Ruptured and Stolen Futures

“Everybody said, "Follow your heart". I did, it got broken”

― Agatha Christie

I want to speak to a different way some of us lose hope in vital futures: too much trauma, severance and loss.

While some of us were never good at dreaming up good futures, for others this capacity was a lifeline. And that lifeline of beckoning possibilities that sustain us through times of difficulty can be severed by brutal or corrosive loss.

This is in some ways worse than never having had much faith in the future. For against our own nature we feel fated and despondent. We lose a resource we have always been able to rely on. Our hopes and dreams give way to collapse, despondency or a kind of defensive hopelessness. Instinctively we contract to protect ourselves from the world letting us down another time.

Once we had specific visions of where we were headed. Now the wrenching away of our dreams leaves us bewildered, faithless and disoriented. Our faith that we had the power to shape our own lives now feels naive, like some sort of cruel joke.

'There have been a number of times when I felt my future had not so much been stolen from me, but rather it was ripped from me in the most violent way. It's the most vicious assault, both physically and mentally. I think my perception of the violent nature of these experiences was a significant factor in the construction of my fatalistic mindset and my self-identification as 'victim'. 

I recognize this makes it difficult, and often impossible, to realize my potential. In my day-to-day life this manifests in stagnation - I actively resist letting anyone get too close to me; my default position is: anything that can go wrong will go wrong - I'm always in 'survival mode'. I sabotage myself through my avoidance in a misplaced effort to protect myself. I'm even aware of this and still continue to do it...'

Psychotherapy Client, (Quoted with Full Permission)

Too much trauma severely compromises our capacity for spontaneity and aliveness. Instead, as analyst Philip Bromberg observes, it inclines us to be flooded by what has gone before, to ‘plunder the here and now on behalf of the there and then...’

Though much of this impact lies outside our awareness, it erodes our basic trust. The futures that once sustained us now seem naive and delusional. Now the future looms as threatening, inevitably promising further disappointments and losses. Cumulative severances and hurts now seem to stalk us; their aftershocks reel inside us. And many of us learn to play dead, buffering ourselves against future damage. Our horizons shrink as we cease to hope and to dream.

Explorations

If you have a sense of your future being ruptured or stolen, can you identify what you feel has been lost? (What did you hope for that was taken away; what disappeared for you?)

Do you sense you now carry fears for your future that echo losses you have already experienced?

Are there ways you feel you live in the present ‘as if it were the past’, protecting yourself in ways more appropriate to a different time?

If you were to find safe ways to hope again for something fresh, what would you hope for? How might you and others support this hope?

[video transcript]

I want to say a little bit here about this experience of the ruptured or stolen future. The sense that life has too often severed a hope, interrupted a process and taken something away from us that we had given our energy to manifesting and to caring for. This can happen in very severe forms like extreme accidents or losses, or it can happen in a more incremental way. But what I think is important to make some space for here is how can we work with that; how can we begin to soften that sense of a catastrophically ruptured future?

It’s obviously a huge theme, so I’m just going to say a couple of things that might be strands in a healing response. One is that we get relational attention and care with what happened to us. That we find a counsellor, a therapist or a context of some kind where we can tell the story, share the catastrophe, feel the feelings. What often helps the most is to experience another human accompanying us and reflecting and being with us in what has happened to us. Because the more we can settle or digest what has happened, the more we can begin to be able to differentiate the present from the impact of the past.

I’ll just say a little about differentiation. Often when bad things happen, we build up templates based on them: don’t hope, you will just get hurt. We build up an operating system that takes account of the assault or the injury. Differentiation allows us to locate what has happned in the specifics. It allows to say ‘when I was seven, this big event happened’ and to really give our energy and care to what happened. This enables us to place that more fully where it belongs. I’m not trying to say it goes away, or that we can magically create a balm where none of the aftereffect of that will live in us. (I think that rarely happens to that degree). But the more we can care for and soften and relate to the experience in kind ways, the more space we have to see what’s different about now and what’s possible now. And that’s really important.

I think some of you will probably have heard this phrase coherent narrative. It’s often used about therapy or journaling, that when we can tell a story of what has happened we begin to speak the unsayable and to put some structure on what was once impossible to even represent. So it’s not that we want to get stuck in a story we tell forever over and over. But that achieving some narrative coherence about the really difficult things that have happened to us, putting language on those and being witnessed in our truths and our experiences, and feeling the realness of them is a really important part of digesting the past, particularly if we’ve had strong experiences that have been traumatic and that we’ve been left alone in.