What are your Isolation Spirals?
“Triggers” don’t seem to go away, do they? No matter what you seem to do, they just keep coming back.
The same kinds of things hurt you, frustrate you, annoy you, worry you, or stress you over and over again.
And even when you learn to manage them, it almost seems like they keep getting worse at the same exact rate that you get better at managing them “effectively”.
Spoiler alert: you’re on an Isolation Spiral.
To be fair… everyone is on an isolation spiral of some kind. Let’s back up to the real problem first.
Isolation is our default setting in the broken world we inhabit. Pain is everywhere - and worst of all, relational pain is everywhere. We are completely interdependent in this world, and we need safe and intimate relationships to function - people we trust to love us completely and help us become the best versions of ourselves.
But that kind of relationship is NOT the default setting. Even our relationships are fraught with conflict, tension, miscommunication, and sometimes betrayal. We have all trusted and been hurt in return - and that pain doesn’t just go away. We remember it in the deepest corners of our hearts.
Because we live with this painful reality our whole lives, we become experts at protecting ourselves from pain and vulnerability. We find unconscious ways to keep people from hurting us in the ways we fear they could. They help us feel momentarily normal.
That’s why our brains have created ongoing cravings and pathways for them - that’s why they become easier and easier, stronger and stronger. That’s how they become our go-to coping mechanisms. We never do anything that doesn’t do something FOR us - and avoiding pain is one of the primary goals our brains are trying to accomplish in most settings.
(the foundation for these ideas is part of the Done with Stuck Roadmap - how we achieve real and lasting change with the help of the bible, brain science, and practical recovery tools)
Every one of our coping mechanisms, each and every way that we protect ourselves from the threat of relational pain, eventually becomes an isolation spiral.
Our coping mechanisms are unconscious protection from others getting to our vulnerable place - the place where we can be wounded. They push us away from people because people are the ones who could hurt us.
They make us feel momentary relief, a little artificial hit of dopamine to ease the pain. But they have unintended long-term effects. They create distance from the people that we need to be close to - the people that we need to help us heal.
And then that pain of loneliness catches up, and my heart is even more tender than before. So I numb more pain.
Then I’m more isolated.
Then more pain.
More numbing.
More isolation.
Isolation Spirals pick up more and more steam, moving faster and faster, until we choose to break them.
Here’s where we often go wrong - because usually, we try to stop coping in unhealthy ways. We try to ease our pain in an acceptable way instead of with anger, porn, binge-eating, overworking, or whatever else. We instead choose arts and crafts, working out, cutting loose someone who annoys me, or something else “acceptable”.
But swapping out the coping mechanism will never break the isolation spiral. It will just isolate you in a new way. And the behavior isn’t the real problem: the isolation is the problem.
We only break free when we accept vulnerability and move toward the people who could hurt us.
• • • • • • • • • •
In this series of posts, we’re going to talk through some of the most commonly misunderstood Isolation Spirals and think about the unexpected ways they isolate us and actually make our issues worse.
For each one, and for all of our behaviors, we’ll ask the same questions:
What am I GETTING from this behavior? What pain am I killing, memory or thought am I avoiding, or fear am I running from?
How exactly does this isolate me, creating distance between me and the people I should be close to? What effect does this have on other people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?
What would breaking the spiral look like? What is the courageous, vulnerable risk that could break my isolation?
