Reacting versus Responding – Pattern Matching

The context for these videos

Each post in this short series is from Alec’s weekly livestream to the Facebook group Finding the Balance with Anxiety Freedom Cards. Each week I focus upon one of our innate resources or needs as depicted in the Anxiety Freedom Cards. And the reason I’m doing this is to show you how you too can live a life free from anxiety and stress.

Please let me know what you think by scrolling to the bottom and commenting below!

Below is a direct transcript from the video shown above.

Well, hello and welcome to another of Alec’s Tuesday Two o’clock Topics on this Tuesday, the 16th of February, 2021. It’s great to be back with you. The subject for today is, it’s the second week. It’s the continuation of the topic Pattern Matching. One of the most kind of interesting, I think I’m one of the most profound of our innate resources and yet also one of the ones that requires a little bit of thinking about, or a little bit of experience to really get. But when you get it, and when you understand how important it is to the way that our brains function, then it can have really significant positive effects on our understanding, not only of ourselves, but the world that we live in as well.

So this is the card it’s number four and the Anxiety Freedom Cards series – Pattern Matching. I talked about it a little bit last time. And if you missed last week’s Tuesday topic, then I urge you to have a look earlier in the Facebook group, because these videos are posted both in the “Finding the Balance with Anxiety Freedom Cards” Facebook group, and also the, in the in8 membership Facebook group. And actually, I also post them on my blog, which you can access at in8.uk.com/blog. So if you’ve missed the earlier ones, I do recommend that you go back and have a look if this is a topic that interests you at all.

So if you are watching this live and I can see that, I think it CG is. Good afternoon, CG, lovely to have you with us. Presume you will pattern match to the guitar and skateboard hope you’re well, indeed, that’s how I know it’s CG because streamyard doesn’t unfortunately tell me who the Facebook users are. So the comments that you post do come through eventually, but they’re quite often anonymous. And that’s why sometimes I switch backwards and forwards between the streamyard screen, which is what I’m watching now and the Facebook group, where the comments are fully labeled with who sends them. But please do comment. So thank you CG for setting the trend. Anyone else who’s watching this either live or on replay, please let me know what you think of this topic. I’d love to get into a discussion about how it works and also to answer any questions that you might have.

So as I go through discussing what pattern matching means to me and how I feel, it’s a really important part of understanding our responses to stress and anxiety. If you have any questions or if you, if you struggle to relate it to your own experiences, let me know, give me an opportunity to, to share what I’ve learned about it. And also I’m interested to know what you’ve learned about it over the years. Because I think it’s something that everyone’s familiar with. Even if we don’t necessarily call it pattern matching. There are many phrases that relate to pattern matching the, the way that the human givens college describe it in their formal training of psychotherapists is they call it our innate ability to know that is to understand the world unconsciously through metaphorical pattern matching. So it’s a bit of a self defense. It’s a recursive definition, isn’t it? And that I’m not too happy with that because you can’t define pattern matching in terms of pattern matching really.

But another way of thinking of it is associative thinking, of labeling of our ability to recognise something, to re-cognise it. And last time I invited people to watch the video. This time I’ve posted in the comments below this video in the Facebook group, the pattern matching worksheet, which I welcome you to download, to have a look at, to fill in for your own benefit, if that seems appropriate. And also feel free to share it. If you find it useful to work with your clients or in your own workshops, then please go ahead. We don’t try to control the copyright thing too much, and we want to get these ideas out there because we know that they’re transformative. We want to help you and the people you work with live a life that is relatively free of stress and anxiety. Now we’re not going to ever stamp it all out. Stress and anxiety is there for a reason, to orient us to what needs to, what action we need to take, but please share. Please feel free to use these resources in any way that you feel can be useful and let us know how you get on as well.

My phone is ringing on my computer, which disturbs me, but I’m going to ignore it completely. So there we go. A good way of explaining pattern matching is to, always through story. If I went to a re a supermarket, imagine that I, I go to my local Tescos and I discover a new fruit and I taste it. And it’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s like, Oh my goodness, what is this? What is this fruit? And what’s the first thing you’re going to ask me about if you’re, if you were interested in my experience and it, and this, you know, gosh, I’ve never seen one of those before and it tastes absolutely wonderful. You’re probably gonna say, what’s it like? And I might say, well, it’s sort of tastes of peaches, but it looks like a, a Gherkin or something crazy. And you would only be able to understand the, my description of it in terms of what you already know. So, you know, if I say it’s, it’s, it’s green and furry, not that gherkins are particularly fury. But bear with me. You going to relate internally to what does green and fury mean to you. That’s a pattern matching process. If I say it tastes like strawberries or peaches or something, and you’re going to think, Oh, what do they taste like? The only way you can ever really know it is to experience it firsthand yourself. But if I was to describe it to you, you, I would might be able to give you some hints, some patterns that give you enough familiarity so that the next time you’re in the supermarket and you see this crazy new thing. Wow, that’s the thing that Alec was talking about. I’ll try and I’ll give it a taste.

And so the way that you encourage a client to access this resource, if you want to get them to use this amazing ability that we all have to make sense of the world through pattern recognition, essentially you ask them, What’s it like? What’s that thing like? That’s an invitation to focus on the pattern matching aspect of our brains. But as I, as you may know, the, our conscious processing ability has a far narrower bandwidth, it doesn’t do so much work, as our unconscious processing ability. They think the ratio is somewhere between half a million to a million times more processing going on in our subconscious than there is in our conscious awareness.

So pattern matching can be conscious, but it also, most of the time it’s a largely unconscious process. And the way that we know that it’s there, that there is a pattern match kind of mechanism happening in the background is, and the way that we know it’s aware, that it’s there, if it’s significant is that we experience emotion, which is often unexpected. And so it’s an unconscious process and it’s highly emotional and it’s automatic. We don’t choose it. So if we find ourselves feeling like our buttons are pressed by some event, maybe somebody says an unkind word to us, and we find ourselves really that’s really pushed my buttons. You can bet your life, that pattern matching is going on in the background. There is some experience earlier in life that you’ve had that primes you, makes you more sensitive to that particular word, that particular phrase, that particular comment that’s made to you. And so for that reason, it’s really useful to examine our own patterns and to become familiar with our buttons, not to try and remove them all because we’re human. And we all have a whole collection of experiences and learnings and patterns that we’ve become familiar with throughout the entirety of our life.

So it’s sometimes enough just to examine them dispassionately, unemotionally, and to recognise them for what they are. And this is the theme of the worksheet, if you like, for today. I’m going to use some other ways of illustrating pattern matching, just cause I think it’s interesting. So I’m going to do a, screen-share here of an image you may have seen before. It may be new to you, but most people when they’re shown this image, the first time they’ve seen it, will see one of two things. Most people, some people see two things at the same time. Let me just describe what these two different ways of perceiving this image are. The first is to say that I can’t point on this. I don’t think you’ll see me with, with the cursor, but there is a horizontal line about halfway up the screen slightly below halfway up the screen, in the middle. Now that could be seen as the lips of an old woman an old witchy looking woman. So she’s wearing a bonnet. She’s looking down, she’s got a slightly crooked nose with a pimple on it. Her eye is detailed and she’s looking to the left. She has thin lips, which is that line in the middle. And you can see the, the neck line of her, of her dress. And she’s got wispy hair, which is to the you’re seeing her face side on. And then the other way of looking at this image is to see that line that I talked about as being her lips has actually a necklace on the neck of a young woman who is looking again to the left, but she’s looking away from us. And the eye that was the eye of the old witch is now the ear of the young woman and the pimple that was on the old witch’s nose is the young woman’s button nose, just visible. And she’s looking away and she’s wearing the same bonnet, but it’s a completely different image. And what was the nose of the old hag is the chin of the young woman.

So if you can see one of them, then congratulations, try and see it the other way. Once you, once it’s been pointed out, and I really wish I could point at the image, I’m sorry, I didn’t rehearse that first, but once you can see the image one way, then you can stand back and recondition yourself. I don’t know how else to say it.

And then see it the other way. And let me know in the comments, if you can see this. And so I saw the second, is it like Good afternoon from Portsmouth. Ah, that’s nice to see, I don’t know who lives in Portsmouth. Let me just go to Facebook and see if I can, I can find out. Yeah, it is. And just going to the Facebook page where this is live streaming at the moment, and it’s, it’s Caroline. So we’ve got Carolyn and Caroline, welcome both. Thank you for commenting. I really, it really helps me to know that people are watching. And they’re thinking about what I’m saying. If you have any questions about pattern matching,

this is a really great opportunity because I make these things fairly open-ended and I really happy to focus on what’s interesting to you rather than just what I think is interesting, because what I think is interesting is often quite bizarre. Okay. And that’s enough of a, of those two images. So the young woman looking away and the old witch looking down and to the left.

That’s, the point about this is that once we have a pattern for make, for a percept, for perception, sorry, I’m struggling over my words here. Once we have a way of looking at something and recognising it in one way, sometimes it’s very difficult to see it in the other way, even though both have, have some reality. And what we see depends on, in a sense what we project out, you know, if we’re expecting to see a young woman, and that’s what we’re going to see much more likely than if we’re expecting to see our witch, and that illustrates that problem.

I’ve got another way of illustrating it here, have a look at this. So this is a plastic image of Einstein. I don’t know whether the lighting’s good enough to be able to see it, but I hope you can see that this is not that accurate, but it is recognisably Einstein. Okay. And you can see that it’s probably the lighting is a little bit better there. And there’s something very odd about this image. And it’s not an image. It’s a molding. So it’s a plaque, it’s made of plastic and it’s 3D relief image of Einstein’s face.

And what happens is if I turn it in the light, you’ll see something quite odd happen and turn it on way and then magically, Oh my goodness, what happened? You start to see that actually what you were looking at was the inside of the face, not the outside. Let’s do that again. And as the inside of the face, but we are so conditioned to seeing faces in 3D relief with the nose pointing out at the front. That even when I explain to you that this is, you’re looking inside, until I actually make it completely obvious, our brains can’t comprehend it. Even though we know what’s going on, do you get that? Do you see it? Does it freak you out? Like it freaks me out? Or am I the only one, let me know in the comments?

So this is a really good way of demonstrating pattern matching. You know, that this is inside. I can’t show it in my hand, but actually you can’t see it that way until I make it really clear that that is in the side. I’ve got my finger inside the plastic mold. I put it like this. It looks like I’m touching his nose pointing out. So we’ve got a “wow”. Good, perfect. That’s enough. I, all I need is a wow every now and then. Even when we know that pattern matching is going on, sometimes it’s really hard to see beyond it to actually, to recondition ourselves, to see what’s really there.

So if we have a pattern that let’s say, take a phobia that going in a lift, traveling an airplane, being in an enclosed space, if that’s a frightening experience for us, even when we know there is no threat, it is incredibly hard sometimes to re-pattern that experience, to interpret the sensory data in a different way. You can tell somebody, Hey, it’s safe to be in a lift. It’s safe to be an airplane, relatively.

It doesn’t make it blind of difference. Pattern matching can be incredibly convincing. It’s the way we perceive the world after all. So what we think is true, depends on our patterns, depends on our pattern recognition. We see somebody’s face, somebody that we know well, we recognise it. Quite often it is just the face that, if there’s no words spoken, that conviction is our sense of reality, in a sense, in, in a, in a very real sense. Reality is determined by the patterns that we have within us. And many of these patterns when we begin life are innate. We are, we have certain genetic templates that help us to make sense of various things. When we’re a baby, even without any conscious rational thought, we still have pattern matching. We, we know what light and dark is. We know what a nipple is. And we know what, we know that what nutrition is. We have an innate anticipation of those things, but when those patterns get formed from negative experiences, especially scary experiences, they can be a fundamental part of our conditioning. So that it’s very hard for us to overcome them and things like, Oh, words are failing me as usual. I don’t mean adverse childhood responses. I mean, attachment theory, you know, the patterns that are formed when we are very young by our primary carer, the relationship we have, whether it’s one based on trust and love or it’s chaotic, or it’s based on fear, they have massive, massive effects on the way that we relate, not only to other people as we grow up, but also to our sense of identity ourselves.

So pattern matching – I can’t get over how important it is. So let’s look at the worksheet and I’m going to do another screen-share for a moment and see if I can find it. Sorry, I have to stop that and click this button, please bear with me. And while I find the screen share, What am I looking for? The worksheet, worksheet. There it is. Sorry. So here’s the worksheet, which is in the comment below this video. So do feel free to have a look at it, download it, print it out, save it, use it for your own stuff. In this worksheet. What I’d like to guide you through is, is, and we’ve used this, I’ve scrolled, scrolling down just a little bit below the description, and I’m sorry, the words are a little bit small in the description, but there was quite a lot to say about pattern matching, but let’s move to the first box and talk about if you were using this with either with a client or during a workshop.

I’ll put my face at the side so you can see I’m still here. Okay. And the first invitation is to describe a situation where you have matched automatically to a pattern from the past. And I really invite you to do this exercise. To actually think, when is there a time when I’ve had a, kind of an automatic reaction to something that’s happened in the past, in the present situation, because that’s ultimately what pattern matching is all about. I’m not, I don’t expect people to share that insight. Just write it down on your worksheet or write in a notebook or something. Just reflect. When have you reacted rather than responded. When have you had your buttons pressed? When have you had an, a response that’s emotional, automatic and unconscious where the level of the response is maybe slightly out of scale to what actually happened as someone else might see it. And I think it’s really healthy thing to look at our buttons, to look at our triggers, to see what our sensitive spots are, because the more we become aware of them, the more control we have over them and the more fluid we can become in life.

This is why I think it’s a good idea to examine these things and to share them. And then the next question is how aware are you of your own triggers or patterns? Because some people live life with apparently no real awareness. They bounce from one experience to another reacting all the time and their lives can feel fairly chaotic. And I think that when we become aware of our triggers and our patterns, we tend to become calmer. We have less stress, less anxiety. That’s the reason I’m talking about this whole subject.

So have a think about how you would rate your own awareness of your own triggers and patterns. You know, are you somebody who’s never thought about this, or is this a new idea to you? Or is it something that you’d given a lot of thought and you’ve worked through your issues as it were, over 20 years or something. And then next box is to describe a situation, any situation in which you frequently respond automatically and negative to, and negatively to an external event. So, you know, I’m really saying, what are your buttons here? And I have a pattern which still struggle with, from time to time is I hate to be misunderstood. I think it comes from my childhood. I think it’s because I felt that my parents didn’t understand me. It’s not an unusual experience after all. I don’t blame them for it. I’ve come to terms with them, but I have a fear of being misunderstood and I, when people do misunderstand me, it irritates me, especially if I think I’ve been clear.

So we’ve, CG’s posted here and I hope you don’t mind me clicking on this to share it. For me, the smell of old spice negative. Okay. That, and a look. Yes. I was unaware a smell was triggering me. Don’t mind sharing, as it seemed to be silent, invisible, ethereal. Yes. Thank you for sharing that CG. I think smells are one of the most evocative patterns. There’s a certain smell that I think is the flower of the Ivy, or maybe it’s honeysuckle that I really don’t like, and I don’t know why I don’t like it. Many people don’t even notice it as a smell, but for me it smells, Ooh, just unpleasant. Can’t even put words to it. Cause it’s not like anything else I know. So yeah. Smell of old spice. Oh, I’m not going to ask you about that CG. But if I was working with you as a client, I’d be interested in exploring where does that come from? You know, what is your previous experience of Old Spice? I bet you know, and I don’t, we don’t need to go into that now, but this is the reason that pattern matching can be quite important and worth talking about with clients and in general.

So then we come to the last box other than the “any other thoughts” box and right at the bottom of the page says, what could you do over the next few days to change this? So this is just an invitation to think, well, if I have a dislike, for instance, of being misunderstood, I, it’s not a big problem to me. It’s not something I struggle with on a daily or even weekly basis, but I am aware of it. I’m sensitive to it. If I’m in a discussion with someone and I’m trying to be clear and I can be pedantic, let’s face it. I know that I have this sort of ability to be very pedantic and very straight laced, very kind of, well, that’s true. And that’s not true, a bit black and white, really. If people don’t get where I’m coming from. And I think I’ve said it clearly, my level of tolerance can be low. I admit it. You know, I would like to be more loving, more tolerant, more able to see someone else’s perspective. But if I think that’s an old hag and not the young woman and they can’t see it my way, then that’s one of my buttons.

Anyway, what are yours? If I wanted to do something about that, what would I do? Well, I would deliberately choose to expose myself to that pattern because it’s not such a bad one because it’s not too emotionally arousing. And I would look to someone who maybe I’ve had disagreements with in the past, and I’d want to have a discussion with them about it. And I’d just point out that, you know, I’m doing this to try and self-development, it’s trying to, I’m trying to kind of get to grips with my own demons in a way. But if they have something that they disagree with me about and we have enough rapport and enough trust between us to go there and to discuss it as you would, for instance, if you’re in a therapy situation, then that’s a great opportunity for doing something in the next couple of days that would help diffuse that pattern. So what would it be for you? Now obviously there are limits to what we can do in this lockdown situation, I am getting really fed up with my lockdown hair, But one of the first things I’m going to do, when we’re allowed is go and get my hair cut. I used to have long hair, but, and I’m done with this. So that’s the worksheet. Any questions at all about that?

I got a few people watching now, please, if you joined us after the start, know that you can watch the start of this on replay within a few minutes of this live broadcast ending. And it will be on my blog probably by tomorrow. And if you missed the Einstein picture and I really recommend you do watch it, cause I think it’s a stunning example, stunning, this demonstration of pattern matching at work. But also if you’ve got any questions and you joined us late, please use this opportunity to ask any questions, for any clarifications or any comments or observations that you have about the role that pattern matching plays in our life. I often use this card. If I’m, if I’m working with a client, I use it as a teaching tool, mostly. There are lots of ways of using it. But if I think about how I’ve generally used it, I, if I’ve got somebody who is suffering, I think I mentioned recently, I had a client recently who has anxiety in certain situations, and I’m not going to repeat the situations because I want to preserve anonymity, but I used this card because they were getting quite anxious when a certain thing happened and they knew it wasn’t really, they didn’t need to, but I think they’d had a panic attack before.

I can’t see the comment for the resource. Oh, that’s interesting. Right. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m just going to address that while it’s on the screen, because I, I think it will be the first comment under the video. Now, when you’ve got the, if you click on the comments button, I think you get the opportunity to see the most relevant, the most recent, or can’t remember how Facebook does it, but you may have to change the filter so that you see all the comments, because it will be the oldest one. It may not be on the screen right now. If you still can’t find it, put another comment in and I will send you an email if I have your email address. So yeah, I’m very happy for you to have the worksheet. Don’t put up with not just being able to see it. We can get it to you. So do let me know. And that’s why it’s so good to have these, this thing live so I can respond on the, on the fly as it were. So as you know, I can talk about pattern matching forever.

Cause I find it an absolutely fascinating subject. And I want to say one more thing about it. And then I’m going to move on and share a story with you, which is in some ways relevant to pattern matching. But the one thing I want to say is that all of the examples I’ve given, all of the demonstrations I’ve given are about perception pattern matching in the present moment. And that’s a very vital part of pattern matching. But when we look at the original definition of knowing something of our ability to know the world, then I think it’s really important to look at the role of narrative. Now, I know one or two of you watching this have heard me say this a million times, but the role of narrative is actually a pattern matching process.

When we know something, I don’t want to get too political or controversial, but whatever you think you know about Corona virus to take a subject of the day, what you know about it, unless you are a researcher who works in a lab with an electron microscope, let’s say. Most of what you know about it is through the stories you’ve been told through the narratives that are presented in whatever forms of media you consume, whether it’s on YouTube, whether it’s on mainstream media, whether it’s in newspapers or on the TV, or however you know about the world, however, you’re exposed to the world. However you take in your knowledge of what’s going on, whether it’s chats with the neighbors or with family members or through your own research or however it is, it’s all narrative. It’s all story. Now. I’m not saying that that makes it untrue. I’m just saying that we tend to think we know what we know, but when we really examine it, all we really know is what our senses are bringing in, in the here and now. And our experience of the past, of history, is through story and our anticipation of the future, our worries about what might happen tomorrow or next week, next year. And they’re also story. They’re stories we tell ourselves or that we’ve been exposed to.

And once you start to really get that the past and the future are accessed through narrative, through pattern matching, because the story is a pattern. Then you start to kind of, you start to develop an ability to see the world for what it is. I think. That might sound arrogant, but that’s my experience. I found it. Oh, that’s great. And so I just say, I found it under Alec’s notification saying he was going live, tapped on one comment. Brilliant. So glad you got it. Yeah. And if you have any other problems, let me know, but it’s story time. Cause I’ve gone on long enough today. Thank you for joining me.

And I always share a story because I think it helps us to make sense of the world. They are also stories that you can use if you work as a therapist, a mentor or a counsellor.

So are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. A mountain guide works in the mountains and he helps people find the paths through the mountains and he loves his work and he loves the mountains. And he’s sitting on a rock one day because he has no clients, he has no one to guide. And he’s just marveling at the beauty of the valleys below the clouds that are below him. The impressive mountain peaks that are in the distance, the crisp cold air and the sunlight and the shadows and the whole experience of being high up in the mountains. He just loves it.

And he’s sitting there enjoying the scenery, enjoying his sense of being alive, enjoying his breath. Let’s say that. And a traveler appears from out of the distance, where winding his way up the mountain path bit by bit towards him. And when the traveler gets to him and he sort of takes a pause to get his breath and exchange pleasantries and say hello. And he says, tell me, it looks like you’re familiar with this place. This is the traveler speaking to the guide. And he says, tell me, what’s the next village in the next valley like? you know, I’ve been traveling for some days and I’ve had various experiences, but I’m really interested to know what are the people like? Are they friendly?

So the guide says to him, well, tell me the valley that you’ve come from, the village that was down there and you’re where you stayed last night. What was that like? And he said, Oh, I was a terrible experience. I was cheated. I was robbed. And that’s why I’m moving on. I really had a horrible experience that people just treated me with

great distrust and I felt abused and managed to get away. And that’s why I’m traveling to the next valley. And the guide says, well, I’m sorry to tell you that I think you’ll find that the next village is pretty much the same, really, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s the way it goes. So anyway, the traveler,

thanks him for his, for his knowledge, for his advice and wishes him good day and carries on, on his path over the mountain, pass to the next village. And the guide sits there for a few more hours taking in the view, focusing on his breathing. And I’ve just added that to the story. I’d love to be in the mountains. I’d love to be there now, and seeing the scenery and, and the distance and the light and the clouds and the whole wonderful experience of being in the mountains.

And another traveler appears in the distance working his way up the path, winding his way towards him. And just as before this traveler eventually arrives and he decides to take a breath and take a space and get his breath back. And we asked the guide after they’ve exchanged a few, pleasantries. Tell me, what’s the next village like in the next valley, I’m really interested to know. I’ve been down there and the old, you know, and the last valley and my experience of this mountain range is that every valley has its own culture, its own its own way of being, its own its own assumptions and its own level of hospitality. What’s it like in the next valley?

And the guide says, well, gives the same response, he says: Well, what was the last, tell me, what was your experience of the previous village? And he said, Oh, it was wonderful. So many friendly people. They shared their meals with me. They share laughter. They put me up for free. They wouldn’t even accept any money from me. I had a really amazing time. In fact, I was very reluctant to leave and yeah, just a really fantastically positive experience.

And the guide says to him, well, I think the good news for you is that you’ll feel, find that the next village is pretty much the same, really.

So that’s the end of the story. It ends quite abruptly. I hope you get it. We get what we expect to see so much of the time we get what we expect to see. Freaky isn’t it?

Anyway. Thank you very much for watching. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments. Next week we move on to the new topic and the topic will be movement. And I’ve got lots to say about movement. Probably not as much as pattern-matching, but still lots to say. I look forward to joining you again in a week’s time for another of Alec’s Tuesday Two o’clock Topics. In the meantime, whatever you’re doing, don’t forget to keep breathing. Thank you. And goodbye.

Here is a link to the worksheet:
>> Pattern Matching Worksheet

Please let me know what you think by commenting below!
Thanks, Alec