What do we do when there’s something that we don’t like or find difficult? How do we approach the tough stuff; the things we’ve done or said or participated in that “stick in our craw,” that dog our steps and are just plain revolting and downright ugly? What do we do with the less than savory stuff; the stuff that leaves a bad taste in our mouths? We’ve all got histories we’d prefer to forget and decisions we’d like to undo or redo. There are things that we’ve done or been involved in that impede us and impale us; making life messy, tarnished and less than glowing. We all have our skeletons in the closet, our dirty laundry, our ‘little secrets’ and our less than tidy histories. We’ve got them, but what do we do with them?
Then there’s stuff that’s not ours at all. There are plenty of things that are annoying encumbrances to achieving our goals; irritating barriers to our agendas and incessantly relentless blockades to our ability to shape our worlds in the manner we want to shape them. There are things in life that simply don’t work when it comes to achieving our objectives, that don’t fit, or worse yet they are entirely and completely opposed to the achieving of our objectives; those irritating and annoying things that we’d much prefer to do without.
The Standard Approach
The seemingly correct answer as to what we do with that stuff would be to deal with these things; to embrace them, engage them or shape them in a manner that allows them to work for us. We can let them inform us, giving us information that we might have missed. Or we can work toward some sort of resolution of them. But these mean accepting whatever it is that we’re working through. It means saying “yup, I did that” or “yup, that’s part of life.” But in doing that we give that action or that reality a place in our lives that we might prefer not to give it. It means accepting its existence which concurrently makes us responsible for it or to it.
But what if whatever ‘it is’ isn’t really all that nice or appealing or tidy or pliable or cooperative or flattering? What if whatever ‘it is’ is such that it stubbornly refuses to let us have the outcome we would like or the solution we’d find favorable to our agendas because whatever ‘it is’ irreparably gets in the way? What if whatever ‘it is’ will actually force us to an entirely different outcome that isn’t appealing at all, or doesn’t even support the very existence our agenda? What if things would be better if these things were simply gone?
The Great Rewrite
While there are many things we can do and a variety of approaches that we can take in dealing with all of this, one simple approach is to simply re-write whatever it is that we’re struggling with. Rather than grapple with whatever situation or event or happening we’re grappling with, why not make it go away, or at least change it up enough so that it’s a bit easier to handle and not quite as hard on the old emotions? Why not create our own reality by re-creating whatever it is that’s creating problems for us in the first place? Why not take liberty with truth or events or history and re-write it all in order to create our own truth or events or history in a manner that will more effectively serve our own agendas? Or better yet, why not perform a vanishing act of sorts whereby we clean up the whole situation and make it disappear altogether by re-writing the whole thing right out of history? Why not?
As outlandishly as all of that might sound, we do it all the time. We re-write truth or history or events, and we do that by doing a number of things:
Re-Writing By Exercising Selective Memory
We can choose what we prefer to remember, thereby sorting through and sorting out all the things that are less than palatable or favorable or nice. It’s not about re-writing history as much as it’s about editing it to the point that we re-write it in the editing. We chalk the editing up to perspective or point-of-view in a manner that causes the re-write to possess an air of believability because it’s just how we saw it; it’s how we remember it through our own lens. Yet the snippets that we retain are typically the one’s that speak favorably of us; that recite the story in a manner that spins it in the service of some agenda rather than being true to history.
Re-Writing By Making Ourselves the Victim
This kind of re-writing is quite shrewd as it leaves the situation exactly as it was while adjusting our position in the situation. We were victims. We were set up. We were used and abused. We were placated, manipulated, fooled, cajoled, forced, had the ‘wool pulled over our eyes,’ or a million other excuses that leaves the situation in tact but tactfully removes us from it. We don’t re-write the event, but we re-write our place and our role in it. We were the unwitting victims of circumstance or the schemes of others, having fallen prey to something we didn’t see and didn’t understand. Yeah, it all happened, but we innocently got caught up in something that we didn’t see coming. It is revisionism nonetheless.
Re-Writing By Justification
Here we don’t re-write it; rather we employ the escapist art of justification to re-write the nature of it. We make it okay and acceptable by justifying it as okay and acceptable. This kind of re-write is not about re-writing the history or the event itself, but re-writing the rightness or legitimacy of the event. We had to take certain actions or do certain things. There were decisions that we had no alternative in making. We were forced into a corner, or we had no alternatives, or we had to choose ‘the best of the worst.’ We make events or actions ethical or moral or just when in reality they are nothing of the sort.
Re-Writing By Selfish Agenda
Sometimes re-writing is done simply because we want to do it. Events or history don’t serve our agenda. We’re committed to some sort of cause or goal that will only be diminished or thwarted if we’re truthful and honest. So we re-write, making the event or history what we need it to be so that it doesn’t obstruct our agenda or worse yet, actually comes to serve our agenda. We can become so deluded in the re-write that we come to believe the fiction of the re-write itself. At that point our lives become based in our own fiction and will be guided by the manner in which we write that fiction and the degree to which it’s contrary to truth.
Will we live in truth, or the truth of our own creation? Are we courageous enough to wrestle with truth, or will we fall prey to the weakness and foolishness of our own revisions in whatever form them might take? How will we live?
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC