Seeking The Familiar
The familiar (root is the word family) can have a relentless grasp upon our emotional lives. Most of us don’t know this. We simply seek it throughout life unaware. Which means that we recreate it repetitively because that is what we have learned. Problem is, the familiar can be healthy and a guide to a healthy maturation in life, or unhealthy and distort our efforts to live a stable and quality life. Our emotional commitment to recreating our familiarity is without equal in this life. The good news, for some at least, is that we can challenge what we’ve learned that has become familiar, freeing ourselves from the control familiarity will inevitably cast upon our lives when it is inherently unhealthy and unexamined.
What happens when a dedicated analysis of unhealthy familiarity takes place? First and foremost, it’s an effort to identify the learning that supports and recreates the familiarity in our lives. It basically involves, mapping out the way the past has grown to dominate our present and future. Nothing new is happening in such a life. Just an habitual recreation of the unhealthy past, over and over again without awareness. So you have to see it before you can make changes. In my experience, this is the hardest part. Our emotional attachment to the familiar unhealthy, is like something worn and deceptively comfortable. Hard to challenge because it is what we know from the beginning of life. Think for a moment, about the way familiarity implants itself in our emotional lives. Essentially a learned blueprint for present and future experiences. We are a lot more active in recreating what we’ve known than we normally give ourselves credit for. It is essentially an emotional time saver, put in place to negate the necessity of always having to make choices about what to believe, how to behave, and what to feel in the present and future of our lives. To disrupt this control over our experience of living is no minor task.
A percentage of us will be forced, and I do mean forced, to consider challenging our familiar. A needed psychological change is never initiated in a happy mood of satisfied living. We human beings require crisis and discomfort before we are willing to do something different and potentially better. Nevertheless, you can expect to go back to the familiar, as the habit of living a certain way, over and over again before actual change takes place. Familiarity as an emotional habit, began forming at a time of exceptional vulnerability and it is not about to give up its control easily. Some people have told me it appears to have a mind of its own, and even a voice. When a person dedicates themselves to challenging learned familiarity, its control over our minds will inevitably come in the form of internal voices advocating for a return to the familiar. Our attachment to emotional learning from the past refuses to change without some measure of force and dedication.
Once a challenge has begun as a practiced mental activity whose purpose is to disrupt the automatic recreation of familiarity, the possibility of doing something “new” occurs. In this context, new experience simply means something unfamiliar. Something other than what we were taught by our life experiences to date. Hopefully, it is healthier than the familiarity we are accustomed to. That would be progress in healthy and quality living. The unfamiliar would of course be unknown and at best could be a source of some anxiety and discomfort. Remember, it is unfamiliar. A risk is implicit in allowing something unknown, unpracticed, and unfamiliar to replace what has essentially controlled our experiences in life so far. Driven by the need to change, the need to get out from under the unhealthy influences of life so far lived, we risk the possibility of healthy change. This too must be a practice because the familiar relentlessly tries to return to its previous sovereignty.
No longer controlled by the past, with a practiced ability to label and disrupt its attempts to return as familiarity, we get to be truely an individual out from under the influence of something other than who we are. Strange notion in a world of strong repetitive outside influences. Imagine, making choices from the unique center of your being unimpeded and uninfluenced by something or someone else. Many people don’t believe that such a psychological state is even possible. They believe that we are from start to finish the product of outside forces shaping our insides for a lifetime. Regardless, imagine a place in your mind where your unique individuality, the whole indivisible you, that was not created by anyone else, makes a free statement in the world. Once it happens, the need to keep building such an unfamiliar free experience into your life will be irresistible.
Comments are welcome. Share your experience.
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, interpersonal psychoanalyst, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Contact: 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com for inquiries. Love Life Telehealth Consultations available by request.
