A different ending
Recently, I watched the movie “Losing in Love” which was written and directed by Martin Papazian. It is a love story; a love story in which the main character has written an ending to not only a play but to his own life story. He is challenged by the potential buyers of his script and his own life to not allow the fear of the past to determine the direction or outcome of the script or his personal story.
I recall the first time a psychiatrist said to me that I was searching for a relationship which duplicated the one I had with my mother. I was sure that he was wrong. After all, I dated people who had many different backgrounds and talents than my mother. Sometime later I had to come to terms with the fact that I was in fact attracted to people who emotionally were as unhappy and negative as my mother. It was as if I was still hoping to have a different relationship with my mother via a surrogate. Later I read the works of the famous family therapist, Murray Bowen, who suggested that until we worked through the issues with our family or origin we were going to continue to select partners with whom we duplicate the unfinished business with our family of origin. Once I came to accept that no parents are perfect and their issues have nothing to do with me I was free to love them unconditionally but not look to them for to write my story. As an adult it was and is up to me to finish raising myself; to own my core values and to design a life which allow those values to write my story.
It was the philosopher George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Many other people have posited the same truth. Of course he was not referring to the act of repeating what passes as fact about the past, but about looking at the past from the standpoint of what worked and what did not work well. Recently some individuals have, for example, been reviewing what we know about the response to the flue pandemic of 1918 and how we are using or not using what we learned to confront and live with Covid-19. I have previously written about what I am hoping we might learn from how we prepared for and are dealing with Covid-19.
In my own life and in my life of working for/with individuals in my counseling practice I find that many of us wrote the ending to our life story based on a very poor research model. We have, for example, used an N (sample size or number of test subjects) which no respectable scientific journal would accept as valid. We have often written our story, including the ending, based on a sample size of one – one marriage, one career path, one failure or one success. We have then used a limited set of “facts” which we may had made up to determine the truths which will determine the ending to our life story.
If in fact I was responsible for my parents successes and failures; if l caused them to be miserable, to fail in their career; if my worth was determined by this false assumption than I am destined to either avoid romantic relationships and fail in my career, I might be better off never having a romantic relationship or pursuing a career. My story is destined to be without love and without a successful career.
The good news is that my parents were humans and had their own issues to resolve or not resolve. While we all affect each other we are not responsible for each other’s story or how it ends. It is true that life will show up and affect the beginning, middle and end of our stories. It is also true we have choices about how we react to life. It is true that our story does not have to be written based on fear. It is true that “it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.” (From a poem “In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred Tennyson written as a requiem for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
It is time to give ourselves permission to write a new ending to our story.
Written April 6, 2020
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
.
Recently, I watched the movie “Losing in Love” which was written and directed by Martin Papazian. It is a love story; a love story in which the main character has written an ending to not only a play but to his own life story. He is challenged by the potential buyers of his script and his own life to not allow the fear of the past to determine the direction or outcome of the script or his personal story.
I recall the first time a psychiatrist said to me that I was searching for a relationship which duplicated the one I had with my mother. I was sure that he was wrong. After all, I dated people who had many different backgrounds and talents than my mother. Sometime later I had to come to terms with the fact that I was in fact attracted to people who emotionally were as unhappy and negative as my mother. It was as if I was still hoping to have a different relationship with my mother via a surrogate. Later I read the works of the famous family therapist, Murray Bowen, who suggested that until we worked through the issues with our family or origin we were going to continue to select partners with whom we duplicate the unfinished business with our family of origin. Once I came to accept that no parents are perfect and their issues have nothing to do with me I was free to love them unconditionally but not look to them for to write my story. As an adult it was and is up to me to finish raising myself; to own my core values and to design a life which allow those values to write my story.
It was the philosopher George Santayana who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Many other people have posited the same truth. Of course he was not referring to the act of repeating what passes as fact about the past, but about looking at the past from the standpoint of what worked and what did not work well. Recently some individuals have, for example, been reviewing what we know about the response to the flue pandemic of 1918 and how we are using or not using what we learned to confront and live with Covid-19. I have previously written about what I am hoping we might learn from how we prepared for and are dealing with Covid-19.
In my own life and in my life of working for/with individuals in my counseling practice I find that many of us wrote the ending to our life story based on a very poor research model. We have, for example, used an N (sample size or number of test subjects) which no respectable scientific journal would accept as valid. We have often written our story, including the ending, based on a sample size of one – one marriage, one career path, one failure or one success. We have then used a limited set of “facts” which we may had made up to determine the truths which will determine the ending to our life story.
If in fact I was responsible for my parents successes and failures; if l caused them to be miserable, to fail in their career; if my worth was determined by this false assumption than I am destined to either avoid romantic relationships and fail in my career, I might be better off never having a romantic relationship or pursuing a career. My story is destined to be without love and without a successful career.
The good news is that my parents were humans and had their own issues to resolve or not resolve. While we all affect each other we are not responsible for each other’s story or how it ends. It is true that life will show up and affect the beginning, middle and end of our stories. It is also true we have choices about how we react to life. It is true that our story does not have to be written based on fear. It is true that “it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.” (From a poem “In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred Tennyson written as a requiem for his friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
It is time to give ourselves permission to write a new ending to our story.
Written April 6, 2020
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
.
RSS Feed