How to Unfreeze Time

HOW TO UNFREEZE TIME

STEP I

COLLECT SAMPLES

When you wake up each day assume that you have already unconsciously arranged the day ahead of you and that you are insisting that you are a child with your parents. You are so sure how people are going to treat you and that something will go wrong. Now, go through your day watching how you react towards family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and strangers. Watch how you go to work feeling unprepared or unqualified to do your work, as if you are an imposter and hope they do not find out. Pay attention to how you experience yourself around these people and how you experience them. It will become clearer to you how busy you are unconsciously preparing to experience each situation around you as if you were a child at home with your parent right now Or conversely, you could experience the other person as a helpless child and you are the parent. You do not experience an equals kind of relationship between two adults. You attribute your lack of confidence and over reliance on other peoples judgment to your low self-esteem. But what you are really doing is making yourself childlike so that you can experience others as wiser, like a parent who will give to you. Everything is in their hands. Their opinion is more important than your own, the way a kid feels with a parent. You are so preoccupied with other peoples thoughts, feelings, behavior, and opinions, that you have little awareness or focus on your own feelings. This demonstrates that you are putting other people in the position of being more powerful, and parent-like. You can then just wait to see what they will do with you, whether they are a good parent or not, and will they give or not. You have this feeling that everything is on the line in the next moment, that what people around you do will make or break you, fix you, make your life worthwhile again. This kind of experience should tell you that though on a conscious level you went to work today, on a more unconscious level, you were experiencing yourself in you childhood home with your parents hoping to be taken care of the right way and not abused again. If you did a good job today at work and you do not get a pat on the back by co-workers, you feel your work is worthless, all for nothing, why bother doing anything. That kind of reaction tells you that you did not go to work as an adult who does his work and feels accomplished even if others did not praise you for it. Instead, you were a child going to your parents for recognition. Another person who did not get a call from her husband today feels she is invisible, worthless. She is not experiencing her husband as her spouse and partner. She is experiencing him more as a parent who is not reacting to her and making her feel she is worthless. In fact, she experiences her husband not calling her the moment she expected the call as his deliberate attempt to deprive her, the way a child feels. Another person stated that she felt depressed, without energy, when her husband did not ask questions about her day. This woman recalls her mother as being so self absorbed that she would often forget to pick her up from school when she was waiting. This woman is experiencing her husband as if he were that uncaring mother. These examples serve to drive home the point that when you get up each day preparing to go to work, or other daily activity, you are unconsciously preparing to experience everyone you see today as your parent who is going to give to you or repeat a disappointment. Everywhere you go is home, every moment, every situation. As you collect more and more samples of how you unconsciously experience every situation as your childhood home, you will begin to experience how busy you are. You will begin to experience your own action, the life in you. It is then you will begin to unfreeze time and return to the present as an adult. In collecting all these samples, its like you are filling up a balloon in front of you that can no longer be ignored.

STEP II

Go from habit to choice, from anxiety to curiosity-Challenge your reactions

Even after you have collected many samples that demonstrate how you are actively keeping yourself as a child, you still do not quite see it as your deliberate action. You experience it more as a bad habit that is out of your control. You still ask "ok, I see what you mean, but how do I stop doing it" This question reveals how you still do not see your action or choice and you are still frozen in time and cant move. You are still looking for something or someone outside of you to carry out action and fix you. A woman is afraid to drop a boyfriend who is abusive and emotionally unavailable. She is panicky about being alone. She is also in a rage about feeling cheated in relationships and her current relationship is another example of how she is always cheated in life. She feels that if she leaves this relationship she will never find someone who is giving and caring. She feels this is her fate in life. What she is saying unconsciously is that she is still that child at home with her mother who abandoned her, who cheated her out of a normal childhood. Therefore, leaving this boyfriend feels more like being abandoned by her mother. That is why she experiences leaving this man as though its life threatening, as though she could die. That is how she felt as a child. This same woman tends to rely on others to make decisions for her instead of her using her own adult judgment. She experiences herself as a child and everyone around her is her parent. When asked why she does not trust her own decision making abilities she responded" its my low self-esteem". When asked for specifics about what is so low in her self-esteem, she did not know. I suggested that experiencing herself as not being capable of making decisions on her own was her way of saying she is a child still at home waiting for her mother to be more giving. But for that to happen she must see herself as small and incapable, requiring a parents help. She accomplishes this by seeing herself as having low self-esteem. After I explained this she asked "how do I stop this" I suggested that this is not a bad habit that is out of your control. Instead, her behavior is her way of making a choice, of insisting, deliberately making sure she is still at home as a child with her mother. She asked again, "ok, so how do I stop". This response suggests she still experiences her behavior as a habit and not deliberate action. Therefore, she still is not experiencing her own action and so is still frozen in time. She needs to experience her action to start time again. In response to her question about how can she stop doing this, I suggested she start to live and react as if she is in the present, as if she is an adult in the year 2001. She can start to challenge her reactions to people and take a chance that there could be another way to view these situations. Will she be homeless and die if she leaves this relationship. A child would feel that way if their parent abandoned her. She can view this breakup with her boyfriend as the end of a mere adult relationship that was disappointing. She does not have to view it as a child being abandoned. I suggested that her saying that a good relationship with a man will never happen is her way of saying she is staying home with her mother where nothing good happens. I suggested that another way she can live in the present is to start to make her own decisions and use her own adult judgment and find out she wont die from it. She was worried that if she left this boyfriend, it will damage him and he wont recover from it. I explained that this comment shows that for her, all there are in the world are abandoned children and parents who abandon them. This is more proof she is insisting she is not an adult in the year 2001, but that at this moment she is in the year 1967, at home with her mother. Stop putting so much energy into being that abandoned child, and just see this relationship ending with this man as simply an adult relationship that was not good for you. At that moment her anger and dejection changed to energy and a smile. There is something for her to do in the present instead of her passively waiting as a child for her fate to be handed to her. When she asks how do I stop, I switch the question to "when are you going to be ready to leave home". In response to this question she thought of something that she thought might go along with what I was saying to her. She described how when she goes shopping for clothes, she thinks about whether her parents would like what she bought. She realized that she unconsciously was carrying her parents around with her, as a child would. She was beginning to see how she was very active. She was realizing that her behavior was not simply a bad habit or something left over from her childhood. She was viewing herself as choosing her action. This gave her hope and relief that she could actually move on in her life.

STEP III Go from just surviving to really living

Is that the only reason you did that?

This stage goes beyond stopping bad habits and finding how you are actively staying in the past. This stage focuses on living now in the present as an adult. Its not just stopping what you have been doing. Its discovering the adult that was there in you all along. Its finding more adult reasons for doing things instead of connecting all of your actions to repairing your childhood. Are there not more interesting things to do than to continually try to patch up your life and carry out emergency rescue operations? To show up to the present as an adult can be facilitated by starting to recognize activities you do that are unrelated to fixing your childhood. Also, you can discover that activities you carried out for the purpose of fixing your childhood can also contain purposes not related to that. For example, a person who went all out on her job was disappointed when she did not get the pat on the back from her boss, and felt it was all worthless, all for nothing, and she might as well quit her job. This showed that she was unconsciously doing this job to get approval and feel worthwhile. It was an all or nothing test of her value and her bosses reaction was going to decide her value, make or break her. She began to realize how she was stuck in this pattern of using her job and boss to repair her low self-esteem related to traumatic situations with her parents. This awareness helped her to stop setting up situations like that at work to prove her value as a person. But she also needed to begin to see more adult reasons for doing her job. I asked her if she only did this job for childhood reasons. She began to realize that she did her job also because she liked the work and it was rewarding in itself. This helped her to experience herself in the present, in the year 2001 as an adult involved in something unrelated to her childhood home and parents. There actually can be a different place and time other than that one moment frozen in time in her childhood home as a child waiting for her life to begin. Another example involved a woman who after putting in a hard week at work was planning to go spend the weekend at her boyfriends home in another city. She asked him ahead of time that he should just leave her alone when she arrives. This included no hug hello, no demands for intimacy in bed, and just let her sit alone and watch television for a while. She grew up with an alcoholic father who was very demanding and placed a tremendous burden on her. So she is unconsciously experiencing her boyfriend as if he were her father. I pointed out to her that by keeping her boyfriend at a distance and therefore not really be involved with him she can maintain her expectation that her boyfriend is her father and will burden her. If she were to really get involved with her boyfriend she would find out he is not like her father and that would mean she is not that child at home with her father frozen in time. She would not want to accept that reality because unconsciously she wants to stay home as a child hoping she will get what she did not get from her father, real caring. She responded to my suggestion with " well then how should I have been when I got to my boyfriends house?". Here again she not only needs to stop her frozen in time activity, but she needs to experience her visit with her boyfriend as a year 2000 adult level event unrelated to her childhood needs. I suggested that when she gets there, do what one adult does with another adult. Hug him ,embrace him, and view that embrace only as a hello between two friends, and not you giving your soul away to your father. I was encouraging her to leave that frozen time and show up to the present where there are people who are really available now.

Beyond emergency do-or-die moments to ordinary days-

To move past the frozen in time moment as a child waiting for good to happen you must start to see your days as ordinary. You need to see your day as not a desperate emergency moment all day long in which your childhood is about to be repaired by the person you are with at the moment. You do not have to feel the way Dorothy did in the wizard of oz, terrified, but hopeful that her wish will be granted. Experience your day as uneventful, ordinary, with nothing decisive about it. Go through your ordinary list of daily chores to do, bills to pay, shopping and so on. A woman experienced many disappointments as a child with her father. When he calls to wish her merry Christmas she tells her husband she refuses to come to the phone. She feels that she harbors too much resentment and will confront and attack him if she talks to him. I suggested that she make it an ordinary day and moment and just do the normal thing and wish him a merry Christmas. I am not trying to imply that she should pretend there is no conflict with her father. I am trying to suggest that she does not have to view each moment as the do-or-die moment with her father where all of her disappointments and hurts have to be addressed. Otherwise, she is just insisting that there is no other time or place but her childhood home where she is that little girl with her father right now and he is about to hurt her again. To help make it an ordinary day you want to look at the pace or speed you move with in your day. The person who very anxiously rushes at work, rushes at dinner, is living like there is no tomorrow, as if there is only the next urgent moment of truth that will decide his value.

Identify what you like instead of what you want relief from

When you are frozen in time as a child still at home where you feel unsafe and uncared for, you are preoccupied with finding momentary relief. You do not have the luxury of pursuing what you like. Its like comparing the life of a military man in the middle of a war with the life of an ordinary civilian. The civilian can go to a picnic. He can play his favorite sport. He can pursue what he likes and what is gratifying to him. The military man cant have a picnic when bullets are flying by. He cant pursue his interests when his life is in danger. He is preoccupied with survival. The best he can hope for is temporary relief from his nightmare. This latter world is similar to the world of the person frozen in time as a child in their nightmare home. It is not enough for you to stop living in this dysfunctional way. To just stop the frozen in time behaviors would just feel like you are still in that home but just experiencing momentary relief. To truly leave your childhood and show up to the present as an adult, you need to identify and focus on the things that bring joy to you, that bring gratification to you, instead of just focusing on the things that help you dodge and hide and survive and gain relief for another day. At first, my suggestion to focus on what you like may seem trivial and easy. In fact I find many people frozen will tell me that they already tried this suggestion and it has not helped them. But when you look closer at how they focus on the things they like, it becomes clearer that they are not focusing on those positive things in an emotional and involved way. Instead they experience these positives more as in the background to their real concern: fixing their childhood and avoiding further damage. So you spend more of your energy focused on what you do not have and feel you never will. A woman had a father who had affairs . She fears that she will never find the right man and get married. All of her energy goes into being sure nothing good can happen in her life. It keeps her stuck in a world of what is bad and what was done to her in her life. Why is she not going after her goals? If you want to be married, go after it. It involves going for what you want instead of avoiding what you do not want or fear. What can help you to begin to focus on the happy and positives in your life is to notice and truly believe that other people enjoy their lives. People who are insisting that they are still in their unhappy childhood home see everyone around them as also unhappy and unfulfilled. You have to see only bad for everyone since everywhere is home. To begin to see others as happy and able to take from life would mean you have to admit you are not home anymore. A woman is very self-sacrificing at her own expense and feels she has no choice but to be that way. She grew up in a family with a difficult and uninvolved father. The mother always made it known to her that she stayed with him as a sacrifice for the kids. I suggested that maybe her mother stayed with her father for more selfish reasons and that it was not just a total self-sacrifice. This woman began to realize that her mother has no problem saying no to her so why cant she have the same privilege. People frozen in time discount situations where it seems others are leading happy and satisfying lives. They are quick to insist that it must just be a cover. They are quick to point out that all their friends seem to be in unhappy relationships and that most marriages end in divorce. Its their way of insisting that everywhere is their unhappy home. It would be a good exercise for you to start taking note of people who are happy and for you to start believing its real. That would mean that you could also have those things. That would mean that you have to take a chance. To just assume that only bad happens in life and there is no use in trying is a way to stay safe at home in your unhappy childhood home. Sometimes a frozen in time person will complain about and wonder why their sibling ,who grew up in the same dysfunctional family, appears to be living a relatively normal and fulfilling life. How could this be so since she, on the other hand, leads a miserable life of suffering and destructive relationships. Many would say that her sibling is suffering behind the happy exterior. There may be some truth to that but you have to also look at it from the point of view that her noticing her sibling as happy can represent how she is possibly entertaining the idea that maybe she can experience happiness. Maybe anyone who came from a dysfunctional home does not automatically have to be cursed and denied happiness forever. So it can be helpful to take notice of other peoples happiness and begin to trust that it is real.

Start viewing yourself and others as capable adults instead of as incomplete, damaged, and unequipped children

Its time to see others as capable and not needing rescuing. If you do not see your spouse as an adult then you do not see yourself as an adult either. When a therapist told her patient that he has low self-esteem because of how his mother degraded him, the patient felt more helpless. He understands the therapists interpretation to mean that he was scared by his mother and that will never go away. He sees his life as a result of what was done to him and he cant heal the scar. He does not experience this as a bad memory and part of his life that has passed. He experiences it as an ongoing present that will never end. Its a way of saying that he is that child right now being degraded. In other words he is maintaining that damaged view of himself so he can stay home as a child and hopefully be taken care of. It is very common to hear people frozen in time over focus on their inadequacies. Its their way of saying they are little children and they require the support of parents. It becomes an easy out and avoidance of showing up in the current year as an adult to participate. They experience their feeling inadequate as proof of damage done to them instead of viewing those feelings as part of their busy unconscious effort to stay home as a child. If you look at low self-esteem as a sign of damage done to you, then you see the solution as a long process of building qualities you feel you do not have. You see the cure as a long process of trying to redo your childhood and receive the correct parenting. But, if you look at your feelings of inadequacy as part of your active effort to freeze time, then you could view the solution more as a choice. The choice is to stay home or be an adult. You already have all the equipment you need to be an adult. Its a matter of choosing to recognize those qualities. Its not a long hard effort. Its a choice.

Evaluate situations from adults point of view.

People who froze themselves at home as a child never give themselves the opportunity to evaluate situations from an adults point of view. They look at situations through the eyes of that child. That is why every situation seems so big, so overwhelming and dangerous. They look at situations through the eyes of their parents. A woman complained that she cant stop being negative about everything. She is critical of everyone at work and feels she cant stop it. She recalled that her father was always very critical and she can hear him in her voice. She asked how she could stop the negativity. I asked her if she believes the world is as negative as her father did. This question encouraged her to use her own adult judgment She did not have to be that child at home who keeps her fathers views alive. She had the feeling that to stop adopting her fathers view of the world was like falling out of a safety net. This showed that keeping her fathers negativity was her way of staying home as a child being taken care of. Its not enough to help her stop her efforts to freeze time. She has to also begin to use her own adult abilities to judge situations to really experience herself as an adult in the year 2000. She can even evaluate her fear that she will get hurt without her fathers safety net. From an adult point of view, she can realize that she will be fine without that safety net. Another woman described how everything seemed so overwhelming to her even though she was taking care of her responsibilities with no apparent difficulty. She was obviously looking at her normal adult responsibilities from a child point of view. I asked her to go over the details of each of these daily responsibilities that appeared overwhelming. As she reviewed each activity in detail it became clear to her that all of these chores were all very manageable. She began to feel less anxious and overwhelmed. This happened because detailing the specifics of a current moment help to separate it from the more ambiguous timeless frozen moment she was living in feeling like a child.

Going through the process instead of demanding instant results

Frozen in time people cannot allow themselves to experience the process involved in any activity because activity and movement implies time moving. So, instead they leap to the end result right away. This is why you are impatient in all areas that take time and involvement. You demand instant closeness in a new relationship instead of allowing the getting to know period. To get to know the person would mean that you must recognize qualities about the person that makes it clear that that person is not your parent. But you are trying to prove you are at home with your parent so you cant allow yourself to look too closely at who this new person is. Its like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. When she first went to see the wizard she did not notice much detail. She was so sure even before she met him that he would help her with his great powers. When she became more involved over time with the wizard she started to notice more detail about the wizard and eventually she noticed the old man behind the curtain who did not have magical powers. Even though she was relieved that he was not so powerful and scary, she was also disappointed that he was no longer powerful and magical enough to grant her wish. That is why People frozen in time cannot allow themselves to get involved in the process of any activity. They are afraid they will notice details that tell them they are not really a child at home any more and they have to give up their wish to fix their childhood. So, it is important for you to participate fully in the activities of your life. Even if it appears that on the surface you are participating, you must look closely at each detail to make sure. Allow yourself to slowly get to know the new person in your life that you wish to develop into a relationship. Allow yourself the many steps along the way that lead towards your career goals. Allow failures along the way that are a necessary part of learning. A woman found relief and more confidence when she realized that each activity or challenge is not a do-or-die, pass-or-fail moment when every thing is on the line. She could engage in activities knowing that each moment adds to her learning and experience. She can trust the process over time. She is not expected to know her new job perfectly on her first day. She can trust the process and steps that lead to experience and knowledge over time.

Separate the past from the present

When you are frozen in time in one moment you cannot experience a past leading up to a present and you do not experience the present leading to a future. You only experience one moment that never ends. So, to unfreeze yourself from this one moment and enter the present, you have to go over the steps you took and the choices you made to get you to where you are in your current life. You were not just dropped here out of nowhere, which is what you feel like when you only recognize the one moment you are frozen in. Go over all of your experiences leading up until now. This will begin to help you see that time is moving and you have followed a path that led you to the present. This activity also helps you to gain more distance from your past and experience the past more like the past, like a memory, something that is over and not still tormenting you. Most people experience memories as something that is over, as something you look back at. Frozen in time people, on the other hand, tend to experience recalling memories as more like they are being brought back to those actual moments. Looking at details of those memories helps to clarify the different elements of that moment in the past that separate it from the present. Just as you can begin to separate the past from the present by going over the details of each so that you can see the differences, similarly, you can also separate the present from the future to help you let go of that one frozen moment. When we say "tomorrow is another day", we are saying that time will move and we will enter new moments. Tomorrow will not necessarily be a replica of today. So, when you are having a bad day, it is comforting to know that tomorrow can be different and better. When you are frozen in one moment you cant be reassured that tomorrow is another day because there is only the one never ending moment you are trapped in right now. So a bad day does not just feel like a bad day. It feels like that is all there is going to be. That is why you cannot tolerate a bad day. If you are frozen in time, you will have difficulty going through this step of recognizing all of the past activity in your life that led to where they are in the present. You will probably insist that you already know about your past and that knowing about this past is not helping you with your horrible present life. This is a tricky step because if you look closer you will find that you are not really recognizing your past. This is shown in how you downplay the past. You will use phrases such as "Yes, but", to steer the conversation away from past events. You minimize the past to such an extent that you are really saying it does not exist. All that exists is this horrible present moment that never ends. You cannot allow the present endless moment that you are frozen in to be connected to anything that came before it or anything that could come after it. You are trapped in that photograph.

Engage in activities today that will serve to create distance from the past

One way to allow you to experience time moving and thus allow you to leave the moment you froze yourself in is to carry out actions today. For example, if you choose to learn a new hobby, like playing the guitar, you can keep track of how you are improving each day. This improvement tells you that time has passed since you are a better guitar player than you were the day before when you first started playing. You are no longer in the same moment you were in when you first started to learn. Your increased ability confirms that fact. When someone is frozen in one unending moment, they spend most of their energy insisting nothing has changed, there is nothing new, they have done nothing. This is the time to go over the new activity or project you started yesterday and point out how much you have accomplished since then. Be careful not to discount this progress.

Acknowledge activity and action that originated from you.

Identify your actions as real . Recall that time moves when you can experience movement and action in you and around you. Frozen in time people deny any action originating from them. So, to help unfreeze time you must begin to view action as having originated from yourself. For example, a woman who complained of being childish and dependent found herself being more adult like and independent at around the time that her father passed away. She no longer could depend on her father to guide her. When I pointed out how she was taking more initiative and successfully planning and organizing her life, she responded with " I have no choice". Saying she had no choice implies that she is a child who is forced to take action to survive now that her father died. She is not experiencing herself as an adult mourning the loss of her father .Instead, she feels like a kid who is suddenly homeless and afraid, and is trying to stay alive. This view of herself serves to negate any mature adult behavior in the current year. A similar example is of a man who lost his wife and now he feels forced to take care of himself to survive. He sees himself as a child who is suddenly homeless and forced to survive instead of viewing himself as an adult who just goes on to take care of his responsibilities in a normal, non-emergency kind of way.

Create room for not knowing everything

When you are insisting that you are forever frozen in one moment, then you have the feeling that you know everything and everyone in that moment and you feel that you know how everything is going to go in your life. That is why you are so sure that something bad is always about to happen or that someone your getting close to will disappoint or abandon you. You are so sure of it even with people you do not know because you are insisting that everywhere is home and so everyone is your parent and you know how your parents treated you. So when you are frozen in time in one moment at home as a child you have the feeling that you know everyone and everything in that situation. To unfreeze time and show up to the present you have to experience yourself as not knowing everyone and not being so sure about what is in store for you. You want to start developing a feeling that things, people, and places around you are not related to you and your life long mission to fix your childhood home. You want to develop the feeling that there are people who do not know you and your history and do not care either way. That can be a very freeing feeling. It is very freeing to not have to know everything, control everything and fix everything.

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