Results of Successfully Unfreezing Time

SIGNS THAT YOU HAVE SUCCESSFULLY UNFROZEN TIME AND HAVE RETURNED TO THE PRESENT

Introduction-

As you become more aware of how busy you are right now trying to fix your childhood home, it becomes clearer that your wish does not belong here. It belongs to another time, your childhood. You realize that the people in your current life that you are looking to to fix your childhood cannot do it. You now experience the hurt more deeply. Before this realization you could not experience this hurt because you were too busy running and dodging and protecting yourself, as if you were in that past right now. Now that you experience yourself in the present, far away from that destructive home, it is safe enough to reflect back and allow the hurt. Now you see the past as something that is finished and cannot be changed. Now that you are back in the present you are in a better position to resolve the past quickly and move on. Below is a description of the steps you follow as you free yourself from your childhood and start to grow again.

Two Main Emotional reactions

1. ANGER- The anger here is different from the chronic anger you have been stuck with all this time. That anger served to keep you frozen in your childhood and still involved with your parents. The new anger is a recognition that you were cheated at a time in the past and because it was in the past it cannot be undone. Its more a real recognition of what really happened. You experience a fresh "why" or "it was not right", as if it just occurred to you for the first time what you went through. One woman expressed shock that her father sexually abused her. For years she talked about the abuse more with fear and with episodes of physically hurting herself. This showed that she talked about it more as if she were there with her father right now being abused. Now that she has unfrozen time and left that scary scene to return to the present as the adult she really is, it is safer to look back and feel shock and anger. This anger is short lived. You are ready to move on and join the real world and grow. This moving on has the feeling of leaving home, a kind of hatching into a full adult. As are most of your feelings at this stage, this new anger is more complex and reality based. You can now maintain different feelings simultaneously since you are no longer frozen in one moment with just one issue, one need, and one feeling. You can now experience empathy along with your anger. It is no longer either/or. You can now take care of yourself while also feel empathy and love for the family that was so destructive. The anger is also more contained. It is not something you feel all the time toward everyone in the world. A woman who was frozen in time saw her mother as only revengeful and hateful. When she unfroze herself she began to look at her mother more through an adults eyes. She now saw her mother more as someone who was lonely for most of her life living with an unavailable husband. She can identify with that loneliness. She can now visit home confident she wont be engulfed by her mother.

2. UNPREPARED FEELING- This unprepared feeling is not the anxious feeling you have when you are frozen in time and feel you are in your childhood home right now about to be hurt. Its not about being traumatized. Instead, this new unprepared anxious feeling represents your awareness that you have left your childhood home. You have emerged from the shadow of your family and you feel exposed. You are psychologically leaving home. This new fear is about new opportunities. It is a health promoting anxiety, not a paralyzing anxiety. This feeling is usually short lived and is followed by more talk of the future instead of the past. At this stage a hunger develops. This is not the hunger or deprived feeling that you have when you are frozen as a child. This new hunger represents an unconscious awareness that you cant leave home unless you have something positive to take with you. If you do not find something positive to take from home, then you are saying there is no good in the world and you will expect to see your disappointing home over and over, everywhere you go. To take the positive from home, you begin to take two steps. First, you search through your past family memories. Second, you compare yourself with your parents.

A. Search for positive-

You let go of the past only after you have taken something positive, something of value from home. At this stage you suddenly yearn to contact relatives to gather information about the family history. The purpose of this gathering of information is not about going back to decide who was right and who was wrong at home. The hunger is about filling out in your mind, the image of a supportive family to carry with you. At this stage you are open to new information instead of proving who was bad. You are alive enough again to allow yourself to wish again instead of hopelessly expecting disaster around every corner. Even if those wishes cannot be fulfilled, giving them conscious recognition will give those wishes a permanent home inside you forever. There is more curiosity than fear now since you are looking back at your history as an adult instead of experiencing yourself as that kid who is in that home right now. To discover that there was good in your family gives you the feeling that there is good in you also since that is where you came from. A woman decided to spend new years eve with her family of origin. She had kept visits at a minimum to protect herself from the chaos there. During the day when she was preparing to go there she had gotten a call from her brother who still lived with her parents. He called to warn her that her mother was in one of her crazy moods and that she should stay away. The woman was curious to see her mother's so called crazy mood and so she went to visit anyway. In the past, this woman would have reacted more with rage and anxiety instead of curiosity when her mother was like that. She was now looking at her mother through an adults eyes. Another woman spontaneously blurted out that she now knows she was abused as a child. Usually when she spoke about how her father sexually abused her she spoke with rapid speech and intense anxiety. Now she was speaking calmly and with sadness. Instead of finding ways to hurt herself she was now trying to see how her feelings about her past might be related to how she feels about herself today. It was at this point she asked herself a new question for the first time. She wondered if her father would have done what he did to her if he could see how it destroyed her life thereafter. Her answer was "maybe, maybe not". The issue at this stage is not about her father's wrong doing. The important process taking place in her asking this question is that she is trying to remove herself from this traumatic past. To accomplish that she is trying to find a positive idea from her childhood home to take with her. Just contemplating the idea that her father might have been more caring was her effort to imagine a positive parent. After reaching this stage she began to be more focused on the future and what she wanted to achieve. She had psychologically left home.

Examples of situations where you locate that positive from your family to take with you.

Focus on subtle changes-

1. Visits to family- A woman visits her parents and her alcoholic father asks her if she is still smoking. When he asked that question in the past it usually meant he selfishly wanted to get a cigarette off of her. This time when he asked, she allowed herself for about thirty seconds to pretend that he was asking that question because he was concerned about her health. Then she felt foolish to allow herself to wish for that. She always felt "erased" when not cared for. At this stage it is not important whether he cared or not in his question but that she was allowing herself to wish again and take from an imagined good father.

2. New memories emerge- A man grew up with an alcoholic mother who was more childlike than him. He had only negative things to say about her until recently when it suddenly occurred to him that she breast fed him as an infant. Right after this realization his posture changed from slumped and depressed to straight and strong. He began to focus more on his career and possible job moves. He was more future oriented. He saw a positive in his mother and felt he had something to take with him as he was psychologically leaving home. Similarly, a woman who up until now only saw her father as cold and punitive, suddenly recalled that relatives had said that her father used to call her his "little Princess" when she was a child. Again, this represents that she has separated herself from her past enough to not be threatened by recalling memories. She is psychologically leaving home and now has something positive to take with her. Some people who are not able to come up with a positive memory from home will sometimes recall a supportive teacher, aunt or uncle. It is not crucial that the positive memory has to include a parent. The issue here is that in taking from someone good the person is accepting that there is good in the world and he can leave home.

3. Fill in the blank- Here you are trying to dig up buried wishes of what could have been, a brief spark of what a good childhood could have been. Once you allow yourself to experience those wishes, then you are more able to voluntarily give up those old outdated wishes as if you were shedding a skin. A man spoke of his father who had been dead for ten years. He spoke of how his father had never come to any of his games that he played in as a child. I commented "that it would have been nice if he did and it would have been nice if he patted you on the back and told you how proud he was of you". He responded with "yes I would have loved that". But he very quickly followed with "but that will never happen". For just a moment he was able to suspend reality and allow himself to take something positive. He achieved an inner satisfaction that allowed him to let go of demands that his father actually be here right now and meet his need. He had something positive to take with him.

B. Comparison with parent-

At this stage you attempt to compare yourself to your parent. You are doing this for the same reason you search for a positive from your childhood home. You are looking for something positive to take. By identifying a trait that you and your parent have in common you are rejoining the tribe so to speak and establishing normalcy. This is in the same spirit of the child who says with pride "just like daddy". The urge is no longer to fight and avoid but to take your place in your family. Before you unfroze yourself you could not do this stage because comparing yourself with your parent would have felt too threatening. To recognize a quality in yourself that is similar to a parent whom you hated would feel too much like you were still at home as a child helpless and unable to escape. It would feel like you just cant escape. But now that you have unfrozen yourself and returned to the present as an adult you can look back and compare yourself with your parents without feeling threatened. A man mentioned that the anniversary of his mothers death was approaching in a few days. She died when he was eleven years old. She died giving birth to his sister. So even though this date was also his sisters birthday he never celebrated it or acknowledged it. To him this date meant only one thing. He lost his mother. For him there was no other moment in his life but that one. He had frozen himself in that moment and still felt he was that eleven year old. If he waited long enough, maybe she would come back. This week he appeared to unfreeze himself from that one moment in time as an eleven year old. He now thought that this day was also his sisters birthday and he decided to celebrate it with her. Until now he had isolated himself from his family as a way to preserve the past and keep everything the same. He was recently shocked when a friend told him he was closer to fifty years old than eleven. On this same day he went to his sisters house to celebrate her birthday for the first time, he later decided to go visit his old neighborhood where he grew up and lived with his mother. He wanted to find out about who his mother was as a person, not just as his mother. He visited neighbors who described her as very giving and how people often came to her for advice. He realized that he has that same quality. He had taken something positive and was ready to move on. People are often surprised at how little they really new about their parents. A woman looking back at her childhood from an adult point of view can now see that the so called rejecting, punitive, inconsistent mother was a mother who was afraid and was clinging to her. Another woman who just visited her mother went home to her apartment and felt a sudden urge to clean (she usually kept a messy apartment). She described cleaning just the way her mother does. She found herself using her mothers words but this time she was not panicked about it. She accepted parts of her mother that were also in her. She experienced this trait as something similar to her mother instead of it feeling like her mother was invading her and still tormenting her. She has taken something positive. Now that she has unfrozen herself she can recognize that she took some of her mothers qualities, not that she was taken over by these qualities. At this stage seeing similarities produces warm feelings, a sense of belonging instead of anxiety. A man who felt rejected by his father was looking back as an adult. He recalled that his father would not let him visit him in the hospital when he was dying. As a child he viewed that as rejection. As an adult now he understands that his father kept him out of the hospital because he did not want him to see his father deteriorating and weak. He now saw his father as vulnerable and scared instead of rejecting. He is no longer frozen in time. He is exploring this past in a curious way, expanding and connecting information instead of fighting and dodging and narrowing his perceptions and conclusions. Similarly, a woman who was critical of her mothers parenting ability can now appreciate that she has children of her own ,that its hard to separate your own needs from the needs of your children. As an adult she can examine more freely what were her mothers aspirations, what was she trying to accomplish in life, what were her limitations.

Moving on and creating new meaning-

Introduction- Now that you have unfrozen time you have entered the present ready to create a life from here on. It involves combining the necessary past( what was and cannot be changed) with the future (what can be). It is not unusual at this stage that you experience sadness. Unlike depression, this sadness is not about tearing yourself down. This sadness simply represents your grieving over missed opportunities. The sadness is a burst of rich and authentic affect. You do not lose yourself as you do in depression. Your emphasis shifts from an acceptance of the past to initiating your present and future.

A. Initiating versus reacting- You are now focused on who you are becoming instead of looking for your parents to complete you. You are creating, not waiting to be fed. A person decided "I will decide to think of a new way to look at myself instead of waiting for others to decide for me". It involves you becoming what you need and wish to be as opposed to wishing or imagining having what you feel you lack. You are moving beyond understanding what you went through to creating a new meaning out of what happened. Your past now is experienced as the past (instead of as an ongoing never ending controlling present).

B. Relationship to family- You are now looking for your families blessings, their acknowledgement and acceptance for who you are becoming on your own instead of looking for them to make you into someone. You are looking for acknowledgement of the growing process you are experiencing as opposed to the earlier urge to instantly become by magic wand.

C. Establish forms of pleasure and satisfaction.- You are no longer spending all of your time and energy defensively trying to make up for felt inadequacies. It is interesting to notice that as you are beginning to establish sources of pleasure and fun, you somehow start to notice that the parent you saw as unhappy and unfulfilled has areas that are sources of pleasure and fulfillment as well.

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