The difficulty in connecting with people from my past.

[DaVinci]

Recently I've felt like trying to reconnect with people from my past, and I don't just mean to say "Hey, what's up?", but to actually see if having a better understanding of myself can help me to connect with others in a way I couldn't ten or fifteen years ago.

 

That having been said my previous attmepts at doing just this have not been very successful, and I am beginning to wonder if purusing this is a waste of time. For example, a few months ago I met up with someone I hadn't interacted with in a long time. I wanted to see if they had changed, and if so in what way. But almost immediately upon talking to them I recognized they hadn't changed at all. Alarm bells went off in my head. I heard myself saying "This is the same manipulative ego-centric person from a decade ago". I spent at least a couple hours with this person before leaving and knew that if I didn't try contacting them again afterwards I wouldn't hear from them again, and it is no surpirse I haven't.

 

I can't say I lament not being contacted by this person based on the way they acted, but it still makes me sad. It is a symptom of a bigger problem. Every time since then that I think "I should contact this person from my past" my enthusiasm for catching up with someone, reconnecting, etc is met by another part of my brain saying "They won't have the time for you." "They won't want to really connect." "It will just be awkward." "Don't bother."

 

So I'm left wondering what to do. I don't like the idea of giving up and thus always being stuck with the feeling of "What if?", but I'm not sure how to approach this. Based on what I have seen it seems like everyone I used to know has a good job, a family, different interests, etc and I think just asking to meet up and talk might come across as an intrusion to them.

 

Does anyone have experience connecting with people from their past? Has anyone experienced what I have? Any success? Failures? Thoughts in general?

[Drew.]

My experience has been that most people don't change unless if circumstances really force them to. I haven't been too far out from my high school years, and when I developed pre-philosophy friendships. But most people that I've interacted with so far, haven't really improved themselves for the better, and in some tragic circumstances, they have only gotten worse.

 

I check in on facebook pages from time to time--not very often. That's kind of the extent that I go, though.

 

At least in terms of IFS, it sounds like you have two parts are have different desires. They're at conflict with one another. My advice is to listen to both of them, and discover if (and there mostly probably, definitely is) there is any common ground between the two and form a bridge or partnership where they're working together instead of opposition to each other. There are good reasons to reach out to people in the past, and there are good reasons not to.They both have their piece to share.

[DaVinci]

My experience has been that most people don't change unless if circumstances really force them to. I haven't been too far out from my high school years, and when I developed pre-philosophy friendships. But most people that I've interacted with so far, haven't really improved themselves for the better, and in some tragic circumstances, they have only gotten worse.

This is also what I have observed, but it is hard to judge if people have changed from just checking their FB page, and my gut reaction is, like you mentioned, that people won't change unless they are forced to.

[Drew.]

Yeah, it can be really stressful to change and grow. Everything in the world is telling us to conform and adapt to other people, that to introspect and try to grow as a person would destabilize everything in a person's life, and it may be a form of psychic death as they begin to distance themselves from their defenses. It can be hard to tell from a FB page, for sure.

 

It might help to ask yourself why you want to connect with these people again. What does it mean if they are what you're looking for?

[DaVinci]

Yeah, it can be really stressful to change and grow. Everything in the world is telling us to conform and adapt to other people, that to introspect and try to grow as a person would destabilize everything in a person's life, and it may be a form of psychic death as they begin to distance themselves from their defenses. It can be hard to tell from a FB page, for sure.

 

It might help to ask yourself why you want to connect with these people again. What does it mean if they are what you're looking for?

Yeah, those are interesting questions. I have a lot of answers for you, but I'm not sure which of those answers is the most relevant, or if they even qualify as answers to your questions. Especially given that I feel differently about different people and thus have a different feeling about connecting with each person. For example, some of the people I think about trying to connect with were people who I felt were self absored, or ego driven, but not "bad" and in that sense might have changed.

 

In some cases I know I have changed and grown as a person and so could talk to other people about what I think and feel easier than a decade ago. I guess you could compare it in a sense to being a little kid. When you are young you don't have a very big vocabulary and so it can be hard to discuss anything with clarity, but as you get older your vocabulary grows and discussion becomes more focused. So now that I am older still and my vocabulary and self knowledge have grown I am frustrated with the lack of ability to use said vocabulary. I feel agiated over gaining an ability after the fact.

 

In some cases I know the person is nice and the relationship didn't end with any bridges being burned, it was more of a fading out from lost contact, but there still feels like a barrier is up on their side to the idea of talking/connecting, so even if I met with them again in the real world, I'm not sure if anything would come of it.

 

Most confusing of all is when I have some or all of these feelings in concert around the same person.

 

So in terms of why I want to connect with these people again I feel like it is a mix of feeling more confident in myself and having the ability to communicate in a way I was unable to before, and understanding that they also might have grown and changed and be able to communicate better.

 

I think I could also link my feelings on this to an event a while back. I ran into someone from my past one day a few years ago who knew who I was but I had no idea who they were. When they asked if I remembered them I had to confess I didn't. They just sort of looked at me and said "Some people never change." Now, that comment might not have had a negative connotation, but the tone of voice did and so the combination of the two struck me. It made me feel bad inside, as if I had done something wrong to someone. Now perhaps the person was just being judgemental without trying to understand me and thus I can dismiss this type of comment as someone taking out their problems on me, but it still made me think that I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be someone who hurts people. I want to be someone who connects to others.

[Alice Amell]

I'm sorry someone said that to you. You aren't hurting others by not remembering them. Or you didn't intend to forget them, nor to hurt them. You want to connect to people, they are preventing you from doing so now by saying that. They made that comment to hurt you. You don't need to meet their standards if they are content being rude to you.

[DaVinci]

I'm sorry someone said that to you. You aren't hurting others by not remembering them. Or you didn't intend to forget them, nor to hurt them. You want to connect to people, they are preventing you from doing so now by saying that. They made that comment to hurt you. You don't need to meet their standards if they are content being rude to you.

In that particular case I have never seen that person again. I don't even remember the name they told me. It just made me think about what it means to change as a person, and how you communicate that. Or if there is value in communicating it.

[Devon Gibbons]

a few months ago I met up with someone I hadn't interacted with in a long time. I wanted to see if they had changed, and if so in what way. But almost immediately upon talking to them I recognized they hadn't changed at all. Alarm bells went off in my head. I heard myself saying "This is the same manipulative ego-centric person from a decade ago". I spent at least a couple hours with this person before leaving and knew that if I didn't try contacting them again afterwards I wouldn't hear from them again, and it is no surpirse I haven't. 

I eerily think I am that someone you met up with.

 

I don't know if my friend had gotten into self-knowledge, I don't think he had. I was coming to the lunch wanting to tell him my lack of connection I felt with him in the relationship we had because mostly all I remember of him was playing video games with him, his friends, and his brothers. But he was normalizing our bored experiences together by saying "Yeah, but at least we weren't doing drugs or anything crazy...", which isn't really a qualifier in my book. I was trying to tell him I felt a distance between us that was facillitated by both of us, but he ignorantly said "I knew you were a bit introverted, but I just wanted to respect that". Of course, he was right, I was introverted and I closed up when people got too close. But him respecting and normalizing the distance that I was putting in our relationship is evidence that he was fine calling our distant relationship a relationship, which felt a bit insulting. He was indifferent to my fear of letting people close. I was telling him about how I was distant with my father and I kind of saw him, oddly as a father - or older brother, he corrected - and that my familial relationships I thought shaped the way I interacted with him and I asked him some questions about his father and if he had a close relationship with him and he said he got into a yelling fight with him when he left home. 

 

The conversation over lunch went on, I kind of thought, like a bad therapy session I had, but I enthusiastically asked him if he wanted to have lunch in a week and he said "sure". Lacking integrity, powered by the overwhelming idea of empathizing with and focusing consciously on all of the crazy fucking shit that he was telling me about his own life, I stood him up. Very **** move, I know. I was feeling a lot of anxiety about what I would say to him in response and what we would talk about at this next meeting. I also feared I would overwhelm him with my life and he would think I was egotistical or would just neglect/ignore/deny the depth of who I was and I would be abandoned again. So, my fear of abandonment caused the abandonment.

 

I know that people aren't locked into certain personalities, but he had a habit, let's say, of caretaking and managing people's emotions in his family, like Malcolm in the middle.

 

(interesting possibly pertinent asside - I had a very sad dream of saying goodbye to him and not seeing him for 6 months. It was very deep and powerful - it swayed my decision and after the dream I stopped thinking about it.)

 

Sorry, as you've probably guessed with the length of this, I haven't really processed this intense "reunion" with him.

 

Every time since then that I think "I should contact this person from my past" my enthusiasm for catching up with someone, reconnecting, etc is met by another part of my brain saying "They won't have the time for you." "They won't want to really connect." "It will just be awkward." "Don't bother."

Listen, you've separated from these people for a reason, listen to the voices. They've experienced these people in much different ways than your enthusiastic part has. 

 

For me it helped to look at my relationships with Voltaire's quote in mind "To see who rules over you, find out who you cannot criticize". And for me, this meant criticizing my first and "best" friend. Thinking about all of his faults actually. I had basically worshiped him secretly for a long time (maybe worship is a bit too much, but praised that relationship and his good qualities). So, in a way, I couldn't criticize him, because he was so nice... yeah, nice... like when he invited me to beat up our other "friend" or when I was 6, and being very honest about it, telling that I loved him - how much I truly loved him (brotherly love) - and angrily saying I was gay.

ALSO, I looked at bad "friends" that I had dropped specifically because they did some truly awful shit. So, I turned Voltaire's quote on its flipside and asked "If I wish to find out who rules over me, I should ask 'who am I not allowed to empathize with?'." And so I started putting myself into his shoes. He'd always make fun of me in a really embarrassing way, and I felt like his pet he could fuck with. He had a really awful unempathic mocking laugh that was annoying (he'd immitate Peter Griffin). So I began thinking about it and came to the realization that we were friends because I wanted a friendship with this asshole, which indicated that, for all this time, a part of me was radically compensating for the shame I had for myself for having the qualities of a person I despised.

 

This helped me, recently, understand some hidden aspects of the relationships I have had. It hasn't really brought me any friends, but has brought me a sort of resolution in acknowledgment of my experience of them. But it was mostly only with introspection I learned all of this, not "hanging out" with these people (besides the initial meeting with that one fellow) and shooting the shit and vaguely trailing on about "I wonder why we stopped hanging out!! It's so weird, man... because we're like the BEST of friends!" and then getting sucked into historical disconnection with these people.

[DaVinci]

I eerily think I am that someone you met up with.

 

I don't know if my friend had gotten into self-knowledge, I don't think he had. I was coming to the lunch wanting to tell him my lack of connection I felt with him in the relationship we had because mostly all I remember of him was playing video games with him, his friends, and his brothers. But he was normalizing our bored experiences together by saying "Yeah, but at least we weren't doing drugs or anything crazy...", which isn't really a qualifier in my book. I was trying to tell him I felt a distance between us that was facillitated by both of us, but he ignorantly said "I knew you were a bit introverted, but I just wanted to respect that". Of course, he was right, I was introverted and I closed up when people got too close. But him respecting and normalizing the distance that I was putting in our relationship is evidence that he was fine calling our distant relationship a relationship, which felt a bit insulting. He was indifferent to my fear of letting people close. I was telling him about how I was distant with my father and I kind of saw him, oddly as a father - or older brother, he corrected - and that my familial relationships I thought shaped the way I interacted with him and I asked him some questions about his father and if he had a close relationship with him and he said he got into a yelling fight with him when he left home. 

 

The conversation over lunch went on, I kind of thought, like a bad therapy session I had, but I enthusiastically asked him if he wanted to have lunch in a week and he said "sure". Lacking integrity, powered by the overwhelming idea of empathizing with and focusing consciously on all of the crazy fucking shit that he was telling me about his own life, I stood him up. Very **** move, I know. I was feeling a lot of anxiety about what I would say to him in response and what we would talk about at this next meeting. I also feared I would overwhelm him with my life and he would think I was egotistical or would just neglect/ignore/deny the depth of who I was and I would be abandoned again. So, my fear of abandonment caused the abandonment.

 

I know that people aren't locked into certain personalities, but he had a habit, let's say, of caretaking and managing people's emotions in his family, like Malcolm in the middle.

 

(interesting possibly pertinent asside - I had a very sad dream of saying goodbye to him and not seeing him for 6 months. It was very deep and powerful - it swayed my decision and after the dream I stopped thinking about it.)

 

Sorry, as you've probably guessed with the length of this, I haven't really processed this intense "reunion" with him.

 

 

Listen, you've separated from these people for a reason, listen to the voices. They've experienced these people in much different ways than your enthusiastic part has. 

 

For me it helped to look at my relationships with Voltaire's quote in mind "To see who rules over you, find out who you cannot criticize". And for me, this meant criticizing my first and "best" friend. Thinking about all of his faults actually. I had basically worshiped him secretly for a long time (maybe worship is a bit too much, but praised that relationship and his good qualities). So, in a way, I couldn't criticize him, because he was so nice... yeah, nice... like when he invited me to beat up our other "friend" or when I was 6, and being very honest about it, telling that I loved him - how much I truly loved him (brotherly love) - and angrily saying I was gay.

ALSO, I looked at bad "friends" that I had dropped specifically because they did some truly awful shit. So, I turned Voltaire's quote on its flipside and asked "If I wish to find out who rules over me, I should ask 'who am I not allowed to empathize with?'." And so I started putting myself into his shoes. He'd always make fun of me in a really embarrassing way, and I felt like his pet he could fuck with. He had a really awful unempathic mocking laugh that was annoying (he'd immitate Peter Griffin). So I began thinking about it and came to the realization that we were friends because I wanted a friendship with this asshole, which indicated that, for all this time, a part of me was radically compensating for the shame I had for myself for having the qualities of a person I despised.

 

This helped me, recently, understand some hidden aspects of the relationships I have had. It hasn't really brought me any friends, but has brought me a sort of resolution in acknowledgment of my experience of them. But it was mostly only with introspection I learned all of this, not "hanging out" with these people (besides the initial meeting with that one fellow) and shooting the shit and vaguely trailing on about "I wonder why we stopped hanging out!! It's so weird, man... because we're like the BEST of friends!" and then getting sucked into historical disconnection with these people.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'm sorry that all of that happened. In a sense it becomes lonely to embark on the path of self knowledge because you learn quickly who you have to cut out of your life.

 

I like that Voltaire quote, and it explains well what I feel on a gut level. But I have already weeded out all the toxic people. I know better now than to try and connect with them. When I think about how they were and how they are now I can see they haven't changed, so I have already pushed them aside.

 

The people I am still considering trying to connect with are the ones I can look back on and remember them being nice. Maybe not perfect, but not jerks either. So I feel there is a chance that if they have changed that it has been a positive change and that the only thing seperating us from having a friendship is my ability to reach out.