A Good Reason to Remember
“I don’t see why I need to go back and talk through that event again?”
“Why do you keep asking me to go back and tell stories?”
“I’ve already gotten through all of that—why do you keep bringing it up?”
These are all good questions I’ve received from pastors, physicians, homebuilders, lawyers, and parents recently in my individual or group sessions.
We live in a time where knowing your childhood and feeling your feelings are all the rage. Yet, sometimes well-meaning clinicians educate individuals or couples that if they can just feel their feelings and set boundaries, they will have an easier life. This undertone to modern therapy is a harmful lie that puts feelings as the end goal for achieving a comfortable life. Feelings and memories are not the ultimate goal or the endpoint of human health. They are more of a necessary starting point for a process that moves us toward living fully. In other words, we don’t reflect on the past or feel emotions just for the sake of doing so; we engage with them as a necessary step toward healing, growth, and living passionately. We don’t feel simply for the sake of feeling; we notice and label our feelings so that the door to getting our needs met and living fully can be opened to us. This is a starting point that we return to many times a day as a way to surrender to the process of living instead of trying to control it.
Knowing where we come from helps us gain personal freedom, just for today. Someone who knows the roles, rules, and internal scripts they had in their first 18 years of life is someone who can seek what they actually need so they can enjoy (with gratitude) their present life.
Alternatively, a person will unconsciously reenact past patterns until memory is restored and shared on an ongoing basis:
Consider the child who grew up in a home where alcohol was abused by one or both parents. This child will inevitably exhibit traits (The Laundry List) that perpetuate abandonment feelings in their grown-up relationships, although they may strive to reverse what happened to them. Unless an adult child of an alcoholic is willing to slow down and name what happened in their home growing up—the cost of what happened to them, how it harmed them, what they feel about that harm, and what that child needed but did not receive—then decisions in the adult years will be made to avoid that unresolved pain instead of living fully in the present. Living a full life as a grown-up involves even more pain, more risk, less control, and more faith—the very things we work to avoid in ourselves and our children if we don’t feel our own story.
Because of how we are made, the willingness to feel and remember is key to reclaiming the freedom to live with integrity and joy.
10 Most Painful
A wonderful beginning point to reclaiming your memories (re-membering) is to make a list of 10 events that have hurt you.
A few guidelines for this list:
Write down any memories that come to your mind immediately. Do not try to cultivate the best list, but rather a “dump” onto the page in a free-association way.
What did you feel then, and what do you feel now as you look at this list?
A main tactic of toxic shame is to compare your pain to someone else who has experienced “more” pain. This is what toxic shame does. Can you acknowledge your own pain? Can the events that hurt you be impactful without comparison? Ownership is important.
Share the list with others who care for you—but only with people who have begun reclaiming their own story with feelings, not with those who will minimize and explain away your pain.
How do you avoid feeling helpless, embarrassed, alone, or anxious in your life now? Do you see links to these memories from your past?
Written by Colton Shannon, Ph.D., LPC-MHSP