Yesterday I was thinking about my last relationship. It wasn’t a very pleasant thought, because it was a very important relationship and it went terribly wrong. It was so important to me that I decided to move from Germany to England just to be together with that man. I decided to do a second undergrad degree and that even though I have so high marks that any grad school would have taken me on. I gave up a rather high living standard compared to the standard I have now due to the high rent prices in England. I left behind friends and family and certainly an environment with really nice tango options all year long almost every single day. And all this I did just for a man! You can imagine how I feel about this now only about 4 months after we finally concluded that it just won’t work after all! With him I didn’t only loose my man, but also my best friend and whatever he might say about being there for me, he still is my ex-partner and we will never be the kind of friends that we were before we came together. Obviously this is all very painful for me. In fact it is also a very big failure, considering that I basically gave up everything for him. And one question struck me as the most important one: Why? Why did it go so terribly wrong even though we loved each other and even though we fit together so well?
The last half a year the answer to this question seemed to me like the Holy Grail. Maybe I thought that I could turn everything around, if I just knew why this was happening to us. Every little bit of insight that came to me this way or another, was carefully pieced together, but I couldn’t help but feel that all this was just a way too big jigsaw puzzle, where someone threw away the most important bits. Those bits that held the whole thing together and actually gave it a certain sense seemed to evade me. Yesterday suddenly everything started to make sense. All the bits and pieces fell together and formed a fairly coherent picture of the situation. I finally knew why! I knew exactly why everything went wrong, exactly where the both of us made our mistakes and exactly how all this brought us into this situation.
Psychologically the reasons for our complete failure to not drive each other nuts is not a trivial matter. It involves a complex set of circumstances and two quite complicated characters. One of these characters behaved to be honest quite accurately as predicted, but for absolutely absurd reasons (that would be me). The other character admits to be slightly impaired in the ability to let people close in general and therefore behaved rather irrational as well. I asked myself: “So what do you make of all of this? None of this behaviour makes any sense.” A long time to think finally brought me to some very interesting insights on my part in this whole story. He already told me why he behaved the way he did and it made perfect sense to me, but my part in all this seemed rather weird, rather … not like me at all and it didn’t fit to what I wanted from this entire situation in the first place. I just couldn’t quite understand myself anymore.
It was certainly a moment of insight yesterday when all the pieces started to fit together and I had to realize why the whole situation had just gone out of control. Nothing could have prevented it, whatever my decisions would have been, it still would have happened. The reason was obvious and there was nothing I could do about it, nothing I could say or do to make everything right again and no this insight didn’t have any potential to rescue anything, it was more of a final nail in the coffin of my hope – dramatically speaking.
What do you do if you suddenly find yourself in a dead-end situation, where there’s not even anyone to blame? I mean this utter sense of helplessness when a higher power strikes and this year’s harvest is gone. Maybe the sense of some childhood trauma, which keeps nagging at you and you can’t change the cause, because it lies years and years in the past. The sense of a global economical crisis that makes you lose your house. Maybe even a sudden loss of a relative due to an unfortunate accident. What if you know the reason and there’s just absolutely nothing you or anyone else could have done to prevent what has happened to you?
Let’s look at an example in a little more detail to show different levels of a situation where reasons seem important: Let’s talk about abuse in childhood. Assume it has happened to you and you don’t even know that this is the reason for your problems, you don’t even remember that it ever happened to you. You might have depressions, dysfunctional relationships, or an awkward sense of fear in certain situations and let’s spell it out again: you don’t know the reason. For years you think: “ Why do I have depressions and why do I always end up with the wrong guys?”
Well, that’s a situation where you feel helpless, because you just don’t understand why things go wrong. You won’t be able to change anything about your situation, because you don’t even know what’s wrong with you. This makes it obvious that in a lot of cases you first have to find out the reasons for a situation, before you can go ahead and change something. Of course you can ease your immediate loneliness with just another relationship, but it might just fail as well, if you don’t figure out what went wrong the last time. If you have psychological problems and don’t know the reason for them, it might be a good idea to go into counselling for a while to find out where these problems come from!
Now, let’s look at the next step from here: What if you know that the reason for your awkward fears and your depressions actually IS that you were abused in your childhood? There is nothing you can do about it now, is there? OK, it is a situation where you surely can blame someone for what has happened to you, but terrible enough that won’t change anything, will it? You are stuck with your past and the only thing you can do with it is deal with it, right? OK, stop! Did you notice the gap between having a problem and actually dealing with it? The big question is: How? Of course, if you have deep psychological problems or a situation that has to do with loss, it might be worth considering that there are professionals around who can surely help you much more than a self-development article! However deep your problem is though, your biggest problem lies not in finding out the reasons for your situation or actually trying to turn things around, no: Your biggest problem and your worst enemy lies in the sense of helplessness!
What do I mean by that?
Remember my last relationship and that there are reasons why I can’t change anything about it and why it would have happened whatever I had done? Doesn’t that quite literally mean that I actually can’t do anything about it? No. Of course I can’t make my relationship work just like that and I can’t change the decisions I made. Of course I can’t get him back and even if I could it would never be the same again. This doesn’t mean though that I’m actually helpless! There is actually an awful lot I could do: If everything is over and lost anyway and I finally accepted to see it, it would be the perfect chance to move on, wouldn’t it? Or I could actually tell him about my reasoning and see if he agrees. I could try and change all these unfortunate circumstances or even my own mindset. Once you see that there is nothing that actually prevents you from trying to change something, it becomes actually quite easy to go ahead and do it. Even though it might not actually change anything about the situation at hand, it will change something in you or in someone else and you will eventually get the chance to move on beyond this dead-end situation. Dead end? Well then turn back and take another way!
I’m not saying that dealing with these situations is easy. I’m also not saying that you should go out there and just find someone else or forget about the problem at hand. I’m saying that there is always something you can do! You can try and move on; you can go start another business; you can go see a psychiatrist if you need a professional’s advice on how to get through situations like these and if nothing else might seem a possible solution, you could even find back to your faith to help you over a difficult patch! Nothing stops you from taking active responsibility for your own life.
In this sense identifying a situation as a problem is only half the story: It is your choice how you write the other half. One thing is clear though – a story without a proper ending shouldn’t be your final destination!
