Marcel Proust had his temps perdu [lost times], and Thomas Wolfe told us we can’t go home again. The snows of yesteryear have evaporated into thin air, and like them, the days and times of our youth are gone. When we visit an old familiar place, such as an old hometown or a favorite summertime memory place, e.g., or even talk with an old friend, we can get a general sense of another time having been a golden time, a better time, and one that we wish we could go back to. If this happens to you, know that you are not alone. We all experience this idealization of previous golden memories from time to time.
In these high anxiety-producing times, it is often an enjoyable tendency, sometimes addictive–but normal– to idealize some time, some place, some people in our past and wish we could go back there. Back to a time in which we had an exciting and unfolding life, but one in which we felt safe. Looking back on that time, and in spite of the cold, unknown, randomizing universe, we still felt swaddled in a safe and comforting blanket all our own, no matter how small. It remains a mental island of peace in the universe.
It can be heartbreaking when we find out that not only is there no return to that place, the place itself has changed. The people there have changed. The times, the mindset, and the culture have all changed. Slowly it sinks in that those golden times have been frozen in the mind for all those years, conveniently ignoring the fact that time changes all things. Those frozen memories, however, can accrue many different meanings and uses in our lives over the years. It can be uncomfortable and disheartening to defrost the frozen memories and only see the losses. It can make one bitter.
We must understand this as the real call to adulthood, the first part of which is letting go of impossible plans based on previous versions of ourselves and old memories. Even creating new goals and life patterns can still be held back by the teachings of the golden memories, not by who we are now and the world of today. The second, and really more important part of accepting adulthood is to create new meaning, new sets of goals, new ways of living based upon who we really are now. This calls for ruthless truth-telling with ourselves and the willingness to give up self-delusion.
What can be re-created in the now, however, is the sense of adventure, of self-confidence, of a dream future, tools that helped define those previous golden times. We must let go of the wish that the world would return to the state it was back then. We must replace it with what we want it to mean to ourselves (and to the world) in the now and in the future. This refocusing allows the brain to hone in on something doable, which takes the place of something undoable (in itself, depressing). This is the way to avoid bitterness.
Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, father of logotherapy (therapy by finding meaning in one’s life), and an Auschwitz survivor, wrote in his masterpiece, Man’s Search for Meaning: “Logotherapy, in comparison with psychoanalysis, is a method less retrospective and less introspective. Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.”* Logotherapy intersects with the desire to make new goals and find new purposes to one’s life. Finding meaning in one’s life means living in the present, not in idealistic and unrealistic fantasies of re-creating the past. Living in the present asks us to come up with new goals and new ways to achieve those goals.
by David Bowman, LMFT
This article was first published on davidbowmanlmft.com. David is a licensed California Marriage and Family Counselor and the creator of Father Figures: Reparenting for Gay Men and Father Figures: Reparenting for Straight Men
*Viktor E. Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning (rev. and updated). Washington Square Press ©1959, 1962, 1984, p.120.