You Can't Win This One
The strange loops we live inside and how they are outgrown
The one who is always wrong must work hard to be right,
And the one who can never get it right returns, again and again, to being wrong.
The one who longs to be seen…
Becomes too much, and must disappear.
The one who has to be in control must not let go.
And the one who finally says fuck it, must quickly take control again.
What we are encountering here is something that BodyMind Maturation calls a paradox, Buddhism recognises as the cyclical nature of suffering, and Systems theorists have described as a strange loop or a reflexive pattern. A strange loop is a configuration in which each attempt to resolve the problem feeds directly back into the conditions that sustain it. Rather than moving forward, the system curves back on itself.
In the language of communication theory, meaning is not fixed but context-dependent, and contexts themselves are organised in layers that continually refer to one another. When these layers become entangled, as Gregory Bateson and later theorists observed, a person can find themselves caught in a paradoxical bind where no position offers resolution, because each position is already implicated in the problem it is trying to solve.
“The double bind is a situation in which no matter what a person does, they can’t win.”
— Gregory Bateson1
These loops are not aberrations, they are intrinsic to how human systems of meaning are formed over time. Our sense of self, our relationships, and the worlds we inhabit are generated through recursive processes in which what we do shapes who we take ourselves to be, and who we take ourselves to be shapes what we do. Over time, and unobserved, these reciprocal movements petrify into stuck patterns that feel fixed, inevitable, and deeply personal.
As the loop closes in on itself, and we become dependent upon it, it becomes a cage. A cage of our own making that we exist within, but that we cannot see because there is no other vantage point from which it can be observed. Every interpretation leads back to the same organising assumption, and every effort to change becomes further evidence of the need to change. We become the problem attempting to solve itself. And in doing so, the system merely tightens. If I am bad, I must work to be good, but if I am always working to be good, then even the smallest failure confirms that I am bad. There is no rest here, no margin for ordinary humanity, and no way out.
At the centre of this looping structure there appears to be a “someone” who is caught inside it: the one who must get it right, or stay quiet, the one who is never understood, and is never good enough. And yet, when we begin to look more closely, our “someone” is not even there.
“The ego is simply the idea of ourselves that we carry around.”
— Adyashanti2
The ‘me’ we know ourselves to be is constructed by memory, past relational positions, meanings formed in earlier contexts and carried forward as if they were present reality. What we take to be a solid identity is, as both systems theory and contemplative traditions have pointed to, an illusion: a pattern that persists through repetition, inside the mind, rather than an entity that exists in its own right.
Who we think we are is a contingent process, assembled moment by moment through sensation, perception, and thought. This self-image formation is a mental representation that attempts to stabilise experience by organising it around a centre. What is striking, in the context of strange loops, is that the very sense of being a someone who must resolve the problem is itself the recursive structure. The one trying to solve the loop is the one generating it.
For this reason, we can’t fix these painful patterns through more effort or better strategies. The growth we say we long for (but usually fear) requires a shift in the level from which the situation is being perceived. In practical terms, this begins in a very simple way: by stopping — not as an abstract instruction, but as an actual interruption of the momentum of the loop. Resisting the urge to do anything, and pulling back from the compulsion to act, allows the movement of solving to pause. And when that happens, something else becomes available: the capacity to feel and experience what is here. This is the domain of being.
Stillness creates a form of contact with ourselves that is not organised by the same recursive logic. In the absence of immediate action, we begin to encounter what has been held in place by the loop itself, we begin to be able to see who we have been being, beneath all the activity. Someone who is terrified of being wrong, someone who really needs to be seen, someone who is very frightened of uncertainty. The next step is to ask a question: How old am I here?
We quickly discover that these strange loops we find ourselves living within are not arbitrary. They are structured responses to unbearable experiences that could not be metabolised when they first occurred. The loop holds in place a way of organising the world that once served a necessary function. In this sense, a strange loop is not a trap but a legitimate form of survival. A way of maintaining coherence in the face of something that exceeded our capacity to process.
From a systems perspective, we might say that the context in which experience is interpreted, conceptualised, and survived, has become fixed, and that this context then generates the world that appears to us.
“A message is given meaning by reference to the context in which it appears.”
— Cronen, Johnson and Lannamann3
We are not simply experiencing present conditions; we are inhabiting a structure of meaning that was formed elsewhere and is now reasserting itself. It is a basic confusion between past and present. Because this process is largely unconscious, it can feel as though reality itself is confirming the pattern, rather than revealing it.
The movement out of such a loop is a process of integration. As the underlying experience is gradually felt and metabolised (not analysed or overridden, but allowed to complete) the necessity of the loop, and our attachment to it, begins to dissolve. This is what it means to outgrow a pattern. It is not broken or defeated; it becomes redundant.
And as this happens, something else becomes clearer. The “someone” at the centre of the loop, the one who seemed to be so powerfully present, is revealed not as a fixed identity (who we are) but as part of an outdated structure (who we thought we needed to be). The real depth of our being can never be contained within it.
The mind, shaped by these recursive patterns, cannot resolve what it did not author. But the body, through its capacity to feel, can complete what was left unfinished. And in that completion, there is a form of freedom that does not come from escape, but from no longer needing to remain.
“Beyond right and wrong there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
— Rumi4
Reflections and responses are always welcome in the comments. I am a UKCP-registered Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, BodyMind Maturation guide, and Elemental Chi Kung teacher exploring non-dual wisdom, the intelligence of dreams and the relational field of human experience.
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Adyashanti. (2008). The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment. Boulder, CO: Sounds True.
Cronen, V. E., Johnson, K. M., & Lannamann, J. W. (1982). Paradoxes, double binds, and reflexive loops: An alternative theoretical perspective. Family Process, 21(1), 91–112.
Rumi. (13th century). A Great Wagon (trans. Coleman Barks, 1991). In The Essential Rumi. San Francisco: HarperCollins.