Longing for the Good Old Days?
~ You may want to let go ~

by Joan Friedlander

One of my clients is has had an understandably difficult time reconciling how she sees herself now compared with who she used to rely on herself to be before she became ill. She's learning to integrate the impact of a severe and painful illness that can often make it difficult for her to focus on her work projects. In addition to the pain she feels in the moment, she adds pressure to her situation when she compares her capacity now with her capacity before she became ill.

Always, she has the greatest ability to positively influence her sense of Self, yet it's where she wages the greatest battle. She's tenacious though. She has made it her mission to accept - and embrace - what is so in the moment so that she can figure out what she can reasonably expect of herself when it comes to work. Slowly, but surely, she's disconnecting her identity from her circumstances.

I understand. I remember the anguish and disbelief I felt when I compared the present to the past after I became ill in 1992 with symptoms of Crohn's Disease. It threw me for a huge loop, both physically and emotionally. Every time I had a persistent flare up of symptoms my identity took a big hit, just as hers is doing now. The picture I had created of myself as a reliable, responsible worker broke down when my illness significantly reduced my capacity to produce. I certainly felt guilty. But worse, really, I judged my life in the present through the lens of the past.

As with Our Bodies, So with Our World

It seems to me that what my client and I have done in response to our illnesses is what the collective consciousness is doing in the face of the economic, environmental and political upheavals of recent years. Collectively, we have literally lost our sense of reliability, identity and power to influence, or so it appears. Now, every new hit becomes another blow to our collective identity.

What happens when you compare the past to the present and the present comes up short? It reduces your capacity to respond realistically to the present. For example, if you notice that you are thinking about how much easier it used to be to attract clients to your business, where is your attention? It's not on the present. It's on the past that you judge as better, compared to a present you judge as unpleasant. You're not asking "what now?" you're complaining about what is and wishing for what used to be.

Romanticizing the Past is a Conditioned Response

Psychologists rightly point out that when we review the past we feel we have lost we tend to romanticize it. In other words, we suffer from selective memory which tends to forget what was unpleasant and remember what was good. We refer to the past as "the good old days."

You may think this is a personal problem. Interestingly enough, those who have studied personal and collective memory assert that our individual memories are highly susceptible to the social forces of the collective memory. I share a few quotes from an article on the subject to give you a sense of what is at work so that you may consider that what sticks to you may not even belong to you.

Cultural memory studies...address what Paul Ricoeur so aptly labeled “the mnemonic phenomenon,” the dialogical process through which collectivities recall the past in light of present concerns that are in part shaped by this very past that is being recalled and refashioned in the present.

According to Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) ... [in] his late in life work On Collective Memory, published posthumously in 1950, memory is not only essentially a reconstruction of the past in light of the present, but also a process largely determined by social forces beyond the control of a single individual.

Michel Foucault ... drew attention to the phenomenon he termed countermemory. A countermemory can be fictive in nature, or it can be a form of excessive remembrance of one event at the expense of other events... .Foucault’s term has also been expanded to apply to another kind of memory, namely fictively romanticizing the past so as to promote an agenda in the present. Nostalgia, never a reliable lens on the past, can be regarded as a kind of countermemory.

Excerpted from "Introduction: Cultural Memory, the Past and the Static of the Present" by Jane Marie Law, Ithaca, New York, September 2007. To read the full report visit http://www.leidykla.eu/fileadmin/Acta_Orienatalia_Vilnensia/7__1-2_/7-12.pdf

To Move Ahead You Have to Let Go

I have noticed over the past year, especially, that those who have come to me for coaching, not to fix what's wrong but to expand and refine with an eye on the future, are doing well. They don't talk about the problems of the day, they talk about what they want to accomplish. In contrast, those who come to coaching to fix what feels broken don't do as well. Their attention is on how hard it is now and how much easier (better) it was in the past. Consequently, it's far more difficult for them to move forward and grow again. As a matter of fact, it's practically impossible. It's as hard for them as pushing a bolder uphill.

To fix what is broken is not likely to be served by trying to recapture the past, which is most assuredly in the past. It is better served by taking a deep breath and asking "what now?"

The client I described at the beginning of this article has turned a corner. Her life is opening up for her; the stress compounded in her body by trying to hold on to an identity forged in the past is leaving her. She's responding to the present and is excited about her future. As a matter of fact, she's taking responsible steps to retire from a high profile, prestigious profession to pursue a new career direction that she feels will be more rewarding. Her physical pain is still present, but she's stopped trying to recapture the past, which creates more ease in the moment.

 

by Joan Friedlander, © 2010. All rights reserved.