Being Present - That Was Then, Isn't This Now?

To live in the moment, we don’t look behind us, or up over the horizon. We look around us right where we are standing at that moment. The leaves fluttering on the trees. The chirping of birds. The jackhammer reducing the street to a giant pothole. Whatever is present in that moment.

We concentrate n how we are breathing now, how we are feeling now, where we are walking now.

If I try and walk somewhere, I need to pay attention to things. Not the place I just was, because if I concentrate on that I’m going to end up walking into a lamp post. Normally I accomplish this by walking and texting at the same time, but that’s just me. Right?

I also can’t focus solely on the destination, because I won’t notice the gully I’m about to step into or the car coming around the corner.

I need to be grounded in where I am right then, while still acknowledging the past and future. Acknowledge them, but don’t focus on them to the exclusion of where I am.

Focusing on the past caused me to bring past experiences and reactions into the present where they had no business being. They became triggers for anxiety, not only frustrating me but those around me as well; especially those around me, because they didn’t even know the back story to any of the triggers.

So let’s see a few incidents and how they triggered huge anxiety in me later.

I was in a relationship once with a girl who liked to dance. I was forced to dance by my parents in our living room on the farm. They liked to dance, so doggone it I was gonna like it! Well, I already associated dancing with negative things. Well, she wanted to dance but didn’t want to drag me out there since I didn’t want to go anyway. So she danced with other guys, which was also generally a no-no based on our religious upbringing in the country.

If you danced with someone else’s girl, and you’d be lucky to get the three steps made famous by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Line dancing made it more palatable, but only because you were just touching your own belt.

This particularly happened more once I got engaged to her and she began to move into her own life and away from me. So now I’m associating my girl – yeah, I said MY GIRL – dancing with other guys as a symbol of her abandoning me and our relationship.

Oh sure, the patterns are clear now….

So later, a girl I was seeing let me know that she went to clubs and danced with guys. It meant nothing. She liked to dance, I wasn’t a clubber. I may be a lover but I ain’t no dancer. So she danced with a friend of hers generally. No big deal, right?

You try telling me that over the deafening alarms going off in my head.

I was dragging the past into the present simply because of similar patterns that my brain recognized and associated with abandonment.

I could have said, “Ok, well, she’s out enjoying herself. At least she was kind enough not to insist I go endure assaults n my eardrums and personal space. She deserves to enjoy doing things she likes and she appreciates me enough not to inflict it on me. She’s awesome!”

Instead I said, without really saying it, “Crud! She’s out dancing with another guy! Maybe a bunch of other guys! They’re touching her right now! They don’t even know she has a boyfriend! A girl dancing in a club must be on the prowl. They’re probably kissing and touching and maybe she’ll get drunk and end up sleeping with him!!! AAAGGGHHH!!!”

Thanks a lot, rural religious upbringing.

And don’t laugh too hard. I ain’t the only dude whose mind has made connections like that. Even dudettes make them.

Yes, the past informed my present, but it should not have been allowed to replace my present. I let that happen, if only because I didn’t know at the time that I could choose not to let it.

So Mindfulness helps us in relationships by reminding us that it’s called THE PAST for a reason. Let go of what happened with that person then and face the new person now with fresh eyes.

Way easier to say than do, for some folks. (Oddly, it seems to be exactly what happens when folks get into serial relationships with the same basic person over and over. Oh no, this one’s different…!) Whereas we should learn lessons from mistakes, we should not see everything as a replaying of that mistake.

Emotions? Keep 'Em Inside!

Another situation, only far worse.

I was always a fairly private person. Growing up an only child on a farm didn’t give me a whole lot of people to talk to. So I was pretty self-sufficient for the most part. I had emotions, but I wasn’t really sure how to express them sometimes.

Both mom and dad drank. A lot. It was a participant sport in the country. Drinking and driving happened because you had obviously been drinking beer all night and you also obviously needed to go home at some point. So emotional expression was often skewed in my household.

My wife always complained I held my emotions inside and needed to let them out more. Very true! However, she could not take into account the things that tended to happen when I did around her. If I complained, she got upset that I was complaining. If I held it in, she got upset too, but at least the house was quieter.

My frustrations and unhappiness triggered the same reaction in her, only she was much more volatile in expressing it. So while I was upset, she was upset and yelling. It got to where I hated the yelling so much that I became afraid of it. I became afraid of her unhappiness, of any negative emotions on her part. Since I was afraid, I hid.

I held in my frustrations because if I let them out when I felt them I would have been doing nothing but complaining. So they built up until I exploded, which then got me yelled at some more.

Flash forward. I was seeing a young lady who was way more balanced and mature than anyone I had really been with before. She wasn’t fond of yelling in the home for reasons similar to mine. But anytime she would get frustrated or unhappy, I would cower. I might not have even been the reason, but I often wasn’t the reason in my marriage.

An unhappy partner = that unhappiness being vented against me. Outside f a relationship, that’s no big deal. I handle that at work pretty often. But in the intimate confines of a relationship, it terrified me. My anxiety would climb to dangerous levels as I looked for any way to avoid that confrontation I just knew was coming.

I let the past experiences, and my learned reactions to them, infect my present relationship. That led to future imbalances that contributed to tearing the two of us apart.

Mindfulness teaches us not to try and stop reacting in reflex, but to learn new reflex reactions. I’ll take a look at that notion next. Then I’ll look at how worry about the possible future is another opportunity to learn to live in the present.