August 9, 2021
Patterns are immensely useful in life. In my opinion, they’re way underrated.
Patterns are more than just shapes and designs you find on decorations, clothing, and furniture. Patterns are also events and behaviors that occur throughout all areas of life. They are useful in connecting dots and learning things about yourself and the way the world objectively works.
Patterns are how we learn things at a very young age. When learning colors, animals, or letters of the alphabet, most early attempts to refer to these things correctly are mere guesses. When guessed correctly, the parent or teacher celebrates and gives a positive reaction. The child notices a pattern: he or she gets a positive reaction when getting the correct answer. The child repeats this until the information is learned.
Patterns continue to serve you as you grow older. They allow you to zoom out and notice a long history of cause-and-effect relationships. Here’s a simple example:
Say you missed the deadline to pay your credit card bill, resulting in a penalty charge. You don’t like that, so you decide to contemplate the cause. You determine that you missed the due date because you didn’t write it down on your calendar.
You’ve now identified the cause of the effect. So you take out your calendar and write down the credit card bill’s due dates for the rest of the year. By identifying the cause and taking an action to fix it, you have now produced a better effect and improved your life. You are no longer late paying your credit card bill.
Then, one week later, you miss a deadline on a project at work, resulting in your boss sending you an angry email. You don’t like that so you decide to find the cause. You missed the deadline because you didn’t mark down the deadline on your work schedule. You’ve identified the cause to the effect.
But hang on. That’s not all. At this point, you’ve also recognized a pattern: you have a bad habit of not marking down important dates in your life.
Marking your calendar with an entire year’s worth of credit card bill due dates is a good thing, but it didn’t help you when it came to your work project’s deadline. But once you become aware of the pattern, then you can pause and take an overarching look at your life and identify all other areas where your failure to mark down important dates is causing you problems. Now, not only do you no longer miss credit card payments or work deadlines, you’ve also prevented yourself from missing your kid’s upcoming appointments, forgetting your wedding anniversary, and you’ve finally memorized your mother-in-law’s birthday.
Patterns also likely helped you during your faith deconstruction and deconversion from religion. How?
Because perhaps you attended a megachurch where the head pastor got busted for having an affair with his secretary. Naturally that bothered you since he spent many a sermon preaching to you about how you shouldn’t have sex outside of marriage.
So you move to the next megachurch. A year later, that head pastor gets caught banging the choir director. Now you notice a pattern: pastors in general don’t really do what they’re preaching.
Here’s another common example of patterns in faith deconstruction—one that happened to me. One day you’re reading the Bible and notice an inconsistency. You bring it up to your pastor who explains it away. His explanation is shaky, but you have faith. The next week, you notice another inconsistency. You bring this one up to your pastor and receive another shaky explanation.
Eventually, you notice a pattern: the Bible is really inconsistent, despite apparently being the inerrant, inspired word of God. Recognizing this pattern then leads you to studying why the Bible is so inconsistent, which ultimately leads to your deconversion.
When you go to therapy, one of the most common goals is to point out patterns of behavior that you don’t yet see for the purposes of improving your life.
- “Your relationships don’t work because you keep dating women who are similar to your mother. Do you see the pattern?”
- “You got fired from your last three jobs because you couldn’t be flexible with your team and you insisted everyone do things your way. Do you see the pattern?”
- “You never succeed with your artistic endeavors because you subconsciously feel you don’t deserve the recognition and success, so you self-sabotage. Do you see the pattern?”
I think by now I’ve made my point clear: patterns are very useful things in our lives. Patterns are your friend. But why am I discussing all this?
Because despite their usefulness, I often see people in online faith deconstruction communities shitting on patterns.
It usually happens in a post or comment that reads something like this: “Hey, so I haven’t considered myself a Christian for a couple of years now. I no longer believe in God or miracles. But… there’s been some weird things happening to me lately. I keep seeing repeating numbers everywhere, usually 11:11 on the clock every single day. I’ll think about someone, and they’ll call or text later that day. And on days when I’m really missing my grandpa who died last year, I’ll later spot a hummingbird nearby, and that was his nickname for me when I was a kid. And there’s just been a bunch of other strange coincidences popping up in my life lately. Has anyone else noticed things like this happening after leaving Christianity?”
Almost without exception, at least one fellow Deconverted Man jumps in with the usual broad dismissal: “Your brain is playing tricks on you. These patterns are meaningless and you’re trying to find meaning that isn’t really there.”
Now hang on. Why?
As I laid out above, an individual develops by deriving meaning from patterns they recognize (learning) and lives their entire life in accordance to the information they’ve gleaned from recognized patterns in the past, including patterns that helped them deconstruct their faith and leave their oppressive religion.
So why, all of a sudden, are patterns not to be trusted?
Hold space for the patterns you identify in your life, even if you haven’t yet deciphered their meaning. Just because you haven’t yet deciphered the meaning does not mean your brain is simply playing tricks on you. Embrace your curiosity and do some research. Ask around (but be discerning with the responses). In my experience, patterns exist for a reason and they usually point to some nugget of Truth that you haven’t yet fully recognized. As with all other patterns, this new information will benefit you and help you live a better, more aligned life.
As a side note, some of the things I mentioned in the example comment above are patterns that I experienced personally. A moderate amount of internet sleuthing will reveal to you that yes, tons of other people experience similar patterns and there are, in fact, plenty of proposed meanings for them. They do lean more into the spiritual side of things, which is why I think recently-Deconverted Men are so quick to say people’s brains are playing tricks on them. Because after deconverting from religion, they generally refuse to acknowledge anything spiritual. This is the case even though spirituality has nothing to do with religion, but that’s an article for another time.
I understand this point of view because I once held it. But some patterns can only continue for so long before I need to take a time out, ask why, and open my mind to some possibilities.