Repeating the Past Sometimes Moves Us Forward

“I hit her!

I wanted to make her laugh, and she wouldn’t laugh.

I wanted to make her like me, and she wouldn’t like me.

Oh, I’ve failed… I’ve failed!”

Liliom (Charles Farrell), Liliom (1930)

Liliom is an unfortunate character. He’s a carnival barker who comes to a sad ending as he dies of self-inflicted knife wounds before the birth of his first child. In the afterlife, Liliom meets God and God asks Liliom what his greatest regret is. Liliom tells God his greatest regret is having physically struck his wife. Then Liliom begs God to give him a second chance; to allow him to return to life on earth. He wants to make his past wrongs into rights and he wants to see his only child.

God shakes his head and tells Liliom that past experience has taught him that people who are allowed to return to earth simply end up repeating their past. But God is willing to give Liliom a chance. God tells Liliom he must go to the underworld first for 10 years. Afterwards, he will be allowed to return to earth.

Ten years passes and Liliom is indeed sent back to earth, to the very house where his wife and daughter live. When he arrives, his daughter, Louise, is outside in the front yard. He approaches her and attempts to strike up a conversation with her. But Louise is very apprehensive about this stranger. She has no idea it’s her actual earth-father and she is fearful of him. The more she resists, the more Liliom pushes her to accept him. Louise grows very uncomfortable with the pressure Liliom is placing on her and she tells him she wants him to leave. He struggles with her and then slaps her, just as he had slapped her mother years earlier.

At that instant, Liliom disappears from Louise’s sight as he is drawn back into the afterlife. Seems God was right. Even though Liliom was given a second chance, his need to control and force things to happen the way HE WANTED backfired on him. And so he repeated the same old pattern of behavior that had gotten him into so much trouble in the past.

How often are we like Liliom? Codependents, and all addicts, are notorious for repeating the same old self-defeating patterns of behavior. Prior to recovery, most of us are simply “reacting” to life in the only way we know how. Recovery teaches us new healthy patterns of behavior, but we sometimes lose sight of the new patterns and fall back into old unhealthy ones. I believe this most often happens for one of two reasons: 1) either we aren’t working our program seriously; or 2) we have a lesson yet to be learned that we previously weren’t ready to learn.

Many people enter recovery with the best of intentions, then they drift away from the program. They think they’re “cured” and no longer need to work the program or attend support groups. Sooner or later, they relapse into all of their old patterns of behavior because they’d rather be comfortable in their misery than work to change their lives for the better. But even those of us who are serious about changing for the better sometimes take steps backwards. I used to get upset with myself when I regressed, but then I came to realize that every regression had a lesson to teach me.

When I regress, it’s usually because I wasn’t ready to acknowledge something about myself or my behavior. I wasn’t yet ready to “see” something in me at a given time in recovery, so I needed to go back and remake the same mistakes in order to finally “see” and get it. This is the process of being able to face something on our own timetable, when we are ready. It means that sometimes we go backwards to reclaim a piece of ourselves, or knowledge about ourselves, so we can move forward again.

It’s important that we learn from our past mistakes and come to know ourselves well enough to stop repeating old, failed patterns of behavior. But we must do this in our own time, when we are ready and able to do so.