INTRODUCTION TO FROZEN IN TIME PSYCHOTHERAPY

 Why would you want to unconsciously freeze time and stay in your childhood home if that home was so destructive, violent, neglectful, and unhappy? You unconsciously have held onto the wish or hope that if you stay around and wait long enough, your parent will become normal and give you what you did not get as a child: approval, love,  and security. So, freezing time will allow you to have a second chance to get what you did not get. That is why every next situation in your life feels so decisive, so do- or -die. This next situation is your second chance and your wish will either be fulfilled or you will experience a repeat of the trauma and disappointment of your childhood. That is why you overreact to minor situations. An example of how you pretend to still be in your childhood home is shown in how you unconsciously seek out destructive relationships. On a conscious level you experience your pattern of getting into destructive relationships as a sign of your poor judgment, as an addiction, or as a sign of your low self-esteem. But, on a more unconscious level you continue to seek out these destructive relationships because these relationships are similar to the destructive relationships you had at home with your parents. Surrounding yourself with these destructive relationships helps you to pretend that you are in your childhood home at this very moment. Not one minute has passed since your childhood. To freeze time you had to freeze everything. You had to experience no movement inside you or around you, as though all living  had stopped. You have to shut off all the life in you, the part of you that lives and grows and changes with the passage of time. This leaves you feeling as empty as an abandoned house inside your body. All you see is a picture which captured that moment that you froze. Just as you look at a snapshot that does not change, so do you experience the world and yourself.  As an adult now, you are not consciously aware that you have frozen time. You are however, aware of feeling childlike. You are also aware of having a chronic empty feeling that nothing can fill. You feel that you are helpless, controlled, and your only option is to wait and react to what others do to you. You clutch tightly to a child view to keep everything the same. Your view of relationships, your view of people and yourself, your ideas of how people grow up, your view of what happens when you make a mistake or do something wrong, your approach to making decisions, are all the same views you held at the moment you stopped time as a child. No new information is allowed.  To stop time you had to stop living emotionally. That is why you have that empty feeling. Therefore, to unfreeze time, to begin the flow of life again, you must locate the life inside you. You have to experience your own actions, pulse, wishes, aliveness. Action makes time move.  Actually, you have been alive and active all along, but you could not allow yourself to know  that fact  consciously ,otherwise  you could not stay frozen in time. The way you have been active all along is by utilizing the 10 ways to freeze time. Therefore, to unfreeze time you have to become aware of this activity. This activity of utilizing the 10 ways to freeze time represents where you are alive at this moment trying  to stay home as a child, to make your wish comes true. On the surface, or consciously, you are not aware of this activity that you are busy carrying out. Consciously, you just experience yourself as stuck and trapped, and you do not know how to get out of it. People frozen in time describe themselves as going through the motions, stuck, scared, lacking, afraid to choose, just feeling they are not participating or living. You experience your problems more as habit instead of choice. You must be shown how busy you actually are  choosing to freeze time by carrying out the 10 ways to freeze time. You must see the life and activity going on inside you right now. That is why it is useless for you to be told "you are living in the past". When you hear this you just feel misunderstood. You will say " how can you be talking about my childhood when I live in such a hell right now ".  Remember, that you experience life as happening to you, and all you can do is react. You are not aware that it is you unconsciously actively setting up situations so that it feels like you are still that child at home right now. Its like you are the director of your movie and you give everyone around you their specific roles to act out so that only one scene in your movie is played out over and over again: the scene of you as a child at home with your parents.  A person stated " I already know what happened to me as a child and that is in the past. What do I do now, in my present life when I feel so afraid, bad, and inadequate". This man does not see that he froze time. For him, there is no past that is already finished. For him there is only an ongoing never ending present where the world is filled with impending danger, disappointment, and unhappiness. It is all too familiar to him because it is his childhood home he sees everywhere. I invite you to explore my website and learn how to unfreeze time and show up fully alive ready to live as an adult.

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Copyright © 2004 by Michael Wells Ph.D. All rights reserved.