ONE MORE TIME…. with feeling !

by stanley

.....Have you ever thought how your life consists of repeat performances? If you are lucky you make the same mistake twice in a lifetime, but if you are like me you make the same mistake over and over.
.....I never learn!
......Well, maybe that’s not altogether true. I do learn, but very slowly. Take my relationships for instance. It’s only now, when many people would say it’s too late, something seems to have changed for me. I seem to have advanced from infantile dependency to mature dependency. Really quite good. But for most of my life I have repeated the same cycle, the same excitement of hope followed by the same dénouement of disappointment.
......After making a mistake – I mean an important emotional investment that goes wrong – it would seem you are a more sensible person if you carefully avoid the same mistake again. Unfortunately, if you are sensible enough to do this, your life becomes an avoidance strategy, where very little happens. The alternative seems to be intolerable repeat performances, same drama over and over. The archetypal image of this is the wife whose drunken husband repeatedly beats her up and from whom she retreats to a safe house – only to return to him again for the umpteenth time – with feeling!
......The hope for a better future is part of the deadly cycle of pointless repetition. Hope always comes before the first act of the drama begins. In fact, without hope the cycle would never start up again. At my age, having a limited future is a forced advantage. But for younger people who do have a future the problem is much more difficult. It tends to stimulate the infantile state, where no matter how bad life is, it most definitely won’t go on like that. One day my Prince will come. The future has everything.
......The philosopher Santayana said: ‘He who cannot remember the past is doomed to repeat it.’ Mostly we repeat it without remembering it in the right way. But therapy is more than just remembering. In therapy life’s repetitions are condensed. That’s why in therapy, without prompting, you return to the same problem area over and over, each time slightly differently.
......Freud worried about what he called 'The Repetition Compulsion'. But there has to be repetition because real change is slow.
.....One more time with only slightly different feelings – that’s realistic movement. There has to be repeat performances to gain any depth in life. Real change is not leaping out of your skin into a different lifestyle with the past just a thing of the past. Real change is slow and it carries the past with it; you gradually discover the past enriches you as it accompanies you on your journey, sometimes a very long journey. That’s why you can’t duck in for a few counselling sessions and fix things. The old psychoanalysts knew this. That’s why they thought in terms of years rather than weeks. And this is especially true now that we have a better understanding of the how the process works, the way things move forward in their own way, at their own speed, step by step, each step having its own emotional logic.