and Adele discuss the reasons why we react to our partners the way we do, how to recognize certain patterns in ourselves, and how to break the cycle of emotional distress that sometimes manifests in relationships. It’s a journey of self-empowerment wrapped in a 4-step process that starts by looking inwards, without judgment. Winner of the 2021 Top Behavioral expert title, Adele’s book, “Shift: 4 Steps to Personal Empowerment” has won several awards. 

• It’s all about repatterning. 
• How to change your reaction to your partner
• How to make your relationship brand-new
• Why do we fall into the same relationships over and over again? 
• Breaking the Serial-Dating Pattern
• Why do you keep having the same fights?

You’re Interacting with a Pattern, Not a Partner [05:38]

Adele explains that when meeting or interacting with a person, we’re actually interpreting them through our own set of past experiences. We’re not reacting to them, but to a pattern we’ve formed for them. 

Let’s think about the brain. It’s inside a dark silent room called a skull. It has no access to the outside world, so I can’t really know you.

We’re interacting to our own brain, rather than to the person standing in front of us. Adele goes on to emphasize that the brain is in a continuous process of rewiring itself. And to break certain cycle, repatterning – which is unearthing, understanding, and changing the internal patterns that are obstructing the relationship – is key. Reminding ourselves that we’re actually interacting with our own pattern, is an introspective process that allows us to find out why we’ve reacted to our partner’s behavior in a certain way. This eventually leads to the understanding that our reaction has more to do with us, than with them. 

A pattern is an intertwined physical sensation, emotion and thought. 

It is the patterns within us that we need to identify, deconstruct and reconstructed, in order to understand the why. And that’s part of the 4-step process that the award-winning author uses when working with couples. 

Your Mind is just Along for the Ride [ 12:14]

Triggers stem from the physical and emotional state, rather than from the mind. What a person’s mind essentially does, is take whatever sensory data it’s given, and weave a story out of it. 

If we could slow everything down, you would see the mind just following along.  

The mind is there to justify the emotions. But in order to recognize these patterns and start deconstructing them, we need to slow down, and ask ourselves the right questions. The first step in Adele’s process for training the brain, is being unapologetically honest with ourselves about our feelings. In a world that’s constantly putting pressure on us to alter ourselves, the expert explains that this process is not about changing or fixing a particular emotion but rather about embracing and understanding it. 

A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Introspection [18:57]

We’re not saying communication isn’t important, but rather how you’re communicating. Constantly trying to fix your partner or tell them what to do - something we’re all guilty of at one point or other - doesn’t work. Whereas, understanding the pattern that makes you react to them in a certain way, does. Your reaction to your partner’s behavior is a reflection of one of your patterns. Explaining those feelings to your partner, once you’ve explored them yourself, is the road to healing. 

It’s when someone needs to justify or defend how they’re feeling, or fix how they’re feeling, it causes the other brain, your partner’s brain, to also want to defend, justify and fix.

The four traps Adele says need to be avoided, and the same ones that keep those triggering behaviors cemented in the relationship, are justifying, analyzing, catastrophizing and rebelling. Our brains have been, throughout our lives, conditioned to analyze, and justify. So, don’t justify. Unless you’ve taken a moment to stand still, and accept how you feel, and what pattern that belongs to, the relationship becomes a vicious cycle that is constantly repeating itself, with no end in sight. 

What’s happening to your partner’s brain is every time you go down one of those traps, you’re pushing them into one of their traps.