Without memory, without roots, we would be beings without identity, without a foothold in life. But sometimes the past haunts us. Can we get rid of it?
Do we need to let go of the past in order to build the future? If we have experienced the worst, if we feel overwhelmed, limited by what was lacking in life, or by what happened to us, this question is quite justified. But what does it mean to be “liberated”? According to psychotherapist Elena Ratner, “it would be vain to hope that we will forget. It is important to be able to transform the memory, to make the event take a different place in our experience, so that it reflects on us in a different way. It’s about finally accepting what happened, stop fighting it. And more than that: to make something new out of it. For example, some bereaved parents or survivors of violence form community organizations to prevent such incidents or to help others recover from the experience.
Psychotherapeutic support most often helps to restore balance after shocks. In some cases, rituals are effective, the purpose of which is to honor the memory of the departed and comprehend what happened, to give painful experiences a certain place so that they no longer interfere with living in the present.
Time also does its job – not erasing the scars, but allowing the healing processes to unfold.
Unconscious trauma
What about those of us who haven’t experienced any overt drama? Or are we all, to one degree or another, out of tune with our roots, childhood or lessons learned from experience?
“From the point of view of psychoanalysis, we are all wounded,” confirms Elena Ratner. Trauma is not necessarily the result of an accident or catastrophe, it is caused by an event that we have not realized, have not lived through.
Because it was too heavy (maltreatment, assault)
or happened too quickly (premature birth),
because it happened too soon (separation from parents, unhappy love in adolescence)
or was not named (a mother who does not say that she survived rape, but testifies against her will by the way she dresses or dresses her daughters),
or seems too scary (puberty, which the girl wants to avoid by getting anorexic) …
We continue to suffer from the past, in addition to the will to play roles, play out scenarios that we are not aware of.
“What is traumatic is what we can neither express nor imagine,” summarizes the psychotherapist. “And from which, therefore, we cannot get rid of.”
We continue to suffer from the past, in addition to the will to play roles, play out scenarios that we are not aware of and that control us. “To get rid of the past means to restore our place as a subject in those events when we were an object on which something was imposed,” the psychotherapist clarifies.
Returning to ourselves begins with the fact that we gain the strength to say: “I did not agree.”
Recurring Scenarios
A course of action that worked in the past (or was the only feasible option) may no longer be optimal today. Psychologist Elena Stankovskaya suggests recalling two concepts of transactional analysis (TA): “ego states” and “life scenario”.
There are three ego states: depending on what I’m experiencing, I can approach reality with the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of the parents I identify with, the child I was, or the adult I have become. A life script is our plan, based on parental instructions addressed to the child and decisions made by him in childhood.
We weaken the child’s traumatized part, and it no longer controls us in the present.
“When the past takes us prisoner, we find ourselves in the position of a child,” explains Elena Stankovskaya. “Unconsciously, we relive childhood trauma, interpret reality in the same way as then, and react in the same way.”
Maria, 27, boycotts her boss’s instructions, even though she knows she’s risking her career. In fact, she behaves like in childhood, when her parents forbade or, conversely, ordered her to do something. The girl did not dare to say “no” and chose sabotage. A number of her early decisions are connected with this: “authorities want to suppress you, you cannot cooperate with them”, “if they ask for something, sabotage it” … But it is obvious that now these decisions do not allow her to live fully.
“We need to see this pattern and the events that shaped it in order to reconsider the situation and think about what new decisions we would like to take instead of the old ones,” explains Elena Stankovskaya. “We weaken the child’s traumatized part, and it no longer controls us in the present when a situation arises that resembles the one in the past.”
Traces in the body
We are weighed down not so much by the facts of the past in themselves, but by the meanings and power with which we endow them. They are also imprinted on the body, and it can tell a lot. The reactions of the body are very individual, and it can be difficult to decipher them.
“In our work, we always pay attention to the bodily side and share our observations with the client,” explains Elena Pavlyuchenko, a Gestalt therapist. – For example, I see that, talking about something, a person shrinks all over. But what emotions are hidden behind it? Shame? Fear? sadness? Perhaps this is one of the characteristic patterns imprinted in him from childhood? These are questions for him. To begin with, it is important that the client begins to become aware of his bodily life: sensations, movements, posture.
This work helps to understand how the past is “actualized” in us, and, better aware of its traces, to fight rigid and automatic manifestations. By becoming aware of what the body expresses and allowing it to experiment with other modes of action, we open the way to greater flexibility and freedom of choice.
New language
If we want to free ourselves from the past, we will have to think about what we are ready to inherit and what we would prefer to give up.
We navigate life with the help of various tools, the first of which is a language that allows us to give names to everything that surrounds us. This instrument is imperfect, because it contains all the influences of those who taught us to speak.
To get rid of the past means to separate the precious heritage handed down to us from the heavy suitcases of junk
So, “a child will not have a language for describing negative experiences if this language was not given to him by his parents,” says Elena Ratner. – But they – due to their own injuries – often do not have such a language themselves. Or they do not consider it necessary to talk to the child as a subject, they do not teach him to talk about feelings (and, therefore, to be aware of them). Instead, they communicate with him with the help of clichés. For example, they say: “Boys don’t cry” – and he keeps his experiences in himself all his life, stifles them, suffers from coronary disease … But if he wants to take care of himself, he will have to ask himself questions: why, in fact, boys should not cry? What if it’s hard for me? He needs to find a language to describe old traumas in a new way, comprehend them and live.
To free ourselves from the past means to separate the precious heritage handed down to us from the heavy suitcases of junk. And look to the future.
Secrets of family photos
Psychologist Olga Perevezentseva, author of the Psyforte phototherapy blog in Russia, explains why she uses family photos of clients in her work.
“These pictures, on the one hand, open a direct path to their unconscious, lead to awareness of feelings. The very synchronization of the internal with the external gives a therapeutic effect. On the other hand, photographs reveal the unconscious of the family clan – by the fact that they show (the order in which the family members are seated in the picture, the distance between them, the places assigned to each) – or hide (absent family members, other “defaults”).
Looking at old photographs, we can see some patterns in the structure of the family system, from which our internal problems grow. The psychologist accompanies us in this study, and his main task is to ask the right questions that we do not think to ask ourselves.