A male client came to see me recently looking tense and unhappy. In the two weeks that I’d been on holiday he had twice broken up with his girlfriend and twice got back together with her. That made a grand total of some 26 break ups in a relationship lasting less than 3 years.
He hated himself and hated allowing himself to get drawn back into a relationship that clearly isn’t working.
He described how friends and family are losing patience with him, how sick they are of hearing about his on-off relationship.
Maybe this sounds faintly familiar.
He said: “It’s so stupid of me. I know that I shouldn’t.”
I said to him that it’s not about being stupid, or weak, or pathetic.
What it is about is forgetting that there are always alternatives.
When you are in a bad relationship you forget that there is a whole world out there. More importantly, you forget that there is a place for you in that world. A place that can be as good as you want it to be and choose to make it.
On many occasions I’ve said this to clients. Only to have them gaze at me blankly, clearly convinced that I had missed the point. Their point was that they had just fallen into the last ditch, were up to their eyes in mud and would, very likely, never clamber out of it again. In any event, the mud bath was their future.
It was only last week that I discovered quite why this sorely limiting belief is so powerful and – and persistent.
Enlightenment came in a book called “Stumbling On Happiness” by Professor of Psychology Daniel Gilbert. Professor Gilbert uses scientific research to prove that human beings are pretty hopeless at imagining the future. Yet we believe, wrongly, that we are rather good at it.
Gilbert writes: “Because predictions about the future are made in the present, they are inevitably influenced by the present. The way we feel right now [‘I’m so unhappy’] and the way we think right now [‘That’s the way it is for me’] exert an unusually strong influence on the way we think we’ll feel later….
“we tend to imagine the future as the present with a twist, thus our imagined tomorrows inevitably look like slightly twisted versions of today…
“Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.”
Abused women, more than most, having been through so much trauma, lose sight of the possible – which is one good reason why they feel unable to make the decision to get out.
The mechanics of getting out can be extremely difficult. The emotional decision to get out and stay out could be less anguished than it so often is.
Gilbert duly poses the question: How are we to predict the future more or less accurately when we are so poor at imagining it?
His answer is to learn from the experience of other people who have already trodden that path.
Gilbert says: “It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are”.
And if you find yourself objecting: “But I’m not like other people, my situation is not like anyone else’s”, Gilbert disagrees. His viewpoint is this:
“Our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates…surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realise just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.”
When you look at it like that, any and every woman who has survived abuse and gone on to build a happy and successful life is evidence that you can too.
(C) 2006 Annie Kaszina
Annie Kaszina Ph D, is a coach and writer who has helped hundreds of women to rebuild their confidence and their life after an abusive relationship. Annie is the author of "The Woman You Want To Be". This ebook will teach you how you can love yourself first, so that you can create strong self-belief and build the fulfilling future you're looking for on firm foundations.
To find out more and sign up to Annie's free bi-monthly ezine visit http://www.EmotionalAbuseRecoveryNow.com You can email Annie at: annie@EmotionalAbuseRecoveryNow.com
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