Pema Chödrön has an excellent book, Don’t Bite the Hook, about working to not react to triggers and attachments. Which is a useful and powerful practice to develop.
In many cases, you’re likely living with hooks you’ve already swallowed. At some point in your past, you were chastised, criticized, and/or blamed for things in a manner that was painful and traumatic.
The part of you that didn’t like that feeling learned a lesson. You now look for anything that might be about to get you like that again, and unconsciously work to escape. You’re stuck on the hook.
The truth is that hook you swallowed back then is harming you again and again now.
And there’s no truth behind the hook in the first place. So biting it gets you nothing but hooked.
Reactions
Everyone, even the best parents, react to their children out of impatience, stress, and their own past trauma at times. Teachers and bosses do it as well.
Problem is, when you’re feeling the lash of that reaction, you don’t have the insight and experience to recognize that it’s about them, not you.
So you swallow the hook and internalize that shame, that failure, that sense of “not being good enough.”
Once it’s inside you, it digs in. Just like a fish with a hook, it becomes part of you, and your brain believes unconsciously that it belongs there. And that removing it could be fatal. The voice in your head tells you to keep the hook.
That’s why sometimes you realize that you’re beating yourself up over something that was never fair or true, but you can’t seem to stop. Because the hook is trying to protect itself, not you.
Find someone to help you remove the hook you swallowed that you don’t deserve.
You can do this. I can help.