You’re on a good date and part of you is already explaining to friends why it didn’t work out. Dr. Gil Winkelman explains future tripping, anxious desire, and how to tell a possibility from a verdict.
A patient I’ll call Simone was on a second date that was going genuinely well, and somewhere in the middle of it she caught herself rehearsing how she’d explain to her friends why it hadn’t worked out. Nothing had gone wrong. Part of her had already left the table.
In this episode, Dr. Gil Winkelman looks at what that is: future tripping, or what he calls anxious desire. Desire is always reaching across a gap between now and an imagined then. That’s not a flaw. The problem begins when the imagined ending gets so vivid and so certain that it stops being a possibility and becomes a verdict.
You’ll hear how fear and anxious desire mirror each other (fear is the past showing up early; anxious desire is the future showing up before it happens), why imagining a future isn’t the enemy, and a simple two-part test for telling the difference between picturing a future and disappearing into one.
This is Episode 8 of the Love series on AskDrGil.
If this sounds like you, the Healing Archetype Quiz at askdrgil.com is a good starting point for seeing your own patterns.
“Fear is the past showing up early. Anxious desire is the future showing up before it’s happened.”
“Keep the future possible enough that the present can still change your mind.”
“Desire can say, I want this. Imagination can say, I can see this happening. Anxious desire adds one more line: I need to know right now how this turns out.”
Leave a Reply