10 Ways to Freeze Time

10 Ways to Freeze Time:

I. You are stuck in one negative moment that repeats forever

Always expect something bad is about to happen.

You do not trust any good moments that might occur in your life. You view good moments as not real, as a temporary mistake. You are so sure that a good moment wont last. A person who constantly complains of all the negative things that happen to him every week will minimize or ignore a good week .He wont dare to be curious about what made it a good week. He is so sure it wont last. He expects the negative to return at any moment. What he is saying is that only bad things happened in his childhood home and he is sure that he is in that childhood home at this moment. No matter where you go or whom you are with you expect something to go wrong. You even feel this way with strangers who do not really know you. You feel that somehow they know about you and how to hurt you. No matter where you are everything feels familiar. What you are saying here unconsciously is that every moment is the same moment at home with your parents and you already know how they will treat you. You experience your life as if there were no other kinds of moments that would separate the past from the present, the then from the now. You do not experience a bad situation in your current life as just similar to a bad situation in your childhood. You experience the current situation as the exact same bad situation that you had at home. It never ended. If you always experience only one moment then nothing new can happen. When bad things do happen you secretly say to yourself "I knew this would happen".

You have problems accepting compliments from others. We usually assume that when you have difficulty accepting compliments, it is a sign that you have low self -esteem. However, applying the Frozen in Time point of view, you could look at this situation in a different way. Because you are unconsciously insisting that you are a child at this moment still at home with your parents, you cannot take credit for these admirable adult qualities they are attributing to you. Instead, you are saying that what appears as adult qualities on the surface is really just you being a scared kid trying to survive and get attention. For example, some people might view your ability to put your needs aside for the sake of others as a sign of you being a mature and giving adult. But you experience those same so- called mature behaviors as representing your fear and desperation to feel accepted so that you wont be abandoned.

You view this kind of relationship as "boring". What you really mean is that you cannot tolerate a normal, giving relationship because you did not have that in your childhood home and to accept that kind of healthy relationship in your life right now would mean that you would have to give up the illusion that you are in that home trying to fix your childhood. An example could be a woman who looks for a relationship that would be a challenge to her. She grew up in a family with an alcoholic parent who committed suicide. What she is unconsciously saying now as an adult when she wants a man who is a challenge is that each new relationship represents a second chance to save or fix her parent so that she can receive what she did not get as a child. This is the moment she is frozen in time. She is sure that each new man will drop her, abuse her, and that it will be her fault. There is only one moment she lives in over and over again. .

You complain about all the pressures and distractions in your life, yet you would actually be more uncomfortable living in a day without crisis. A day without crisis would mean that you were not at home as a child waiting for your father to come home drunk. You would not know what to do not living in constant crisis.

If you are unconsciously insisting that you are in your destructive, terrifying, childhood home at this moment, then you cannot tolerate a normal uneventful moment because that would contradict your assumption about where you are. To make sure you only experience negative moments even if things appear normal, you start obsessing about future crises or negative situations before they occur. This way you can make sure you are always surrounded by that negative childhood home atmosphere.

You still carry around with you in every moment, all the bad things that ever happened to you. That is why you over-react when minor things happen to you. You are experiencing your whole history of abuse in that moment. A woman who was treated in a slightly insensitive manner at work reacts in a rage. ."When will it ever stop, why do people keep treating me this way, it never ends". She is not just experiencing the minor incident that just took place at work. She is still feeling the hurt inflicted on her by her father when she was a child. Its a never ending moment. You carry your whole history of abuse around with you in every moment. That is why it feels like the next bad situation , no matter how minor, will due you in. The old hurts never stop hurting. You only experience one moment that never ends. When you cannot experience time moving , then you are becoming over focused on the one moment you are in. That so-called boredom you experience is really an irritated feeling, an uncomfortable feeling. This boredom represents your feeling intense pressure from feeling all of your history continuously in one moment that never ends. This feels excruciating because you feel that all there is is this one moment that never ends and you are trapped in it.

You leap into a new relationship without looking closely at the details about who you are getting involved with. You have an urgency about this relationship that says "I know this relationship is the right one for me, it will make me happy, it will fix me, it will correct my whole history. It is my second chance to get what I did not get from my parents". Its like Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz". She was so sure the Wizard would be magical , even before she ever met him, and that he would fulfill her wishes. When she started to pay attention to more detail she noticed the little old man behind the curtain. That is when she realized there really was no magical wizard and so her wishes would not be fulfilled. Its in this same way that you do not look at details when you leap into a new relationship. If you keep the details blurry, you can use this new relationship to pretend you are at home with your parent and you hope they will treat you the right way this time. By avoiding the details of who you are actually starting a new relationship with, you have created a second opportunity to redo your childhood and hope for a better outcome. But as usually happens when you leap into a new relationship without looking first, you are shocked and confused that this new partner turned out to be such a monster. The usual complaint is that he was not like that when you first met him. The truth is that you did not take the time and notice the details of who this new person in your life is. There is no tolerating the "getting to know" someone. You only see that person in terms of your need, your need to fix your childhood.

You have accepted, without question, a negative view of yourself. It feels like a truth not to be questioned, as if it came from God. You do not examine the details to see if it applies to you. A person believes she is selfish when she does something good for herself. When asked how it makes her selfish she could not say. She recalled that her mother always called her selfish when she was a child. She is obeying what was told her. She is not evaluating this from an adults point of view to see if it applies to her. Its her way of saying that she is still that little girl at home right now and you do not question your parent. Another person says she has no confidence. Many therapists would simply accept this as a given since the patient came from an abusive home. The therapist would hear the patients fear and try to provide the safe atmosphere they did not have at home. However, I would go further and question what it is that she does not feel confident about. If you ask for details about what she does not feel confident about, she cant say. When asked about the specific aspects of her job that she feels she cannot perform she cant say. She can begin to realize that this scared, inadequate feeling is a vague general feeling that has never been examined or challenged from an adult point of view. She still views viewing herself as she did as a child, as she was described by her parents. She is not using her own adult judgment to evaluate who she is. She is still that child frozen in time just remaining loyal to her parents view of her.

A person who was left by his girlfriend described the days that followed as "each day rolled into the next", as if there was nothing different about each day that would separate it from other days and tell you that time is passing. He was shocked one day when it occurred to him that three months had already passed since his girlfriend left him. On the surface he experienced frustration, feeling stuck, wanting change. But, unconsciously by not letting himself experience each new day as different from the previous day, with different details, he was unconsciously insisting that time had stopped. He could not accept losing his girlfriend and so he wont let time move on . He froze himself in that moment she left him, hoping that if he waits long enough she will come back to him.

We all know that to preserve food you do not keep it out and handle it . You put it away in the freezer so it stays fresh. You do not have contact with it. You do the same thing with experiences in life. A good example is a high school reunion. Even though you know that time has passed and that everyone has changed and aged, you are still shocked when you see your classmates and how they changed. Like you did with food, you had no contact with your classmates over the years. This allowed you to preserve them in your mind exactly the way they were the last time you saw them in high school. If you have gone through traumatic life experience, then you have psychologically detached from the world around you. By doing this you experience the world around you like that food that was put away. You are disconnected from life and from the movement of time. That is why you experience yourself as just existing, not living, as empty and alienated. Not being in contact with life explains why you feel you have to guess at everything, including what you and other people are feeling, and what is right and wrong. An example is a woman whose father died a year ago and she has not addressed this. When its brought up to her her reaction is so intense that it sounded as if her father just died yesterday. Her reaction of grief sounded so fresh because she put the whole experience aside, like the food in the freezer. There is no chance to experience the loss of her father as already having happened and getting older. When she did not allow herself to experience the lose on an ongoing basis along with new events the came after the loss, she cant experience the loss as having already happened, connected in time with new events. The loss is separated from life and the movement of time. It is frozen. Unconsciously, she froze that moment she lost her father so as to keep it fresh. This would give her the feeling that its happening right now, and her father is still within reach

A man pushes away a relationship that is getting too close. We understand his action to mean he is afraid, he does not feel deserving or is punishing or depriving himself. The frozen in time way to look at his actions is that he is unconsciously trying to preserve himself as a child who can pretend to be at home with a good parent. The more involvement or contact Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz had with the wizard, the more she noticed about the wizard until she finally saw that he was not really a wizard at all. At that moment all his magic disappeared and so do her hopes of having her wishes granted. Unconsciously you are still a child looking for a good parent. So, to get closer to someone in your present life would force you to see the details of the actual person in front of you. You can no longer pretend this is a good parent. This real person in front of you wants to have a real adult relationship and you do not. You are trying to fix your childhood. So , as long as you do not get too involved in a relationship, and do not look too closely at who the other person is, you can maintain the illusion that you are really with a parent. But, when this person disappoints you in any way you go into a panic or rage. You are not experiencing what your partner did as a disappointment or annoyance by a spouse or other partner. You experience it as that child who feels abandoned. And your partner does not understand why you overreacted. That is why you panic when your partner puts realistic demands on you. You are unconsciously saying "I am a child and you are my parent". This is a parent-child relationship. It means it is a one-way relationship. You take care of me and never disappoint me.

A person who has stayed away from her parents for years now wants to visit them. But, she is afraid that everything will be exactly the same , that she will experience the same abuse that she suffered as a child and she will be trapped and powerless. What she is really saying is that she is still that little girl at home and she will have to just take it. By staying away from her family for many years she psychologically preserved them exactly as she last saw them. Its like when you move away to a new neighborhood far away and do not visit the old neighborhood for many years. When you revisit the old neighborhood you are shocked to see changes. Unconsciously you preserved it just the way you left it. A woman who refuses to have contact with her father because of how he disappointed her in her childhood feels she has eliminated him from her life. Yet by having no contact she has psychologically preserved him. Even though on the surface she experiences him as out of her life and far away, psychologically, her father could not be any closer. This is shown in how she anticipates the same devastating disappointment from her husband, friends, in fact, everyone in her current life. Its another way of saying she sees her father in everyone and she is still that little girl. By having no contact with her father she preserved him as she recalled him before she left many years ago. She has kept him alive in her current life through her current relationships.

You have the feeling that your parents reach is endless, like the witch with the crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz who could see Dorothy wherever she went. There is no feeling of a separate place away from your parents home. Even if you go to a different country you unconsciously just feel that you are still in your childhood home. You just feel like you are in a different room in that same home. There is no other space. No separate place or time. And so no matter where you go you expect the same treatment or outcome you experienced as a child with your parents. You even expect the same treatment with strangers as if they knew you, as if they are your parents. When you are in a world of only one moment, everyone is equal. Everyone is the same because there are no other moments or places where people can have a different experience from you. So nobody has a past history that is different from yours. You cannot experience people as perfect strangers who know nothing about you and your history.

You feel responsible for other peoples happiness and have to direct others and sacrifice your own happiness. Others describe you as "controlling", and you feel misunderstood and unappreciated. You do not experience it as controlling others because when you are frozen in time in one moment as a child in your childhood home, you are saying that there are no other moments or places, just your childhood home. And so, everything is related to you. What appears as controlling others is you unconsciously saying that everyone around you is related to you, is your childhood family, and you are trying to fix your childhood. You do not experience other people as unrelated to you with their own separate lives. You have to "save" other people and take care of them. They are family. They represent you the abandoned child, or your abusive parent and so you have to fix them. It feels like everything is connected to you, to your unhappy childhood. That is why it feels like even total strangers know you, know your hurt, and they will take advantage of that

The feeling that you have about your own life is applied to the whole world. You feel that everything bad that ever happens to you is deliberate, purposefully prearranged, your destiny. You view your life as a curse, a life long series of punishments. During the same week that positive things are happening to you, you also happen to get a cold, or your car breaks down. You would react to this with "see, just when something good happens, I get a cold, its punishment. I always have to suffer". You do not see unfortunate situations as accidental or just part of life. Everything feels deliberate. When someone disappoints you, you do not see that person as disappointing you because they have shortcomings. You see them as always deliberately trying to make sure you have an unhappy life, because on some level you do not feel you deserve any better. When your partner has affairs and abandons you, you view it more as having to do with you . You feel that you are always the one left out and abandoned. A healthier approach would be to examine the other persons shortcomings and conclude that you got into a bad relationship and its healthier to walk away..

You not only feel your childhood home and parents are everywhere you go, surrounding you. You also experience your parents as if they were inside you, tormenting you. There is no place to hide. You are so sure that when you have your own children you will do to them what was done to you by your parents, because you feel that your parents passed their poison down to you. This is part of that feeling that your childhood home is everywhere, around you and in you. There is no safe place or time. You spend your life fighting hard to make sure that that badness does not come out of you. Its difficult for you to accept any qualities in yourself, good or bad, that are similar to your abusive parent. You experience these qualities in you as haunting and tormenting you, as if that parent is in you abusing you. There is no place to hide.

When you are frozen in time you do not experience a past that is over and done. You only experience a present, a right now that never ends. So, everything is fresh and new. Everything feels like its the first time. A woman still reacts shocked when her mother is emotionally abusive and shows a lack of concern for her. Why should she be shocked and surprised when her mother has acted this way all her life. She is acting as though it is the first time she has seen this behavior from her mother. Emotionally, she is reacting as though there is no past from which to draw from and not be so overwhelmed and surprised. Unconsciously, she is saying this is the first time she has seen this behavior from her mother because she is that child right now experiencing her mothers abuse. To her this is not a bad memory but an ongoing present trauma that never ended. Her rage at her mother shows that she cannot accept this from her mother. After so many years of this repeated abuse by her mother, why cant she accept it. When I say accept, I mean accept that its the truth, that that is the way her mother is, and that this truth probably wont change. Her rage at her mother shows that she does not accept that her mother is this way, and she is still waiting for her mother to be more giving, more normal, as if her childhood is still alive waiting to be corrected and repaired. A woman finds out that her husband has lied to her for the hundredth time. It is understandable that she react with anger, disappointment, and hurt. What is curious is her reacting shocked. If this was the hundredth time he had lied to her then it should not be such a surprise or shock to her. She could still be upset by it but she should have come to expect it by now. Intellectually she may say she expects it or is not surprised. However, her emotional reaction tells us that she is shocked as though this was the first time he did this to her. Since she is frozen in time and there is no past experience, then each time he does it is the first time.

When you do not allow yourself to emotionally experience a past in which you accumulated experience and view this past as already over, then you do not experience yourself as having done anything yet. That helps explain why you feel so unqualified for your job, that you are an imposter and people will eventually find you out. Emotionally, you feel that each day you go to work , its the first time and you do not know what to expect. If you do not allow yourself to experience a past, then you cannot experience the previous days at work when you accumulated experience and competence. Therefore, it is hard for you to draw from previous experience and get used to or anticipate the next day. Each day is the first time. A person panics about her next business trip that she has done before with the same clients. She is reacting as though she has no idea how it will go, as though it is the first time. She does not let her previous experience stick. You do not allow any previous experiences to register with you and add to your view of yourself. You are saying that you are that little child still at home who has not stepped out of the front door into the adult world. You have not done anything yet. When you are frozen in time, in only one moment as a child at home with your parents, you cant experience your day-to-day adult accomplishments which add to a permanent sense of yourself and self-esteem. That is why you feel like you are only as good as your next accomplishment, since there is no previous experience to hang your hat on. That is why each new job or task at work feels so do-or-die, like it decides who you are. To have accomplished something would mean that time would have elapsed. People who are frozen in time often speak of having low self-esteem. The mental health field usually views this low self-esteem as representing damage caused by abusive parents, a kind of scar that wont go away. Another way to understand this low self-esteem is to view it as a sign of being frozen in time as a child. Here, his low self-esteem represents his feeling like a child not equipped or having the tools to handle adult life. In other words, low self-esteem can represent your unconsciously taking the position of a young child so that you can reassure yourself that you are still home waiting to be taken care of.

When you are frozen in time as a child at home in one moment that never ends, then you can only experience one emotion, one need, one wish, which ever one it was in that one moment you froze yourself in. Because you are that child in a dysfunctional home, the one need or wish or fear has to do with one topic- will I be given to, taken care of, or will I be neglected or abused. If there is only one moment, there is only one topic that you are preoccupied with. You maintain a very narrow one- dimension focus with people. Its an either/or view of people. People will or will not fulfill your need. People are giving or depriving. Its a child's view of adults. You constantly test people in terms of this one need. A man whose mother had affairs when he was a child is constantly jealous and fearful that his wife will abandon him. There is no evidence that his wife would abandon him, yet he is living each day as if its a matter of time before she does. Thus, he is ignoring all the information about his wife and sees her only in terms of this one, never ending need and question: will she stay or abandon him. You are not really interested in individual qualities of people around you. Instead you look at people with one question in mind: " will they give to me or will they deprive and disappoint me." A more extreme example of a person who is only focused on what others will give them is a person who, after he ends one relationship, quickly goes into another relationship. That person is saying through this behavior that it does not matter who he is with. He describes the people he gets involved with as "faceless". In other words he looks at others not in terms of their individual qualities, but in terms of their ability to meet his one need. He approaches relationships the way a child looks at parents. One reason you expect that empty feeling to go on forever and never be filled is that on some unconscious level you realize that you are frozen in time, disconnected from your current world and so unreachable. Freezing yourself in time leaves you feeling unconnected to people around you because when you are frozen ,you are alone in a time that does not exist anymore. You do not expect that others will meet your needs because you are not really here in the present to receive.

Another sign that tells us that there is only one need you are fixated on, and that it is a child need, is the extreme reaction you show to small disappointments and everyday irritations. When your spouse is his usual pain in the neck, you react with low-self esteem, rage, depression, devastation, feeling you might as well die. This shows that you experienced your husbands minor insensitive behavior as another example of your parents abandoning you and not meeting your one need in life that you have been waiting to fulfill; the need to be taken care of . Every action your spouse carries out is always evaluated by you as a do-or-die, pass-fail, test.

If you are frozen in time as a child in one moment in your childhood home with only one need you are always preoccupied with, then you assume, as a child would assume, that everyone else in the world has the same need as you. In other words you project your own childhood craving to be taken care of onto others and see everyone else in the world as needy as you are. That is why you experience other people as such a burden and you assume they will be just as devastated as you would be if you disappoint them.

Because you are frozen in time as a child in one moment in your childhood home, you only experience yourself in one dimension, the way you were in that one moment you were frozen in. Its like a photograph of you. You are nothing more than what you are in that frozen picture. Therefore, you cannot recognize change of any kind, or the passage of time because a frozen photograph does not change. Otherwise, it would not be the same photograph anymore. No one in the photograph can move. You experience yourself and others in one dimension, with either/or kinds of qualities. You experience people more in terms of categories, not as people. You see someone as either an angel or a devil. You cant see that person as having both angelic and evil qualities at different times because there are no other times, only that one frozen moment, that one frozen photograph and you can only be what you are in that photograph. When your partner does something bad , you see him as only bad, as only what he just did. You do not see the good he did yesterday. People are either witches or fairy godmothers. When you are with others, you do not experience them as live people. Instead you experience others as just frozen pictures. You do not experience people as having many different moods. That is why you see people as either with you or against you. Since what happens in that one frozen moment is all there is, you cant experience a person as just being in an inconsiderate mood today. You see him as an inconsiderate person. That is all he is. You are afraid to show anger because you fear that people will see you not just in an angry mood but as an angry person, as if they cant recall other times when you are a nice person.

Because you experience yourself as frozen in a still picture, you feel that the next thing you do defines you. This helps explain your low self esteem. When you have a bad day its hard for you to tolerate it because it does not just feel like a bad day. It feels as if what you did to make it a bad day is all there is to see about you. You cant feel that you also did good things on another day. When you are frozen in time, there are no other moments or days..

VII ONLY ONE KIND OF RELATIONSHIP IN THE WORLD: A PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP

Because you are frozen in time as a child in your childhood home in one moment that never ends, along with experiencing one need, one moment, you can only experience one kind of relationship; the one that existed in that one moment in your childhood home: a parent-child relationship. Every relationship in your current adult life, such as your marital relationship, your relationship with your boss, how you relate with your friends, all are experienced as a parent-child relationship. This becomes clearer when you begin to notice how devastated you are when they do not meet your expectations. Unconsciously, you experience everyone around you as if they were your parent. As any young child would, you experience no psychological space between you and your parent. You feel so connected with your parent that you assume they feel exactly what you feel. You have this feeling of an instant ,automatic connection, like an umbilical cord connection. That is why you feel that what ever that other person does will make or break you, the same feeling any young child feels about their parent That is why you feel like you have no choice of how to react when someone treats you a certain way. As with an umbilical cord, you are only what was just fed to you. That is why it is hard for you to accept criticism as just another opinion. You react more the way a child reacts when a parent criticizes him: Its not just another opinion. A parent is always right. Its like when the great and powerful Oz has spoken. That is why you are so invested in changing or" fixing" your parent. Because you are the child so dependent on your parent to decide your value, your identity and who you are, you feel you have to change their view or reaction to you before you can go on with your life. Your parent has to see it for it to be legitimate. Just as a kid will not see his perfect dive off of the diving board as legitimate unless his parent was watching the dive, the right reaction from your parent will allow you to start living. So, even though you complain about your parents as though their behavior is only annoying to you, on a deeper level you are experiencing it more like their behavior makes or breaks you. On the surface it may appear that when you complain about what your parents did to you as a child, you are just conveying what your childhood was like. But, on a more unconscious level you are really demanding that they have to change right now so that you can be freed , and start to take charge of your life. Its like the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz who believed that he could not have courage until the wizard gave him a medal of courage. Just as any young child does, the cowardly lion experienced all power as coming from outside of himself, from a powerful wizard (parent). A man was disappointed that his girlfriend did not have time to see him today. He felt bored, that there was nothing to do, that he was just waiting, just keeping busy to pass the time. What he was saying indirectly was that his life stopped when she left him, and all he can do right now is exist, survive. He experienced her leaving as if she were his lifeline and the plug connecting him to her was pulled (umbilical cord). He said that when he was with her he would try to get as much as he could out of being with her. He would feel great. However, when he was away from her during the week he experienced himself sliding down into depression. He could not wait until the end of the week when he would see her again and be emotionally lifted again. He described it as being " starved". This is not an adult having fun in an adult relationship. Because he is frozen in time, he makes it a childhood life- or- death moment in which he must be fed enough to hold him until the next time he sees her.

When you are frozen in time in that one moment, you feel that every one in that moment, everyone in that snapshot, shares the same space. You feel that everyone shares all the feelings and qualities that you have. That is why you sometimes feel like the parent in a relationship and at other times you take on the role of the child. It does not matter who plays the parent and who plays the child in your frozen world. The theme is still the same. Will the child be fed or rejected. If you find yourself playing a parental role, then you feel pressured to be exactly what your real parent was not. You feel pressured to be perfectly giving and never disappointing. If you are in the child position, you are looking for your partner to be that perfect parent. A woman complains that her mother is emotionally unreachable. She unknowingly later describes herself as unreachable with her own child. It would miss the point for her to over focus on how she feels abandoned by her own mother. The point here is that she is experiencing this unavailable quality as existing in both her and her mother. She is unconsciously saying that all the good and bad qualities are inside everyone who is frozen in her childhood home, and she feels there is no escape. She will spend a life time trying to prove she does not have the same rejecting qualities that she perceived her mother to have, but her behavior will say otherwise. The bigger message here is that when you are frozen in time with your parents in your childhood home in one never ending moment, in one space or snapshot, all the participants in the moment share all the qualities. They take turns switching roles. It feels like qualities in people go back and forth and it seems to you that your feelings and qualities are automatically connected and complimentary to the feelings and qualities in your partner. For example, if you feel weak, you experience your partner as strong. If you have more of one quality, that must mean your partner has less of that quality. Again, you relate to your partner as if there was an umbilical cord connecting the two of you. You experience your qualities as if those qualities are direct proportion to qualities of your partner. So, when you feel anxiety or panic you do not just hope your partner is supportive and strong. Your partner would have to be just the opposite of what you feel. He would have to be superman. Anything short of that is unacceptable. Thus, Dorothy in the wizard of oz, who felt lost and frightened, needed more than just a supportive friend. She needed the great and powerful oz. There is always a one sidedness to these parent-child types of relationships. The focus is on the person in the child position feeling deprived and needing to be fed.

You do not develop adult qualities ,skills, and abilities; those qualities are given to you instantly by a powerful parent

If you are frozen in time, how can you develop skills and abilities since those abilities require the experience over time to develop. If you are frozen in time as a child in your childhood home, in one moment that never changes, then you cant allow yourself to acknowledge any experiences over time. So how do you obtain skills and qualities if you are frozen in one moment? You maintain a childs' view of how qualities and abilities are developed. A child's view is similar to how the cowardly lion believed you gain qualities. You are given those qualities by a powerful person like the wizard. When the wizard gave the lion the medal of courage, the lion instantly became a brave lion. To a child, to become brave he has to associate with a brave adult and that quality will somehow rub off onto the child instantly without the passage of time. A child and the cowardly lion could not see that he became courageous not because of what the wizard gave him, but it was the result of his adventures and chances he took, the experiences he had along the way with the passage of time that led to him becoming brave. A little girl feels that she instantly becomes an adult when she puts on her mothers high heels.

When you believe that you were given qualities by a powerful parental figure as opposed to developing these qualities through experiences over time, then you experience these qualities more like tangible objects, like a medal for courage. You will also therefore believe that these qualities could just as easily be taken away. A man decided that he would date only women who went to college. He did not attend college and always felt like a failure. By associating with college graduates he will somehow raise his value, instantly given a quality by another person. But, if this college grad is no longer interested in him, he will lose all his value. He will lose all of his confidence, instantly. Unconsciously, he is not really looking for a relationship; he is looking for this college grad to repair him, fix him, complete him. Because you experience all of your qualities as given to you instantly by a person whom you view as already having these qualities, you do not experience these qualities as having taken time to develop, and you do not develop a feeling of permanence about these qualities. That is why you have more of an amazed feeling when you accomplish something. This helps explain why you feel like an imposter. A person who completed a project at work successfully wonders if he will have the same success next week. Since he does not experience his abilities as permanently inside him, these abilities feel like the weather, or a breeze, that can come your way and leave just as easy. To experience something as permanently inside you, you would have to allow yourself to experience time passing while still seeing yourself maintaining that quality. If you are frozen in time you cant experience time passing. When you maintain a child's view of how you gain qualities, you often look to a specific event that will make or break you, that will instantly decide who you are. A woman decided that if she gets brave and goes to Europe, far from home, this will make her an adult. Everything is pass or fail. You have to get an A or you might as well get an F. This is not about taking the time to learn, fail, have good and bad days, and learn from mistakes, and improve your skills over time. When you are frozen in time as a child, its about proving that you are a capable adult. Everything is on the line in this next job or task.

When you are frozen in time as a child, in your childhood home, in one moment that never ends, then you cannot experience yourself as moving. To move from one spot to another means that time had to pass for you to have gone from one spot to another. Recall, that if you are frozen in time, its like you are in a photograph where no one moves. If you move, then its not the same picture anymore. When time moves there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Things grow and they can get old and decay. When frozen in time, nothing grows, nothing changes, nothing gets old or decays. You just stay in that one moment. Unconsciously, you are saying, "I am not moving from this spot, I am not leaving my childhood home". When we experience activity, we experience time moving. When we are not doing anything time slows down. Waiting is eternal. You are unconsciously waiting at home to get what you did not get as a child. In that waiting for something or someone who will fix your life, you just wait. Any action must be initiated from someone else. This helps explain that feeling you have that life happens to you, that you do not initiate and direct your life. You just react to events. When you only experience one moment that never ends, then you believe that every action, every thought, every movement, every breeze, is completely predetermined and repetitive forever. In this frozen world, you do not experience freedom of choice to initiate a new and different action. Therefore you are not responsible. You are not independent. This is how a child experiences himself in the world. That is why you are amazed when you improve or get better and feel that it was somehow just luck. You cannot allow yourself to let it register with you that you did hard work, struggled, fell down and got up again. You cannot allow yourself to initiate any action. If there is only one moment, then there is no future. If you cannot see a future then you cannot see the results of any of your actions. Therefore, you are paralyzed into inaction. Also, if you feel frozen in time, then there is no urgency to do anything. You feel like you have forever. A person who was able to control his anger this week stated "lets see if it continues next week", as if he did not experience it as his own controls that helped him, as if its something outside of him that happened to pass through him this week and give him control over his anger. Another person wont just quit a job she is unhappy in. She will wait to be fired. The action has to come from outside of her. A man spent a good part of his life isolating from people. He now has a girlfriend and attributes this change in his life to his girlfriend who "brought me out". Because he is frozen in time and cannot move or initiate anything , he cannot allow himself to realize that it was actually he who actively chose to let her in his life. Not realizing his ability to act and bring about something he wanted (a girlfriend), he worries that if this woman left him, he would automatically fall back into isolation, and have to wait for someone else to find him, like a lost child. Similarly, a woman married to a man who cheats on her states "why wont he just end it". Again, like the isolated man, she waits for someone else to initiate action, instead of her taking action to end a miserable marriage. A person states that she controls people because her parents were abusive to her when she was a child. As with the other examples, she too cannot see that she is actively choosing her actions. She experiences her behavior as automatic and out of her control, as if her parents from childhood were still effecting her. People who are frozen in childhood often state that they do well under crisis situations, but have more difficulty with normal everyday circumstances. You could look at this reaction as an example of how they do not allow themselves to initiate action. They experience a crisis as something they react to because there is no choice. Its another way of saying that all action is initiated from outside of them, and all they can do is react. This is similar to the person who waits until the last minute to take care of her responsibilities. She does not experience herself as initiating, planning, and pacing herself. She just reacts to external pressures such as deadlines. When you are frozen in time and cant move or initiate action, you have a fatalistic view of life. You can feel lucky or unlucky, but either way everything is determined from outside you. You experience the inevitable instead of being open to possibilities. People who procrastinate are looking for a push from someone else to get them going. They cannot allow their own action. Choices and decisions are more of a burden than an opportunity. A person has trouble choosing a career direction and wants someone to direct him. He grew up with parents who were not strong and directive, and they left him on his own. Unconsciously, he is still waiting for better parents to come along and direct him. A person who has to stand still so that time will stand still, cannot allow himself to experience his own action and movement. He will make comments such as" lets see what kind of week this is going to be", as if there is nothing to do but wait to see what fate will throw his way. He experiences life as happening to him, instead of him directing his life. Obsessing can be seen as an another example of not acting, just reacting. A person who obsesses and worries about all that can go wrong is usually seen as trying to anticipate and protect himself. From a frozen in time point of view, you could see this worrying as representing his taking no action and not directing his life. He simply waits to see what is sent his way, good or bad. He views himself as if he were on a conveyer belt in life and all he can do is be carried to the next thing that will be thrown at him. A woman who grew up with very critical parents keeps their behavior alive by being excessively critical of herself. She sees this harshness towards herself as a bad habit that is hard to break, out of her control. From a frozen in time point of view, she could instead look at her "habit" as an unconscious decision to keep the harshness going so she can feel like she is still home with her parents. The point here is that she experiences herself as not moving or taking action. She experiences her habit more like it originates from outside of her, as if it was being done to her, not by her. Its so hard for this woman to see that she is not really stuck or trapped. She cant see that she is unconsciously insisting that she stay home as a child with her parents. The reason she would want to stay home with abusive parents is because she still has hope that her parents will become more normal and give her what they did not give her as a child. But, for that to happen she must freeze time, stay home, and wait for her parents to fulfill her wishes. Its this waiting that represents her felt inaction. Consciously, she experiences herself as stuck. Unconsciously, she is clinging to, holding onto her childhood home for dear life. She is not aware of how active and busy she really is, unconsciously keeping home alive.

We are familiar with how people at ACOA, CODA, incest survivors, or any recovery meetings, spend hours and hours expressing rage towards those who have hurt them, usually their parents. These same people are frustrated and confused at why they continue raging for years and do not get anywhere with it. Most mental health professionals believe these victims need to vent their rage to be cured. From a frozen in time point of view you could understand this chronic anger as an unconscious attempt to freeze time and stay at home with parents. If you listen closely at those people stuck in chronic anger, you will notice there is an emergency, terror kind of feeling mixed in with this anger. They do not sound so much like they are recalling a bad childhood memory and expressing anger about this long passed event. They sound more like they are being abused right now and they are terrified. They are frozen in time and they are in that childhood home as a child right now being abused. When you are frozen in time you do not experience your childhood as a bad memory that is over. You experience it more like a current event that never ended and never will. In other words chronic anger is unconsciously used to give you the feeling that you are still at home as a child with your parents. Revenge serves the same purpose. If you listen closely at someone who is seeking revenge you begin to notice that in seeking revenge and staying angry at their parent, they surround themselves with feelings about that parent. That is one reason it is useless to ask them to forgive. To forgive would mean moving on, which means giving up that parent, which you are not ready to do. Someone who is frozen in time cannot forgive their parents for past abuse. When you are frozen in time there is no past. Psychologically, you are in that home right now, as that child with your parents. Forgiveness implies that something already happened. It implies that a change is possible because time has passed in which the blamed person can be viewed as having changed for the better. But, when you are frozen in time you experience it not as a bad memory, but as going on right now. Experiencing it more as a past event would elicit more sadness than rage. You experience shame and rage in the present which gives you the feeling the events are very fresh, very recent, in fact, happening right now.

Anxiety is a future oriented feeling. Its about something that has not happened yet. People who are frozen in time harbor anxiety as their main feeling. They do not show much sadness which is associated more with a recognition that something has already happened. People frozen in time tend to feel that something bad is about to happen. That is why they feel particularly anxious when something good is happening. They feel that the other shoe is always about to fall. That is why you feel anxious talking about a bad childhood memory. It does not feel like you are looking at an old photograph. It feels more like you are in that photograph right now and cannot escape.

We usually think of boredom as meaning that we are not interested, or are tired of what we are currently involved with. If we moved onto another activity the boredom usually ends. However, when the person frozen in time complains of boredom, he is referring to a more extreme and trapped feeling. This kind of boredom reflects how they have frozen time and so have stopped life. They experience a deadness. On the surface they feel irritable, trapped. But unconsciously, it is reassuring because it says they have stopped time, they have frozen themselves at home as a child and that is where they want to stay.