We can easily stay trapped and just fall back in to our old habits and patterns, which may seem to run us around like marionettes
How is it possible that after a breakup, one person can hang on and hang on and hang on? Why doesn’t the person get a clue or move on, after all, you have! (Or, sadly, they have.)
Old wounds, sometimes, seemingly long buried, don’t heal magically! Time does not heal all wounds, either.
To get over a wound or a relationship, you must deal with your issues, within yourself. If you lock in to what the other person did wrong and blame the person incessantly, you will get nowhere. It could, essentially, freeze you in time and may create an unhealthy bond/cycle of hashing and rehashing what went wrong. If the two of you have a similar issue and let’s face it “like attracts like,” you could both be doing this little dance for years. One specific method of locking into this pattern is by going back into the specifics of what you said and what the other person said and then this happened and then that happened. It’s akin to retracing each step on a molecular level. It is exhausting, to say the least, and can be monumentally unproductive. I think this fits under the true definition of beating a dead horse. It is also a common way to endeavor to stay connected, through churning up those powerful feelings and wounds!
Eventually, to truly move forward and get to choice or free, you must take stock of what part you actually played and ultimately make the decision to take appropriate responsibility. Appropriate responsibility taking does not mean leaping to extremes, such as “okay, it’s ALL my fault, my bad, I’m bad,” etc. It means pausing and looking at what genuinely was your part in it. It means sifting and sorting through, seeing without emotional reactivity. I believe taking responsibility for everything, is a cop out and just the opposite side of the blame coin. I’ve never worked with a couple, wherein one person was entirely to blame. It is always a dynamic interaction.
Another important step may be to forgive yourself. You did what you did, for a reason, and were probably operating at the most informed and best level you could, at the time. Most people do not like to suffer exquisite pain, so it follows, to make choices that create exquisite pain, I don’t believe is deliberate. If we knew how to make other choices, we would have. Forgiveness gets a bad rap. Often people avoid forgiveness, due to a long held Biblical interpretation of “turn the other cheek” or “accept the blows of what the other doles out.” “Don’t defend yourself.” “Don’t fight back.” “Be a doormat.”
Another way to view forgiveness is as a way to free yourself from the pain and memories experienced with the other person. Imagine your pattern of relating to others as a “well worn groove” in your mind, sort of like a record on a turntable. Directing your brain and leaping out of that groove, creating a new one, possibly through forgiveness, involves conscious, mindful, intention. Without conscientious remapping, which current research is showing to be absolutely possible (yeahyee!!!!), we can easily stay trapped and just fall back in to our old habits and patterns, which may seem to run us around like marionettes. I consider the anti thesis of this to be operating, instead, from a place of choice or freedom.
Some report fear to forgive, as it appears to let the other person off the hook. For others it can be fear that a flood of long trapped emotion for the other, will be released. What if something soft is trapped behind that anger? Consider forgiveness is not about the other person. Consider it to be about you and freedom for your memory, for your heart, for your attention, and for your energy. Think about the possibility of it being a gift for you. Picture holding frozen the memory, the feelings, the guardedness, and the pain as a block to that ever happening to you again AND as a block to you RECEIVING in a new way, again. It’s a double sided sword, serving to both protect and hurt you. It is also a primal way of emotional survival. Many of us locked a primal survival mechanism into place in childhood and have never revisited it.
Maybe it’s time to revisit the strategy, leap out of the well worn groove, to evolve, and operate on a more adult level. Try forgiving or even praying for the person who wronged you. If you aren’t a praying person, try holding that person in positive regard, wishing for a positive future for them – it doesn’t have to involve you, in the slightest – but it can help set you free.