Have you ever had the feeling that your life isn't quite your own? Somehow things don't feel quite right, like you're an actor playing a part that you didn’t completely choose. Or perhaps you find yourself engaging in behaviors that don't seem to make rational sense or don’t contribute to your quality of life. Perhaps you notice some degree of self-sabotage and can't seem to find, or maintain, a different way of going about things? Living from a reactive vow is one way these experiences come about.

Vows are often associated with conscious and momentous decisions. They are meant to set a course for your life. Reactive vows carry the same course-setting power, but are usually made in a moment (or a series of moments) of intense reactivity and then buried in the unconscious. They are often made in response to a repetitive situation in which you are experiencing pain or watching others experience pain. Reactive vows typically revolve around a core value/universal need and dictate particular behaviors to engage in or completely avoid.

For example, if you grew up with the knowledge that your father was having affairs and experienced all the havoc and pain that came with that, you might have made a reactive vow like this: "I will never put my family through this. I will always be loyal to my partner." OR "I will never fully trust a partner and will always stay vigilant."  

You can imagine how reactive vows like these can play out in ways that create a whole new kind of difficulty. In the first example, the reactive loyalty vow could result in the impulse to keep everything outwardly harmonious by not communicating unmet needs in the relationship, unconsciously sabotaging the possibility of a truly intimate and trusting relationship and making it more vulnerable to disconnection and even affairs. In the second example, the reactive vow to stay vigilant would keep you from recognizing a partner who is worthy of trust and similarly block the building of intimate relationships.

Reactive vows can also flip-flop from one polar extreme to another. Let's say you grow up in a chaotic home in which your parents’ lives are run by addiction and impulsive decisions. You make a reactive vow to live a life that is never directed by impulses and the desire to escape through chemicals. You create a highly structured and disciplined life in an attempt to meet needs for integrity, safety and stability. This reactive vow, however, blocks connections to your authentic needs and values and pushes you to live from its idea of  how you should be. Living from a set of “shoulds” eventually leads to health problems, depression, chronic anger, and poor decision making— a lack of thriving.  

Because it is our fundamental human mandate to be fully who we are in harmony with other living beings, unmet needs that are systematically excluded by decisions made from a reactive vow won't stay underground forever. When some pillar of the life that arose from the reactive vow breaks— say you lose the job you dedicated yourself to for years, or find yourself in a conflictive divorce procedure after years of what seemed like a stable marriage— such an event can catapult you to the other pole of your reactive vow. Because the unmet needs have been repressed and possibly shamed for so long, your psyche will have to do a lot of work to justify the change. Your psyche wants to preserve your sense of self, so it may resort to blaming others. You may find yourself criticizing the life you led and the people in it. In the most extreme scenario, the previously cherished values will be shunned and the new values will receive all your focus. Eventually, you will again find yourself in a situation in which you are preventing yourself from meeting important needs (the ones you prioritized for so long and then shunned) and again experience a life out of balance. 

The first step out of this vicious cycle and towards a more thriving and authentic life is becoming aware of these reactive vows and how they impact your choices in life.

So, if these reactive vows are unconscious, how do you find them? Behaviors that arise from reactive vows usually have one or more of these characteristics:

• Rigid, black and white thinking

• Disconnect or dissociation from your own experience and from others

• Urgency and anxiety when a particular avenue of behavior is blocked

• Righteousness

• Desperation: a willingness to do certain things at a high cost

• Flat emotionality or disconnect from emotions and feelings

• Defensiveness around anything relating to the reactive vow and the decisions you have made because of it

• Consistently scoffing at or ignoring specific needs in relation to oneself or others

• Impulsive or secretive behaviors that are attempting to meet the repressed needs

Once you start uncovering a reactive vow, an integration and healing process is needed. At the very least, this involves telling your story and receiving empathy for the situation in which the reactive vow was made and allowing space to grieve the unmet needs and hurt for you and others in that situation.

As you are able to integrate and accept all your needs and the experiences that go along with them in both the past and the present, you may want to make conscious non-reactive vows: vows that are in alignment with honoring all of you, as well as the living beings around you, and support an experience of authentic thriving. Such vows are living, dynamic entities that evolve and change as you do.

Practice

For now, set the intention to become aware of your reactive vows. The next time you are engaged in your contemplative practice, ask yourself to become aware of your reactive vows and wait quietly. If you continue to ask and wait quietly, your subconscious will eventually offer up the information.

 Adding to this, you can use the bulleted list above to direct your attention to parts of your life in which a reactive vow might be in the driver’s seat. Besides observing your behavior, you could also use a feelings and needs list to note which universal needs are being consistently met and which are consistently remaining unmet through your current lifestyle and then explore whether there may be a reactive vow at work behind your choices.

 As always, do these exercises when you can bring a gentle and compassionate attitude towards your experience as you reflect. If this feels too challenging, you could ask an empathetic other to accompany you while you reflect.