Our Present Reality

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Our Present Reality – By Joseph Ghabi

How do you envision your life and dreams? Do you look at them with open or closed eyes? If you have your eyes open, that means you are not afraid to go after what you dream of. With closed eyes, it means that you are having some difficulties and are fearful or hesitant to go after them.

How do you look at your past experiences? Do you look at these with open or closed eyes? Looking at your past experiences with open eyes means that they are in the distant past and you are over them. If you look at these with closed eyes, it means that you still have difficulties in letting go or accepting what happened in your past experiences and also in forgiving the people who were involved in the situations.

There are two realities in every experience or lesson in our lives. Those realities determine the effects and the direction we will take in our lives. However, the choice is always ours and it is our own responsibility to do whatever we decide to do with our lives in the end.

Anytime you have problems or if you happen to be experiencing problems at the moment, the way you see yourself within that problem will determine what your reality is. In life there is always black and white, yet many of us are stuck in the middle in the grey area. Being indecisive all of your life is not an answer though is it? We are talking about YOUR LIFE here, and it seems that most of us do not give a toss about it! The people who don’t care are the ones who have already given up on life. That is the case whether they like it or not! These are the people who thrive on getting the sympathy which comes when they constantly complain about their life to other people. Unfortunately, in reality living this way is not a solution to your problems either!

Let’s consider, for instance, this scenario. You were abused physically or mentally during childhood from either your father, mother or from someone else. You are now grown up and have become mature man or woman. In this case there is now a huge chance that you will become gay or lesbian in your style of relationship. This is common for many of us, although in many cases it can be an unconscious choice made as a means of rebellion against the fact you experienced abuse earlier in your life from a member of the opposite sex. This usually would happen when the experience of being abused has not been handled properly. Don’t get me wrong here, I have no problem with same sex couples, however, in our case here, this is not living with the right intention towards ourselves or the other people involved. The many people who are familiar with circumstances such as this will likely have confusion about their sexual identity at a later stage in life. We will leave this subject for deeper discussion at a later time!

We will now consider your heterosexual relationship in the case where your childhood abuse was again with someone of the opposite sex. In many instances, after experiencing this, we might always fall into the wrong relationships once again. Many of these relationships end up being abusive, regardless of the type of abuse. Abuse is abuse and is always wrong in any case. What would happen then in your situation? In many cases you end up blaming yourself as if you were the one who was provoking your partner, or whoever it was, to abuse you. Then you always end up forgiving him or her for their abuse by making up all kinds of excuses to justify what they did wrong to you in the first place. Why do you do that? You know you are neither helping yourself or them by accepting this kind of treatment. Think about it!

Let’s get back to the fact that you were abused as a child that you have not been able to handle it properly. As a child being abused you probably felt hopeless and that there was nothing you could have done or said to stop this because you did not want to hurt your father, mother or other people in the family. Maybe one of your parents, the one who is not abusing you, is also afraid of the other and is making excuses on their behalf. What has all this to do with your situation today? It is probably very similar but you are playing different roles.

The best excuse you can tell yourself is “I love him or her” I do not understand this when on top of it all you are still being abused and or taken advantage of. How do you justify this as being a love relationship making you feel happy?

What is the link between both experiences of being a child and being an adult? It is possible that you went for therapy between those ages, yet it might not have brought you any effect. In many cases your therapy probably succeeded in fixing the immediate problem, perhaps on a ‘conscious’ level. For many of you though, the therapy probably did not do much because unless you and your therapist were working on healing the fear based at the root of where your trouble stems from at an earlier stage in your life. If this is the case, do not blame yourself. You probably do not know any better!

So you have dealt with the problem on a conscious level, very good! But what do you intend doing about what is happening in your sub-conscious? Are you even aware of the stuff that is in your sub conscious which is left for you to understand and handle as a remainder of your experiences?

At this point I will take the opportunity to remind you that I come from a very technical and scientific background. In this field, if there is something which cannot be proven logically and rationally we normally assume that it does not exist. I know this is a wrong approach which only ever leaves us with a very limited view of things. Is this really what science is supposed to be about? I thought science was supposed to be about exploration and enquiry into the unknown without applying judgment from our human rational mind! On that note, how open minded was your therapist when working with you?

When growing up as a child, constantly seeing and hearing things in front of your eyes gradually builds up your perception in your mind until it becomes what is ‘normal’ to you on a conscious level. This is how you slowly program yourself and your association to life to things according to what you see and understand from that age and up.

Where do we store the un-necessary residue which is left behind from past experiences? The sub-conscious is the next level of consciousness which is programmed. The sub conscious becomes the next level of deep memory storage which is also engraved according to our understanding of life and our understanding of who we are. If we have passed through tough experiences then we might have a personality which will begin to develop with low self-esteem, perhaps no self-confidence and trusting no-one in the process. How many of us are living at the moment with this dilemma in our lives? I’ll bet there are many more than you could ever imagine!

So what is the real problem here? Your sub-conscious will always trigger a reaction to the events which occur in your life. Whenever something happens which is familiar to a past experience it will trigger a feeling, memory or a behavioral pattern which was created by you earlier as your way of handling your past experiences. This happens when it is least expected and it becomes normal to you as a being a part of your own built-in personality that you will probably not even see it as being a problem!

This is all very well and you could argue that there is nothing wrong with this because this is YOU and who you have grown to become after what you have experienced in the past. This is true to an extent, however, in reality you do not have to make do with what you are familiar with because it is easier than handling and accepting the truth of your misery. This is always just an excuse we make to take the easy way out of dealing with our problems! We can all be whoever we would like to be and it is unfortunate that in reality many people do choose not to handle their experiences for fear of loosing their identity.

This is a huge mistake we have been making as a human race. When we realize that we can potentially be whoever we would like to be then we would probably be able to handle our experiences much better and without being sub-consciously programmed to act in ways which are not healthy for ourselves, just because we are afraid of losing what has become comfortable for us! Denying the fact that the sub-conscious exists and disregarding the fact that it is a huge part of your experience which greatly influences how you will handle your experiences now and in the future will eventually be your worst enemy in life if you do not deal with it properly.

If science was to change somewhat and become more open to new ideas instead of insisting upon following old theories which were proven long time ago and accepted the existence of our sub-consciousness, just imagine how many mental illnesses or other types of illnesses could be solved. What are we afraid of losing by exploring new dimensions in our life?

We are becoming more and more lost by assuming all aspects of the human misery can be handled and treated the same way. If the old theories, anti-depressants and sleeping pills were so good and effective then why are we all still having so many of the same problems? We are, as individuals, unique and very different from each other and we should be treated accordingly, instead of being categorized according to ‘theories’. If we were to begin understanding this concept and embraced the things we are afraid to embrace new ideas which are out-with the concepts we have grown to feel comfortable with, then we would maybe begin to understand the more mysterious aspects of life and perhaps we would enjoy that way!