Earlier this week, I belatedly discovered that there isn’t going to be a series three for Netflix’s Friends From College because it was cancelled within weeks of the second series’ launch. It had a really good end of series and I wanted to know what happened — and now we never will. In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I talk about how we (and others) open up loops in our mind. Thanks to our curiosity or our desire for a satisfactory ending that matches our view of things, we can sometimes find that we overinvest in certain situations in our desire to ‘close the loop’.

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Nuggets From The Episode

  • When someone who we weren’t actually planning on seeing again says “I call you”, this opens up a loop. When are they going to call? Do they want a relationship? Wait, why didn’t they call when they said they were going to?
  • Someone intimating or outright promising something opens up a loop. If they don’t follow through, it’s an unsatisfactory ending. We need resolution. This is especially so if they made themselves (and us) out to be the best thing since sliced bread and now they’ve done a runner or turned into a nightmare.

Sometimes people say and, yes, promise us stuff they’re not actually going to do because it makes them (and us) feel good at the time.

  • When we beat ourselves up because the story didn’t turn out the way we thought it would and we have an ‘open loop’, we’re opening up more loops. Now we need resolution to why we weren’t ‘good enough’.
  • Wondering why an ex who we cut off with No Contact isn’t trying to contact us, opens a loop.
  • We will feel as if our relationship or breakup has an unsatisfactory ending if part of what we rely on to make us feel good about ourselves is about getting validation in the form of something we don’t actually need. We will do things that scratch the proverbial itch and maybe close the loop, but then open other ones as a result of what might be self-defeating actions.

Seeing someone as a romantic possibility opens up a story loop. We often feel compelled to find out what will happen or convince ourselves that we’re in a rom-com.

  • We all have our individual and, to some extent, collective ideas about what constitutes romantic possibility and interest. Because of this, if we experience something that we think signifies this, it opens up a loop that we often pile lots of story and plans onto. This means that sometimes we’re trying to resolve stories that really only exist in our mind.
  • Often, it’s not really us that’s bothered about the resolution of a story; it’s our ego.

Links mentioned

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