Hindsight is 2020 Part. 4
2020 is almost at an end and I know I’m not alone in saying, “what the actual fork”. For many, this year has been filled with loss, disillusionment, despair, and pain. Including the emotional toll of the pandemic, social injustices, and being a therapist through it all, I’ve also lived a full year as an ex-wife.
The truth is, despite it all, I find myself feeling the most content, certain, and secure in myself I’ve ever felt. As I think about how I managed to get here despite the insanity of this year, I realized that I chose to move forward with an almost unabashed fury. With that mindset, I opened up myself to be fully vulnerable to myself and the others around me and I learned something fundamental about “letting go”. The key? Have the past inform the way you grow instead of dictating the direction you go.
I mean, that was really good you guys.
In thinking about how to expand and share how I got here, I thought about the work I’ve done with my clients and the structural concepts we’re given as clinicians to help create a clear direction for people. I realized that a lot of how I managed to feel good about where I’m at and where I’m going follows the path and the concepts in the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Triflex (pictured below). So, here’s how I managed to let go of my past, function in my present, and move toward the future.
Be Present
It may seem counterintuitive to stay focused on the present when you’re trying to work through the pain and the grief of the past, however, being present, especially the way ACT intends is the first step of letting go. After I ended my marriage, there was a part of me that wanted to think through every single thing that happened. I wanted to dissect it and process it over and over and over again. There was a bigger part, however, that recognized that in order to process and understand, I needed to create a space of safety and openness for myself. Attending each day, presently and mindfully, allowed me to start to build a referential foundation of who I was apart from being a wife. I needed to learn what made me feel re-energized and I needed to model to myself that I was worthy of being taken care of even if it was just by me. I sought to create a new routine for myself that was challenging but kind to myself. I exercised, attended to active friendships, invested in new ones, and created a self-care routine that was about intentional healing vs. distraction. I worked on creating moments of levity- like playing music outside of the session and dancing in the kitchen while I cooked. I also created an intentional space for processing. I restarted therapy, I talked through my feelings with friends, I journaled furiously, I consumed media that allowed me to access my emotional expression and I worked through analyzing my thought processes and tried to see the objectivity in my current circumstances. Oh, and I cried, as previously mentioned, a lot. I can’t confirm nor deny that the waterworks looked a little like this…
Allowing yourself to be present helps you to contextualize and build space and for yourself. That’s the other component to this point of the triflex: self as context. What this essentially means is that you are allowed to take your experiences from your past, your personality attributes, and your dreams and desires, and use those to create a path for forward movement. If you’re fixated on the person you were before and the circumstances around that version of yourself, you’d be hard-pressed to understand what choices, resources, and opportunities you have right now to work through the things you’ve experienced.
Recently, I was working with a client on improving their negative self-talk. This person is currently going to grad school and is enrolled in a program they very much enjoy. However, they continued to struggle to feel confident in their work and hopeful that this is the “right” career path for them. In the past, this client experienced going through the motions of being in school and yielding good academic grades- much like they are currently. Despite having done well in undergrad, my client determined that this was not the career path they wanted to pursue. So, they spent years bouncing from one job to another and this effectively reinforced their fear of failure. I asked my client, “what’s different now from eight years ago?’. After a pause, my client responded, “this is a graduate program that is more focused and purposeful around a specific field, you and I have worked on identifying what may be a good career path through the assessment and learning about myself….”. I responded with, “and what, or who is different now?”. “Me”, they responded. At that moment I knew it had clicked for my client. In an attempt to reinforce the insight, I reflected back to them with, “Exactly. The reason why you’re not going to experience the same thing you did after undergrad now is that you’re not the same person anymore. You literally can’t go back to that place because time travel doesn’t exist and neither does that version of you”.
I believe this is a fundamental insight needed to work through the grief and stuckness that comes with our past. Once we realize that time is linear and therefore the only moment we can guarantee to actively live in is the current moment and immediate future, we can allow ourselves the opportunity to learn who we are, what we have, what we need, and what we’re working towards.
Open Up
According to ACT, opening up allows for two things to happen: acceptance and defusion. Defusion here refers to becoming unstuck. Oftentimes we are stuck to beliefs, thoughts, emotions, or behaviors that are largely based on the past.
Common thoughts/beliefs we can get stuck on are:
I’m not good enough
I have to do everything on my own
Nobody cares about me
No one understands me
I shouldn’t even bother trying
Things never work out for me the way I’d like
People are always going to think I’m __________
I need to figure everything out now
I can just avoid all my problems and they’ll go away
Things will just get better for me one day
Common emotions we can get stuck on are:
Guilt
Grief (complicated bereavement)
Anxiety
Anger
Resentment
Bitterness
Paranoia/mistrust
Sadness
Fear
Loneliness
Common behaviors/actions we can get stuck on are:
Avoidance
People-pleasing
Overcompensating
Seeking excessive validation
Co-dependence
Rigid boundary setting
Lack of boundary setting
Self-harming behaviors
Impulsivity
Being stuck inhibits our ability to let go, move forward, and work on living out our desired meaning and purpose.
Mindful awareness (or being present) allows us to take stalk of our current reality. Being aware helps us see what we need to accept. Acceptance helps us get unstuck. I’ve talked about acceptance here before and I’m going, to be honest, this is not a popular construct with my clients and I’d be lying if I said it was my favorite thing to do. Acceptance is REALLY FORKING HARD. HOMEVERRRRRR, if we get this part right, everything else is actually really simple. Few things to mention about accepting to help overcome those “no, thank you” barriers. The first is that accepting your reality or the things you experienced in your past is not excusing those pains or grievances. I accepted a lot of the hurt that I experienced in my marriage but that did not make the things that happened okay. Likewise, I understood and had to swallow the pill of the poor choices that I made, but it wasn’t a pass on my behavior. In addition to needing to accept past experiences, past pain and trauma, and the truth that sometimes things don’t turn out the way we’d hoped, we have to accept the reality that future pain is guaranteed.
This, I believe, is the next essential insight we have to obtain in order to be able to overcome the past and move forward. A lot of what is tied to hurts in the past is the fact that we experienced those hurts in the first place. Knowing you’ve been hurt is a form of grief. Grief is a LIFELONG process. There’s the initial loss which is the source cause (i.e the death of a loved one, the reality of a global pandemic, the formal end of a marriage) and then there’s secondary loss which is the ripple effects of that initial loss (i.e. missing the physical presence of someone, not being able to see family members, getting let go at work, the new adjustments to life as a single person). Secondary loss can happen YEARS after the initial loss takes place. Oftentimes, in order to guarantee that we don’t experience secondary loss or a potential initial loss again, we close ourselves off to the world around us. This is especially true in relationships. Countless individuals have started therapy with me with the intention of getting over an ex-partner or moving on from a bad friendship and expect that bitterness, rigid boundaries, and avoidance are going to be the solutions to their pain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Opening up is what allows us to have enriching, rewarding, and intimate relationships, and experiencing pain is a potential outcome that we all have to face. We often think that having empathy and opening ourselves to others is giving away our power and control. The truth is, that being vulnerable and opening up to yourself and others gives you full control of your authentic self. Showing others who care about us aspects of ourselves then gives them an opportunity to choose how they want to engage. If for whatever reason, circumstances don’t allow for further connection, then there’s no opportunity for regret, a form of complicated grief, because you know you shared yourself thoroughly and fully.
When I came to this realization, the idea of dating again was not very scary. I recognized that I had already experienced significant heartbreak. LIKE PUNCHED STRAIGHT INTO EACH CHAMBER OF THE HEART heartbreak. And I’m actually okay. All my parts are together and while it took some time to get there, the point is, I got there. Understanding that potential pain comes with the territory of relationships, signals growth from fear of the past. I got to reinforce this belief firsthand for myself very recently. I’ve just experienced relational pain and being incredibly present in the pain has allowed me to understand that this pain feels much more tender than the pain I’ve experienced before. An older version of me would have ignored the cues and tried everything to either erase the past or force some kind of future that goes against the reality of the situation. I would have called everyone I know and talked it out without really getting anywhere. Instead, I’ve realized that this event has left a little etch in my sketch and I need some time to shake it off. The etch will stay there, under the surface, but instead of haunting me, I will choose to see the good I was able to experience before the etch was drawn.
While the process of defusion is an individual and solitary process, opening up also allows for connection and the use of support. The biggest changes I see in clients who are ready to change their lives occur in those who feel supported. Chances are, the people around you are the ones that know you best, and opening up towards acceptance and working on defusion allows for the opportunity to hear feedback from people who have more of an objective perspective. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with my best friend on my balcony a few months ago. We talked for a few hours and she opened up about her fears and concerns she has for me. I learned a lot about myself that night, including my struggle with comparison to others. Talking through these struggles and identifying what I wanted to do with these behaviors helped me let go of the misplaced desire to only ever strive to make people happy.
Do What Matters
After I settled into my space as a single woman, I had to figure out what I was now going to work towards. I needed to orient myself to what was important to me and what drove me. If I didn’t have a good understanding of what motivated me to move forward, then it would be very easy for me to get caught up in all that I had lost. A common issue in this phase is determining an authentic set of values instead of those that are derived from defense mechanisms or the ideals of others. Your desires are often not the problem, it’s the intention behind those desires that need to be evaluated. Doing what matters is different from doing what’s popular, acceptable, or correct. For some, being in an intimate relationship is a significant value. A committed action in seeking that value is to seek a relationship. Oftentimes we think that a person must “love themselves” or be a whole and completely functioning person with no flaws before they commit to the action of dating. But sometimes healing takes place when we work towards what matters to us. I’ve had clients who have started relationships when they weren’t 100% all-together or quit jobs when there were too many uncertainties and it turned out that all of these decisions were congruent for them because their process in healing included working toward what mattered to them. This looks different for different people, of course, and there’s, unfortunately, no formula for determining what the rightest or best value is. Sometimes the committed action is to take time for self-growth and understanding. As long as the committed action is towards a congruent value and not as an excuse for something that’s ultimately unhealthy, we get to decide what those values are.
Doing what matters also helps us stay away from depressive apathy which can sometimes be a result of past pain or grievance that we haven’t been able to let go of. Setting your intention and reminding yourself why it’s worth committing to getting to know someone, seeking a new career venture, or processing old wounds, helps us stay motivated and connected to our current reality.
It’s funny how the universe brings you parallel interactions. After I started writing this post, I headed into my first session of the day. As I started to check in on my client and discuss the growth they were experiencing, I noticed that the ideas I was starting to jot down for this post were being perfectly exemplified by them. They started off the session by saying that this holiday season had gone better than expected because they had accepted that their family dynamic was not going to be perfect. They found themselves enjoying the time they got to spend with family. When I asked how they experienced this newfound emotional experience my client responded by saying they were excited. When I asked, how so, my client responded like this: “I was waiting for some miracle to happen, something would happen and then all of a sudden things would change. But I realized that can’t happen without me putting in an effort first. I thought about my younger self who would listen to his parents fight and I’d lock myself away. Instead, I could have talked to my sister and told her how I was feeling. I want to do that now”.
I often hear people say they want to live life with no regrets. I’m here to offer a controversial opinion. If you’re living life fully, then you will probably have a lot of regrets. I believe life is about challenging yourself, growing, and learning from your past mistakes and pains. If you’re wanting to let go of the past and have it inform rather than dictate your life, then I encourage you to be present, open up, and do what matters.
Happy New Year.