NEW BOOK: We’re pleased to announce the publication of our book — (tap title to purchase)
Seeing Through the Grief: A Time Perspective Therapy Application
When we experience great loss, our despair can be so intense that we get stuck, oftentimes facing backwards, reliving painful experiences thar may leave us feeling stranded in the past. We can find ourselves living day-to-day on autopilot, going through the motions, while in the back of our minds we might think we don’t deserve to be happy anymore. When we try to look at the future, whatever plans we had made prior to our loss now seem impossible to achieve.
If this sounds familiar, Time Perspective Therapy is designed to help; it provides simple tools to turn your perspective from dark to light, from negative to positive. This book dives deep into the many facets of grief: from depression and caregiver stress to reestablishing relationships that may have fallen to the wayside and making plans for your new and different future. Through real-life intimate stories of those who have suffered loss and grown from the experience and easy-to-do exercises, it is designed to help you learn how TPT can help you cherish the past, enjoy the present, move toward a new and brighter future, and live a fulfilling, meaningful life.
Rose Sword & Phil Zimbardo
(Tap to purchase The Time Cure )
The Time Cure: Introduction
Some years ago a young man I’ll call James came to see me in my Stanford University office for help with his shyness. In the course of our conversation about the origins of his awkwardness around people, he told me that almost everyone he met reminded him of someone who had hurt him or rejected him in the past, so he could not risk being open to them. And then he related a very interesting image: his life, he said, was organized around the eighty slides that he had arrayed in what he called his “Kodak Carousel mental slide projector.” Once the slide show started, the images were projected into his current consciousness in a predictable and reliable sequence. So his present sense was the slide on his mind’s screen, his past sense was the slide he just viewed, and his future sense was determined by the slide or slides coming up next. My first thought was that this seemed like a reasonable metaphor for memory.
What he told me next, however, was quite unsettling: James’s slide tray was filled with slides of negative experiences only—rejections, failures, missed opportunities, mistakes, miscalculations, bad deals, and more. His present sense, then, was always of a past negative event; his past sense was also of a negative event; and his anticipated future slide was always a predictable negative event from his past! Worse, his mental slide show was out of his conscious control—it could be turned on at any time by a triggering experience; so repeatedly viewing all of these horrific images of his past negative experiences, so vividly projected, further burned them into his brain.
I thought hard about a treatment plan, and arrived at a solution that seemed to fit his particular imagery. I informed James that Kodak had just developed a 120-slide carousel, which meant that he would now be able to add 40 new slides to his old show. I encouraged him to explore his memory to find any events that were positive: successes, good birthdays, friends, favorite foods, movies, books . . . and for each positive image he was able to recall, we created a new, vividly bright slide and inserted it randomly into his mental carousel. Although the negatives still dominated the set, there was now some occasional relief. He could see that his life had many good people, experiences, successes, and more that were balanced against the bad.
We gradually replaced more and more of the bad slides with good ones from recent positive experiences. Over a period of months, this impromptu treatment program began working to provide James with a more balanced, nuanced conception of his life over time and of his ability to shape his current life. It also had a profound impact on me, encouraging me to think more deeply about the nature of our temporal orientation and the real impact that our individual concepts of past, present, and future have on our lives…
Phil Zimbardo
Note: The Time Cure is available in German, Polish, Chinese and Russian.
(Tap to purchase Living & Loving Better)
Living & Loving Better: Introduction
…In Living and Loving Better you’ll learn the basics of our therapy and how it can help solve problems and improve relationships. In a nutshell, Time Perspective Therapy is about checking our personal time perspectives -- whether or not we view the past, present, and future positively or negatively -- and if it’s negative, that by applying a dose of positivity, we gain a more balanced time perspective and therefore a more balanced life.
This simple method works particularly well when we get stuck in the past, especially if it was a negative experience. In Time Perspective Therapy, these recollections are considered past negatives. We might not realize that every day, these past negative memories can cast a shadow over the way we think, see, and feel right now, in the present, as well as how we view the future. Time Perspective Therapy is also helpful if we’re stuck in a present behavior we know is unhealthy, like present fatalism. A past negative experience can cause us to be present fatalistic and make us behave in ways we normally wouldn’t, or make us sad when we’re supposed to be happy.
When we are overshadowed by negative things that happened in the past, or current situations that seem overwhelming, it’s easy to drop the ball, to lose track of time and those with whom we were once close to. We think no one understands us, or has a more difficult life than we do. In Living and Loving Better, you’ll read stories of real people who have overcome tremendous past negatives and moved on to reconnect with loved ones and live productive, joyful lives. You’ll read about people in toxic relationships, people who are bullied, or shunned; and you’ll read about their triumphs. How did they do this? By focusing on past positives instead of past negatives and by becoming selectively present hedonists—all the while creating and working towards their brighter future positive. You can be one of them! All it requires is a better balanced, more optimal perspective on time in your life.
Living and Loving Better will provide you with the simple tools and real life examples that help you see the big picture of your life. It will help you let go and heal the past, appreciate and embrace the present, and create an ideal future – for you and your loved ones.
Phil Zimbardo & Rose Sword
Note: Living and Loving Better is available in Polish, German and Italian.