Those distractions come from our meaning perspectives which are forever dragging the present moment into the past and defining the present by the past and generally make those distractions negative. Through meaning perspectives, we rarely live fully in the moment. We stay too busy making negative judgments about the present to participate fully in that present. We do want to relate somewhat to past experience in the present to give certain worldly structures meaning and form, a heuristic. "Green lights mean go, and red lights mean stop" is a conscious perspective from past experience and learning that allows us to drive safely (or run the light if we live with that sort of meaning perspective). These conscious perspectives help us live in the moment because we don't have to relearn every element of the world every moment of the day. When heuristics operate properly, we find that past a very helpful apart of our present and also help lead us safely into the future. In that way, our past and future inform but do not dominate our present. Our immediate experience exists as a collaboration of past and present events which open up future, possible events to us. All that is to the good for living fully in the moment.
If something gets in the way of our living fully in the moment, even if we think these are conscious meaning perspectives, it may well really come from unquestioned meaning perspectives. When we fear what others will think about us, we really fear ourselves and what our meaning perspectives tell us about ourselves and our identity. We feel anger and hurt because when we make interpretations and diagnoses, we often do that to defend our identity through the aggressive offices of our ego. In that way, we cause ourselves harm as well as do harm the persons we interpret and diagnose.
The dominator model wants us to perceive the world through interpretations and diagnoses in this way because these perceptions support conformity and societal forces that inspire fear in us. When we do, we miss what the world really has to offer us because our vision is limited to the dominator's vision. In terms of the meaning perspective, that is even more the case. The meaning perspective functions as the dominator of our observations. In that meaning perspectives transfix us in a past defined by some perceived traumatic event, some perceived nearly deadly assault on our vulnerability. Our lives feel threatened when we feel our identities threatened. We transfix as an act of defense against these perceived events that have happened and we fear will happen again. By setting up interpretative meaning perspective barriers to the present and future, the best things in life can simply pass us by, as the saying goes, because we diagnose them in terms of our past suffering. As an ironic consequence, we bring our suffering with us and relive it constantly even as we think we are avoiding it happening again.
If I had succumbed to the seeming safety of a negative meaning perspective about women after my summary dismissal by one woman, my life might have felt safer, but it would have been stunted. When I met Silvia who has nurtured my life so I thrive and grow, I would have interpreted her as a deceiver and a fraud because "all women are like that." I would have diagnosed her as a threat and never really seen her and all the intelligence, sensitivity, creativity, and emotional scope she offered.
Many of us live through meaning perspectives that cause the very thing we fear: deprivation in a general sense and deprivation of unconditional positive regard specifically. Our negative perspectives become our negative interpretations which cause us to make negative diagnoses. A woman lies to me and hurts me. I want to avoid that hurt, so I create a meaning perspective I think will protect me from such lies: "All women are liars." It may keep me safe in some ways, but it also keeps me from seeing nay woman in her self. I condemn myself forever to distrust and blindness to the true qualities offered to me by women. That kind of self-inflicted meaning perspective keeps our world a fearful and a very small and isolated place. In that way, we have chosen alienation from the external I/Thou which causes alienation within us. It keeps us from exploring the liberating creativity of a life fully lived where bad things happen, but many more good things happen if we look for them and believe we can create them. We can even learn from the immediately perceived bad things. In a sense, something I discovered while attempting to recover from a long term physical problem will serve as a brief counter to the negative: "we want to look for the good stuff 'cause the bad stuff is too easy to find." We can choose to take every negative interpretation and diagnosis we make as an invitation to question and critically reflect on the meaning perspective that gave force to that interpretation, to that diagnosis. That process can lead to the transformative and liberation.