The Cure for Bad Déjà Vu
“You can’t undo the past…but you can certainly not repeat it.” –Bruce Willis
A wise man once said to me “History is nothing more than collection of lessons never learned.” Alas, I sadly believe that he was correct. Even individually we tend to live each day as if the previous ones had very little to add. If I were to ask you what yesterday taught you would you have an immediate reply? How about last week, month or a year ago? If we are healthy people then we should be growing and growing means continuous learning and change. We should be using our past properly to improve ourselves so as not to repeat its mistakes.
Unfortunately, it is my observation that we humans have a strong tendency to repeat negative cycles. In short, we seem to have propensity for reiterating the errors of the past. Like a patient teacher, life keeps giving us similar situations over and over, day after day, in the hopes that we will eventually learn the lessons and then move on to different challenges where we will then obtain new knowledge and diverse experiences. If you are honest with yourself you will see that your own behaviours set the stage for a great deal of what you experience during the day. If negatives are repeating then you are the most significant common factor in the equation. Personally, time and time again I have experienced some painful situations that I could not seem to avoid until I finally saw and acknowledged my own role in their creation.
Nobody likes déjà vu when it comes to their past mistakes. While we certainly are not the cause of all our own misery, when it comes to chronic situations we almost always play a very significant role. Unfortunately, it is quite natural and easy to see and blame external causes for all out mishaps: if this hadn’t happened, if she hadn’t done that or if they wouldn’t say that. It’s like the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now, “So many things I would have done but clouds got in my way.” We are all talented at making excuses for what we have neglected. We fail to see that it is this brilliant talent that helps to feed our cycle of repeating our past gaffes.
It may sound egotistical or even masochistic but there is great value in taking personal responsibility for your outcomes regardless of the situation or the actions of others. If it is all your fault when something doesn’t go as you planned then you have all the power to fix it because you have significant ability to make changes to yourself and your behaviours. If it is something or someone else’s fault then you have far less influence over them and therefore you have less chance of improving your outcomes. Taking back your responsibility is very empowering. You do not need to own the behaviours and responses of others but you can certainly be frank with yourself about your own actions, reactions and choices.
Break your past situations down into the choices that you made. Determine if you could creatively make different options for yourself that you did not perceive at the time. Use your imagination to come up with alternative responses the difficulties that you encountered. This is almost a form of mental and emotional martial arts. Life situations present us with decisions in the same way an opponent’s actions require response. If we practice sparring in a safe place and objectively analyze our performance then we can develop tactics that better ensure our outcome in future conflicts. We learn when to block, dodge, push, pull or simply move out of the way completely. This is true in both physical and metaphysical situations. When an encounter throws an emotional or mental jab at you then can unlearn your clumsy unhealthy habitual responses and instead apply some skilled countermoves.
There is a cure for bad déjà vu. By learning from it we can determine how not to repeat our past. If we do this then we obtain something far better than undoing our previous errors. We will obtain new and better life skills and start to rid ourselves of negative patterns that we may have developed. By practicing this we can become black-belts in overcoming the past and then we will move on to new and different lessons in the dojo of life.
©2018 Scott D. Wilson
