You hear it all the time: live in the present! Don’t let the past hold you down! It’s great advice but it’s also a lot easier said than done.
If you find yourself living in the past or unable to let go of memories of times gone by, it’s probably because you have unknowingly trained your brain to escape from reality. Instead of focusing on what you could do to improve your life today, you may be paying a heavy price for living in the past.
BOB’S STORY
My former client Bob was deeply unhappy about the life he had in the here and now. Disappointment oozed from his pores. When you asked him about his career or his relationships, he dwelled on the ones he had in the past rather than talk about the ones he had today. Talking about today irritated him. He wanted to relive the highs and low of his former relationships over and over again. Similarly, he would speak volumes on the ambitious projects and early successes he once had. But now, in his 50s, all that was long-since over. Now he was a working a dull, low-paying job he hated to talk about, and all the women in his life had left him. His solitary existence really bummed him out, so that was off the table for discussion as well.
Bob could not stand the thought of never being with a woman again and constantly relived the experiences he once had with Rhonda or Liz, women he secretly stalked on the Internet but hadn’t spoken with in over a decade. He repeated stories from the past over and over again as if each time he found something new and charming about them, as if repeating them made them real again. All his best moments were in the past. He hadn’t had sex in over a decade. He was frustrated at work. His social life in the here and now was sad. He could not hold people’s attention long enough to have meaningful conversations — something which bewildered him and drove him to fantasize even harder about the past and how much people once loved talking to him and all the great conversations he’d had. Why didn’t people see that in him today? He didn’t know.
I knew. Bob was trapped by his own coping mechanisms. He was so out of touch with reality, it made an otherwise intelligent guy sound dumb. It was as if he could not understand simple cause and effect, like if you’re a really boring conversationalist telling the same stories for the nth time, people’s eyes will glaze up; or that if a dark cloud of disappointment hangs over you, they’ll steer away from you. He couldn’t get that. In his fantasy world, he was the liveliest, most intriguing person in the room.
A Gift & A Curse
Our natural coping mechanisms are truly a biological gift: they help us get through grief, anger, and other high-stress experiences. The problem is that even after those unhappy periods end, our brains continue to push us to pursue stress-relief for the kick of pleasure it gave us. In some of us, particularly those who had traumatic experiences, our brains stubbornly return to the old mechanisms that helped us feel better. They may become our normal, our go-to for relief from the sorrows and grief of our daily lives. They can grow into addictions too. Booze and drugs are obvious examples: one day you’re having a couple of glasses of wine, and then you discover you need more to get the same sense of relief. And then you want more. And then you start to really need more. Or maybe now you want to try something else to see if it can give you an even bigger kick.
You can apply this to any kind of compulsive behavior, whether it’s ordering spatulas off Amazon at 4 a.m. because they finally got a color you didn’t already have or going to a sex club and letting strangers fuck your ass without condoms because you had a really bad day. Ok, the details are going to be crazy different among the people: but the brain mechanism is the same for all. You have found something that your brain thinks will make the pain of life go away.
[div class=”statement”]His obsessions with former glory distracted him from the work he had to do in the here and now to get his life in order.[end-div]
For Bob, that meant dwelling on the past. His obsessions with former glory distracted him from the work he had to do in the here and now to get his life in order. Instead of taking an active role in his reality — finding new ways to communicate with people, taking a fresh approach with new women based on what he had learned, and building a new vision for what his life could be — he kept spinning his wheels over and over again, repeating the handful of stories that once made him happy and almost unable to articulate anything he wished to accomplish in the here and now.
His was an all-too relatable problem for this therapist. I knew exactly where he was coming from — and where he needed to go. Coping mechanisms are first and foremost fear behaviors. You wouldn’t need a coping mechanism if things weren’t going to hell in the first place. It’s actually a sign of a strong and healthy brain to fight back against pain and grief by self-medicating with behaviors that calm our nerves. The problem is that while some people self-medicate with life-affirming approaches, like meditation, athletics, or therapy, most of us turn to quick dirty fixes.
My Story
When I was a girl, I spent as much time, if not more, in my fantasies than in the world. I know we complain about how kids today won’t get off the Internet to live life, but I remember how it was for me before there even was Internet. I surfed inside my brain, and I didn’t share my cookies, either. I immersed myself in fantasies about the future — all the things I wanted to have, all the places I wanted to see and all people I wanted to sleep with. Which, admittedly, was a lot of people. I would draw the fantasies out for days and weeks at a times. Nothing irritated me more than a parent suddenly popping their head in my room while I was imagining myself at some future glittery literary party in a glittery literary loft in Manhattan. I wanted to live THERE, not HERE. Here sucked! People were mean to me here. That other place was so much more relaxing. Imaginary people liked me! When I returned to reality, it was all so petty and boring and demoralizing. I knew it was kind of crazy to live inside my fantasies, but it was the only thing that cheered me up. I had a dark foreboding that one day I would go off the deep end and never return, but it didn’t mean I wanted to stop. If anything, I wished the world would leave me alone so I could lay under the blankets and stay in my fantasies all the time.
[div class=”statement”]The dark irony is that when you escape reality you often find that reality didn’t wait for you. [end-div]
The dark irony is that when you escape reality you often find that reality didn’t wait for you. Life moves on while you stay in the same place. When I would finally step out of my fantasy bubbles, reality seemed even grimmer. All the problems I never dealt with were not just still there, they’d gotten worse because of my inactivity and escapism. And that, naturally, drove me back to my brain’s reliable mechanism to relieve the anxiety. And so the cycle got locked in place: what was, during my childhood, a wonderful escape became a twisted addiction by the time was an adult and living on my own. Late rent? Unanswered phone calls? Stacks of overdue work on my desk? They were all part of the gray blur of real life as I waited restlessly for the hour when I could crawl into bed and let the fantasies flow. I watched friends and colleagues push ahead with their lives, getting married and having kids, getting those promotions and raises they had worked so hard for, achieving their goals while I was numbly slip-sliding through life.
I understand how emotionally addicted we get to the coping mechanisms we originally built to fight off the burdens of memory. The problem is that our brains don’t necessarily figure out the BEST way to cope with stress. They just figure out a way. And since your coping mechanisms spring up when you are at your lowest, most vulnerable and most emotional, it’s a crapshoot how it will play out in your life.
Pete’s Story
Pete had a very traumatic childhood. The first years of therapy were devoted to his accounts of the many emotional tortures he’d endured. At some point, he began talking about his parents. And, once that started, it seemed like it would never end. He was continuously fighting with them in his head over every mistake, every bad decision, and every indecision that ruined his childhood. Once he recognized the enormity of the impact of their dysfunctional patterns on his own life, he obsessed over it and became convinced he would never know true happiness. Instead, as he had felt in childhood, Pete firmly believed he was doomed to be the person everyone else came to when they were depressed, the collector of lost women and fixer of broken people. It was pretty horrible. He entered relationships with low expectations, not believing anyone would really love him; so, almost inevitably, instead of finding love and trust, he was emotionally exploited by the women he chose. He was a young man in his late 20s but he felt even more desperate than my 50-something client, Bob nrvsidr he did not have any victories to savor or warm memories of women’s flesh. So he reviewed his traumas endless, restlessly searching for something that made sense, trying to think his way out of his pain.
But that doesn’t work either. You can’t just THINK your way out. You have to DO to break the cycle.
Eventually, what was once a way to cope with anxiety becomes your home: it’s where you live every day. Instead of fully engaging in the life you have, and directing your focus to the things you can improve, you are held hostage by all the fears and grief that drove you to obsess in the first place. In the grip of their counter-intuitive ways of coping with stress, some of the most brilliant people I know have made such stupid choices in life, you’d think they were morons. They accept the misery they know because their brain has tricked them into believing that the thrill they get from escape is enough to keep them happy. But it isn’t enough. It’s never enough. If you brain is constantly telling you that you need to escape, it means it is holding you hostage with fear.
And that’s why learning to live in the here and now is a life-changer. People who are truly engaged in their own lives are nurtured by reality. They’re not afraid of reality. It fulfills their needs. They may revisit the past or recall it when it’s RELEVANT — but they don’t live there. They don’t stop living. They don’t let former failures stop them from trying new things. They don’t get lost in dreams of the future either — they make practical plans to achieve future goals. They don’t go numb, get drunk, flee the situation or pick a fight to avoid making important decisions. They live HERE and they know the time is NOW. They deal. They overcome. They create different, happier realities. They build stronger, reality-based foundations for their lives.
Eventually, Bob saw the light
One day, he announced he was going to complete a project that would get him the promotion he wanted, along with the compensation he felt he’d deserved all along. A few months later, he got his raise and decided to stop bemoaning bachelorhood. He redecorated his apartment, top to bottom, to make it feel like a permanent home. The last time I heard from him, he’d started a happy long-distance relationship with an Asian woman he hoped to marry. It was pretty incredible. Incredibly wonderful. The more he stretched and pushed himself, the more he discovered how much he could do. The more he did, the better he felt about himself. Instead of brooding over the past, he had exciting plans to work on. His negative coping mechanisms faded and his new intelligence began firing. Now he had interesting new stories to tell! He was like a new man. A much more intelligent man, too, because his life in the here and now was filled with positive things.
Pete moved out
Pete started his journey out of nihilism by moving out of the shit-hole he hated and into a place he loved. He recruited friends to help him decorate, and soon it was hip and beautiful. Then he started pushing harder on the career front — so hard that, eventually, he opened a successful business. Now, 10 years later, he’s found that one special amazing human who loves him as much as he loves her. Pete got there by pushing himself hard, past what he thought was his own breaking-point, to bust out of his fears and negativity. He began to wall off the past and build a new structure for his life. He left his comfort zone, he tried new things, he pushed himself to build a new life. The pay-off for him has been almost unimaginably spectacular, especially when compared to where he started when we first met.
My self realization
As for me, the understanding that I needed to re-invent my life happened in a big existential flash of brain lightning when I finally accepted that I was kinky, queer and suffocating in the reality I was trying to live. I had squelched my authentic needs and identity to fit into a straight role out of shame and low expectations about life. I locked myself into an unhappy life by giving all my best energies to my precious fantasies. I avoided kink relationships out of fear. Coming to terms with my authentic needs, and accepting my sexual identity, forced me to re-evaluate all the other sides of my life. I started making better choices in relationships; I stopped trying to fit my round-ass peg into a square-ass hole. I slowly began to tap into my true potentials by keeping it real, authentic, true to myself, and making the behavioral changes and life decisions to further myself along that path.
Bob, Pete and I share this in common: by putting our emphasis on realities we can fix and modify, we have chased away the demons of the past that kept us powerless and afraid.
We stopped being afraid. We began to align what we know with the choices we made. We have stopped living in our heads and taken concrete action to make today as positive and rewarding as possible. We changed our behaviors and our brains changed with them. Today, all three of us are highly functional, fully connected, emotionally whole people. We are a whole lot smarter about the lives we live and the choices we make. And we owe it all to living in the here and now.
Tomorrow, I will give you some tips on how to break with your own negative coping mechanisms and begin to take steps to break out and move up to a happier, more satisfying life in the here and now.
(to be continued)
