Prime Time by Jane Fonda Read Free Book Online

grew concerned.
    Today I do not suffer from the “poor me”s; there is no longer a blanket of negativity weighing me down. I no longer react to today’s dramas with my own drama, partly because I’ve replaced stress with detachment. By that I don’t mean indifference but, rather, an ability to step back and observe events with greater objectivity, fairness, and perception instead of so much subjectivity. This detachment can be one result of doing a life review. Understanding leads to the realization that it’s not just about you! I have been able to carry this newly discovered perspective and wholeness with me into my Third Act—proof that it’s never too late!

    With Vadim on our wedding day.

    Tom Hayden with Vanessa and Troy.

    With Ted at one of his ranches in Montana, in 1977.
© ANNIE LEIBOVITZ/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES
    Decommissioning Our Demons
    What the experience of doing a life review has taught me is that while we cannot undo what has been, we can change the way we understand and feel about it, and this changes everything. It helps us decommission our demons, frees us from the past, and gives us a boost as we go forward, in new ways, into the rest of our lives.
    Self-Confrontation and Transformation
    While researching this book, I was surprised to find that a number of psychiatrists advocate the life review process, not for the purpose of wallowing in past problems or pathologies or enshrining our early years in either joy or pain, but as a means of self-confrontation and transformation. We look back, we take responsibility for ourselves, and we move on.
    The late Dr. Robert Butler, who was the founding president of the International Longevity Center in New York City, said, “There is a moral dimension to the life review because one looks evaluatively at one’s self, one’s behavior, one’s guilt.” He believed that a life review can lead to atonement, redemption, reconciliation, and affirmation and can help one find a new meaning in life. He noted that “if unresolved conflicts and fears are successfully reintegrated, they can give new significance and meaning to an individual’s life.” I know this can be the case; I have experienced it and the freedom it brings. So, step one in making a whole of your life is spending time on a life review.
    As mentioned earlier, Viktor Frankl’s idea that you have the freedom to choose how you respond to a given situation influenced me greatly. Approaching the matter from a different vantage point, quantum theorists have reached a similar conclusion, maintaining that “we determine reality by the manner in which we approach it. If we observe from a different perspective, we ‘discover’ a different reality.” 1
    Doing a life review can allow us to discover a different reality lurking within those already-lived years. What exquisite freedom this could give us if it allowed us to rearrange our attitudes about our experiences and the people in our lives—the freedom to choose the meaning of our experiences.
    Developing New Neural Pathways
    If we can learn to assign new meanings to stressful situations, we can actually avoid the biochemical and hormonal reactions that cause damage to our systems, especially with age. Recent cognitive research shows that our ability to change our attitudes and behaviors manifests neurologically, as well. Our brains retain their plasticity well into our Third Acts, and they can be rewired. When we react to a person or the memory of a person or event in a negative way over and over and over, it becomes woven into the fabric of our brain’s neural network, like a well-worn footpath that grows deeper over time. The footpaths are not structural; they are patterns made by electrical and chemical signals that are sent via neurotransmitters to parts of the brain’s hundreds of billions of cells, or neurons; the neurons get into the habit of interacting in certain patterns. But when we change our reactions through new insight,