We can’t just ignore the bad things that happened to us in the past. It won’t go away and it won’t stop being bad. And it will influence us. But we can still do something: it is in our power to change the present.
How does psychotherapy help in real relationships? I often get asked this question. Sometimes it seems to the client that it only gets worse. For example, when, after several meetings with a psychotherapist, he goes to relatives and, under the banner of a radical clarification of relations, smashes to smithereens the little mutual understanding that they had. And then he wonders what he’s doing wrong.
Everyday logic says that if strong feelings are found, then they must be expressed, and to the person with whom they are associated. But worldly logic is different from psychotherapeutic. If our parents didn’t buy us a toy car at the age of five, arguing with our parents now is not enough to get rid of the feeling of worthlessness. Even buying a real car is not enough. Why?
Because mental reality is arranged in a special way. First, it does not consist of events as such, but of our interpretations of those events. Secondly, it is inhabited by «internal objects». These are traces of our relationships with significant people, a kind of repository in which all the hopes and disappointments associated with them are collected.
Our anger, irritation, disgust, resentment and other unpleasant feelings are directed more towards internal objects than towards living people. That is why there is no need to present your experiences to the latter.
But what to do with feelings from the past, if we still experience them? There is another way — to look for an answer to the question of what message they carry and what we can change for ourselves now.
Over the years, the accumulated tension gradually faded away, and it became clear that the present is not determined by the past, but is created here and now.
One day a 29-year-old man approached me. At first glance, Yuri gave the impression of a very physically and intellectually developed person. He took up karate and bodybuilding to be masculine, and then went into teaching to improve his social status, all his life he moved from one achievement to another in the hope of catching his father’s approving glance. But he was indifferent to the success of his son.
A lot of anger was revealed behind the unsatisfied thirst for recognition, and Yuri’s first impulse was to «avenge» his father for his distorted life, which he told me about. I suggested experiencing this emotion not through reaction, but through exploration.
We turned to Yuri’s childhood: the boy needed a father and got angry without receiving attention. But it was impossible to show anger, so it seemed to freeze and accompany him unchanged for the rest of his life, breaking away from the situation in which it arose.
In our work, we brought it back to its roots, and Yuri again lived through his feelings. They turned out to be diverse: along with anger, sadness, fear, disappointment “thawed out” …
After some time, he was surprised to find that the desire for revenge had disappeared, and it turned out that you can talk with your father about cars, go fishing …
Over the years, the accumulated tension gradually faded away, and it became clear that the present is not determined by the past, but is created here and now.