In Awakening From Belief Ken explains that reactive patterns always start with an emotional core—something we are unwilling to feel. They exists to make sure attention cannot land on the emotional core for more than an instant. Instead, attention is diverted into thoughts, impulses, and behaviours that feel necessary and justified. Once activated, reactive patterns begin producing conditions that perpetuate themselves. You don’t see the emotional core; you see the world distorted through the pattern. He stresses that reactive patterns always feel like “me,” appearing as personal truths. A few examples:
Everyone is judging me. If the emotional core is shame, even neutral expressions can feel sharply evaluative. The sense of being criticised arises not from others but from the fear of being exposed.
No one ever supports me. If the emotional core is abandonment, you may not register support when it’s offered. The pattern filters out moments of connection, leaving only the sense of being alone.
This is going to fall apart. If the emotional core is fear, you may find yourself scanning for signs of danger or instability. Even small changes can feel like major threats.
I need to fix this immediately. If the emotional core is helplessness, the urgency of a situation may become exaggerated. Everything feels like an emergency.
Ken notes that the emotional core of a pattern is always simple—fear, shame, abandonment, loss, inadequacy—but the patterns around the core can be enormously complex and multi-layered. They can include emotions, behaviours, and also physical tensions, automatic impulses, habitual stories, identity structures, perceptual distortions, and worldviews. He points out that people often try to work with the complexity—analysing, fixing, and improving—instead of addressing the core.
I've noticed that a reactive pattern can produce many different distortions, and that it can take years, decades, to develop enough capacity in attention to fully experience a heavily sealed-off emotional core. Life events trigger reactions that reveal more and more layers. Over time I’ve come to see that each layer functions as a kind of protective shell, formed around something I once didn’t have the capacity to feel. As capacity grows, life exposes the next layer. There’s something strangely trustworthy about this process, but it's not smooth or predictable, and when a new layer shows up and asks to be met, it can feel explosive in its immediacy—abrupt and destabilising.
In the following passage, Ken offers four reliable ways to recognise reactive patterns, and later on in the session he talks about the particular relevance of these for core patterns that are heavily protected from awareness:
Ken: Now, the first thing is to recognize reactive pattern. And we’ve talked about various ways to do that. The main one is when what you experience as result is consistently different from your intention, that usually indicates that there’s a reactive pattern operating somewhere in the mix. But there are other ways. One of my favorites is: What you don’t notice; what you don’t question; what you can’t laugh about.
Student: Once more, Ken.
Ken: What you don’t notice; what you don’t question; what you don’t laugh about. Queen Victoria’s: “We are not amused.” [Laughter]
Student: I think she had a very strong identity.
Ken: Only just a little. So, those are very reliable. Now, of course, what we don’t notice, you’re going to depend on somebody else, your teacher or friend, your spouse, to point out to you. And that’s very helpful. But you can observe what you don’t question. This is where your beliefs are, and your assumptions about life …
Related posts:
Recognising Reactivity in Real Time – Part 1
Every Reactive Pattern Has Two Poles