when you're feeling overwhelmed,
you tend to go into the:
MERGING PATTERN
The safety strategy of the Merging Pattern is to look to others to have your needs met, rather than developing your own internal capacities.
When you're in the Merging Pattern, connection to others feels like the key to survival. In pattern, you'll likely find that you're quite talkative and focused on keeping everyone around you happy.
The results are in!
So what does this really mean?
The Merging Pattern isn't a personality type like the Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. Rather, it describes the safety strategies you immediately go to when you start to feel overwhelmed. It doesn't describe who you are, but rather what is blocking who you are.
The inner journey takes time and effort, but once you know where you're going, it will be much easier. Without a map, you may have been running in circles for years. But with this map, you can finally find your way home.
Fortunately, there is a map to the Merging Pattern that shows both how you got stuck in this pattern, and how you can break free and return to your true self.
- You feel empty when you're not connected with someone else.
- You fear being alone, rejected, or abandoned.
- You struggle to directly ask others for the things you need to feel loved.
- You work hard to try to keep everyone around you happy.
- You are quite talkative and touchy-feely.
- You might find yourself playing the victim or playing the rescuer.
- You wonder if others like you or what they're thinking about you.
- Your attention and thoughts tend to have a positive bias which might skew your perception of reality.
- You're quite trusting of others.
- You can be clingy with other people.
- You struggle to say no and set healthy and strong boundaries.
- heart-centered and radiate love energy
- aware of the emotional connections between people
- ensures everyone in a group is feeling included and happy
- very attuned to the feelings and needs of others
- good listener
- kind, supportive, and helpful
- enjoy bringing people together and creating community
- slow to anger and unlikely to judge others
- able to be present and enjoy the moment
The gifts of the Merging Pattern are the gifts of the heart: love, compassion, nurturance, and generosity.
Examples:
- the archetypal Good Mother
- Pollyanna in Pollyanna
- Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates
- Oprah Winfrey
As a child who adopted the merging defense, instead of feeling satisfied, something happened where your sequence likely became:
I need I ask something bad happens I feel worse
Many different circumstances might have led to your needs not being met in infancy. You mother might have been ill, exhausted, overwhelmed, too busy, had difficulty producing milk, or ignored your cries for milk and only fed you only on a schedule.
When your needs were not fully satisfied in infancy, your nervous system could not fully relax. Instead of a confident expectation that your needs would be met, you developed an anxious expectation that you would be left empty and wanting.
You may have also developed an additional layer of defense where rather than denying your own needs, you started to project your needs on others and you became the ultimate giver. Giving to others helped you feel big and strong, instead of small and needy. You subconsciously shifted from rescuee to rescuer.
As a certified Master Coach, I took a deep dive into personality patterns. They're pretty fascinating, right?! I really wanted to help other moms learn how to identify their patterns, recognize when they're acting in pattern, and heal their patterns so they can parent and live as their true and authentic selves.
Before understanding my pattern, I was often overwhelmed, and my inner critic kept piling on the mom guilt. I couldn't figure out why seemingly "little" things would send me over the edge and cause me to lose it. I didn't understand how my survival pattern was distorting my motherhood experience. I couldn't see that how I was viewing life and motherhood was filtered through the lens of my pattern.
Working with a coach and healing my own patterns changed my life! Learning how to get out of pattern and back to the present, gave me full access to all the help, resources, and maturity I'd worked to develop as an adult, and made me such a better mom and wife.
Hello there!
BEFORE WE GET TOO FAR INTO THIS...
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A few action steps:
The Merging Pattern is distorting your perceptions and your experiences. What you're upset about may not be nearly as bad as it looks through the filter of your Merging Pattern. And even if it is, you need to be able to see it clearly to find the best way to respond. Remember, following a distorted map will not take you where you want to go!
Whenever you realize you've gone into the Merging Pattern, your first job is to get yourself out of the pattern and back to being present. When you get out of the Merging Pattern and back to the present, you will once again have access to all the help, resources, and maturity that you have worked so hard to develop. Once you are back in the present, you will be able to find the best way to respond to any situation.
The healing work of the Merging Pattern is to learn how to truly meet your own needs instead of being stuck in the belief that you must get what you need from others. Because the Merging Pattern starts at such a young age, you'll need help and guidance to learn the skills that you missed and complete the tasks of this age.
To heal, you need a warm, loving connection to others who support you in developing your own capacities by gently directing your attention back to your own strengths and abilities. You need to learn how to reference yourself so you can measure what you have and what you need and ask for it directly. In order to do all this, you need to be held in an unwavering love. Your patterned habit is to reference others for guidance, so you need someone to repeatedly direct your attention back to your own needs and abilities. Great healing will be found in working with a coach who can measure your real abilities, help pace you, and have realistic confidence in you.
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We all have blindspots in our lives. That's one of the reasons why working with a coach is so powerful. Awareness is the foundation to all change. You can't intervene in a world you can't see.
Join me in the journey of understanding why you do the things you do. Let's work together to recognize when you're operating in a survival pattern that's distorting your motherhood experience.
I can teach you how to get out of pattern and heal your core wounds so you can get back to the present - back to your true self - where you're able to parent and live with full access to all the help, resources, and maturity you've worked so hard to develop.
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