Holding on

I having been thinking a lot about the difficulty some people have in letting go of the past. It may be an old girlfriend or boyfriend that dumped them or the ex-husband or wife from hell. Others obsess about some wrong done against them or some sin they committed. Stolen family fortunes, broken promises, affairs, abuse,betrayals and unfulfilled dreams overshadow and contaminate the present. It's as if there can be no happiness, no satisfaction in life, and no future because of whatever it is in the past that they cannot leave behind.

These people typically are what psychoanalysts call an anal character i.e. one who hangs on to stuff, can't let go and fears making mistakes. And any mistakes get blown out of proportion as if they were life and death matters rather than very human errors. Anal characters tends to hold grudges and thus find it hard to forgive themselves or others. They are still valiantly fighting the toilet training battle crying out for all the world to hear "You can't make me do it!"

One woman bitterly blames her ex-husband for everything wrong in her life. They've been divorced ten years! And they were separated many years prior to that. There is no doubt he was a jerk, but ten years later she's still hanging on to her anger. I found myself thinking that this gal is having a sit down strike. She recently lost her job and now she won't exercise, eat correctly, look seriously for a job, keep her apartment clean or do much of anything. Loss=loss. The loss of her job pings every one of the previous losses in her life...like dominoes tumbling all the way back to her early childhood when her mom, perhaps too harshly, too early and too abruptly demanded she mature and use the potty. So now, when she's mad and when she faces one of life's inevitable set-backs, she goes on strike. She sits down like an angry toddler. She hides out hoping that no one sees what a mess she's made. The key is to help her improve her life now. If the present is better and there's hope that the future will be even neater, then she doesn't have to hang on to the past. Gradually she'll learn that the sit-down strategy she used as a toddler is not the best one to use an adult.