Therapeutic Time Travel
(6 min read)
Many in our generation have embraced the idea that relationships are the context in which we experience our most meaningful growth, and that they are the greatest catalysts for personal evolution. They are where we find real “traction,” where we care enough and are cared for enough—with the fierce urgency of romantic love longing for and striving to provide the unconditional positive regard of an ideal primary attachment figure—to stare the worst aspects of ourselves square in the face, and to stand by, to “hold space,” while our partners do the same. We confront the underlying reasons for our behaviors, reactions, and projections. We listen to painful feedback, acceptable only because we know it is coming from a place of love. We make adjustments. We take actions we would have never taken if it were not for our partners. We own up to things. We learn to take responsibility for our needs, learn to ask for them to be met. We learn to advocate for our vulnerable selves, much like a parent would advocate for a child: to say “hey, when you do this, it hurts me, can you please stop doing that?” We learn to distinguish between a healthy request to be honored for who we are and an unhealthy insistence on having our trauma-based coping mechanisms catered to.
In this way, what relationships provide is an ongoing calibration mechanism in which you learn to separate what is truly you from what is not you. Every negative reaction provides an opportunity to consider whether the thing you are upset about is something you want to continue defending—because it is based on a principle that you newly decide holds value and resonates with your true identity and priorities—or whether it is something you are ready to let go of—where new input and new perspectives shift your priorities, shift your focus, and shift your behavior to what you now see to be a more appropriate and beneficial way of responding to said situations. Seeing something in a new light, from a different vantage point, lets you adjust your position on it. It lets you, quite literally, change your location.
What I want to understand better is what exactly lies at the heart of this change. How does it work? Why does it work? What makes it happen? What, precisely, is the “it” that happens when it happens? Let me use a personal example to illustrate:
I have a six-year-old son who I’m sharing this soul journey with, and as our Self-Help saturated culture iterates ad nauseam, this parent (or primary caregiver)-child relationship is of paramount importance. The moment he was born the world ceased revolving around me, and began revolving around him. The relationship I have with him is not so much an external connection with an independent Other, as an internal connection with an outpost of my own soul. Children are in a way an extension of yourself, at least initially, in that your nervous system, your sphere of awareness, and your heart strings are permanently re-grafted to encompass something that is as much a part of you as your own arm or leg, but behaves and moves independently of your own will. Needless to say, having and enforcing “boundaries” with said extension of yourself is a challenge—one that continuously evolves but never resolves. Being a single parent can exacerbate boundary issues, as do inherent character traits and learned behaviors from one’s own formative years.
Long story short, over the years several people have remarked that my son sometimes speaks and behaves toward me in a disrespectful way. That he “demands” rather than “asks.” That he doesn’t respect my “boundaries,” my instructions, requests, rules, and guidelines. That he “orders me around,” etc. For years I didn’t understand what they meant. I would get defensive about it and pontificate passionately about how my nature, my circumstances, and my spiritual views on children (that they are here to teach us, perhaps more so than we are here to teach them) perfectly justified my peer-to-peer interaction with my son, even though he was a four, five, or six-year-old. I did not perceive his behavior to be “disrespectful” or a “violation of my boundaries.” Consequently any attempts at helping me become better at “enforcing boundaries” or “imposing structure” with my child failed, because to me it felt like I was being asked to change who I was. And I couldn’t change who I was. We are powerless over who we are. Right?
I don’t know. But something did change. It came about as a result of repeated confrontations about this issue with my partner, each time uncovering different and ever deeper aspects of it. Eventually it came to a breakthrough that shifted the entire landscape around this matter, including my perspective on every single variable involved. If you’ve ever had a personal realization or therapeutic discovery you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s an iterative process that involves a few key steps—steps that each person experiences in different ways, but I believe it’s possible to summarize the essentials along the following lines:
becoming aware that something about your behavior isn’t ideal;
watching it, observing it, experiencing it consciously in different scenarios;
bringing to light and articulating what constitutes the supporting structure behind the behavior (motivations, beliefs, feelings);
tracing the causes of those supporting motivations, beliefs, feelings;
examining those causes from your current day perspective, with the benefit of your knowledge, experience, and present-day vibrational stance—questioning assumptions, poking at foundations, letting defensive demons run out of steam;
and then, with a clear view of the pattern, perceptions no longer clouded by demons, the moment arrives when you go through the motions of the outdated behavior one last time. Only now you’re watching with eyes wide open, and with your newly established detachment, and sheer curiosity, you grab it by the tail, and you let it guide you right back to its source—invariably some moment, or period of time, in your past where you got hurt, and made some sort of an adjustment in your psyche in order to cope with life moving forward.
Some of the motivations, beliefs, and feelings I uncovered in the example with my son included:
“I am not worthy of being in a leadership role.”
“Self-assertion is dangerous.”
“Telling someone what to do is tyranny.”
“Demanding someone behave the way you want them to is selfish and cruel.”
“It is wrong to impose yourself on others.”
What’s interesting to me is that while most of the work, time, and emotional effort happens in steps 1. through 5., the actual change, the pivotal shift, occurs almost instantaneously in step 6. When you have everything lined up from the previous steps, you are then able to connect the dots and trace a line straight from the present experience back to that specific moment in your past where you first instituted the behavior. That moment of recognition, that flash of insight, changes everything. The deeper that “a-ha” experience, the more you will literally not be able to go back to the way you were before. In that way it’s almost like you’ve traveled back in time, made an adjustment in that past moment, and created a new branch in the time-line continuum that is now resulting in an adjusted version of yourself in the present. So we’re not changing who we are, but in a sense when we are.
This ties in beautifully with an intriguing notion I came across recently, one that also aligns with my inherently optimistic view of life (which I acknowledge not all of my friends share): that the “inner voice” or the “spiritual guide” we link up with every time we make positive changes and grow as a person is in fact just our own evolved Self in the future, reaching back in time to guide us toward itself. I’m on board with that idea, so long as it allows for a source of divinity that exists in addition to, and separate from, ourselves.
