As a child, did you ever play with the water as it swirled in the vortex going down the drain? I used to stick my finger in it. At first, I was afraid of it, because I thought it might suck me down the drain too, but after a bit I liked watching the soap suds get picked up in its current, broken apart and dragged away.

Then I would put other stuff in there to see it go down the drain too. I think we lost some things that caused my parents consternation that way.

Tornados look like the water swirling in the drain. On a larger scale, with a distant view from the space station, so do hurricanes. These are familiar patterns that seem to get picked up and repeated from one level of physics to another.

People in my profession as a psychologist often look for patterns of behaviour. When we see recurring patterns, it gets our attention. Sometimes we notice these patterns as they seem to become replicated in families, for instance, passed on from one generation to the next. Someone comes for counselling because they have a problem blowing up and raging all over everyone, and when you talk longer with such a person, you begin to see that their father was a workaholic, and their grandfather had a problem with alcohol.

The pattern is not an obvious one, but it?s there.

Commonalities exist and get passed from one generation to the next. When stress mounts, or when the dysfunctional person begins to get too close to their own sense of inadequacy, they self medicate those bad feelings out of existence. Some people do it with a stress-relieving behaviour, and other people do it with some kind of substance like alcohol, marijuana or cocaine. After a short time, the whole pattern of this experience becomes quite routine; when bad feelings arise, they take a drink, smash some glass, have sex, gamble, spend money, eat a pie, smoke some weed or snort cocaine.

After a little more time, they learn that at virtually the first sign of any sensation at all, they turn to their drug or behaviour of choice.

That becomes the typical addiction pattern of experience, which keeps on playing in life, even if the person ?gets sober?. The real pattern doesn?t change unless one pays attention to it; one merely replaces one drug or behaviour for another, and the quick fixes to life just keep on rolling.

So it was that I was reading a book to keep up professionally, ?Practical Ethics for Psychologists, a Positive Approach? (American Psychological Association, 2006), and I noticed a pattern. In fact, they advocated a five-step process in ethical decision-making, and when I read it, I realised I had seen it before. That is, while I had not seen that pattern applied to ethics, I had seen it applied to understanding the cycle of experience we all go through on a daily basis. It?s the same cycle of experience an addict will warp in his or her repetition compulsion.

1. any kind of physical, embodied experience such as perception

2. the movement from vague to focused attention of interest, need, drive, curiosity, etc.

3. exploration of potential ways to meet one?s needs or satisfy interest

4. the implementation of one?s plan, and the satisfaction of one?s needs and curiosities

5. the learning from one?s experience

6. the movement back into spontaneity, where one is available for new experience

1. Identify activities that threaten to violate one?s moral commitments

2. Develop alternatives ? various potential solutions that might resolve the potential moral breaches

3. Analyse the various options for the one that provides greatest balance in moral principles

4. Put into action one?s plan for resolving moral dilemmas or conflicts

5. Look back and evaluate one?s actions in order to minimise harm to offended moral principles While these two processes, or cycles, are not exact duplicates, the similarities are enough to catch the attention.

Further, people can use these patterns to assess their own effectiveness. Some people are truncating their experience of life, selling themselves short, so to speak, by repeating the same experience over and over again. Other people are falling prey to moral breaches for which they themselves regret out of a poverty of creative moral problem solving. In both cases, what is needed is to slow down the process, expanding upon each step along the way. If all that fails, a person could just sit in the tub and stare at the water swirling away down the drain.