LIVING IN THE PAST

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see....Martin Luther King Jr.

Human emotion is very difficult to experience and even harder to understand. We feel because we need information for our survival and need to connect to others for our well-being. The strength of a feeling helps us separate important from unimportant events. These emotions are experienced directly without the need for delay or use of defenses. Emotions tied to relationships are more complex and can be as contagious as a virus. We feel because feelings tell us what is happening with the connections to others. We read others emotions because they signal what is going on within that person to know how to connect to them. We understand them because their emotions trigger emotions within us. We react to their emotion with our own.

Our history of relationships is embedded in our emotional reactions to others. As a child, we are a blank slate. The rules of connection to our parents are laid down in a time of high vulnerability when we believe everything that we are told. The conditions of love are held in place by strong emotions. Do as our parents wish and you feel good, Break the rules and we feel great fear, guilt and shame. We know how to act in a relationship because we learned those rules in the relationship to our parents and store them in our memory for future reference.

As an adult, those memories and emotions become the road map to tell us how to act in all our relationships.When faced with a choice as an adult that may require us to break these rules, we experience a level of anxiety that reflects the level of demand by parents to follow the rules. We feel fear because we face a choice of following the rules or breaking the rules. Break the rules, and we encounter the negative emotions. Follow the rules, and the anxiety disappears. Internal conflicts appear when the rules are unreasonable and designed to keep parents from emotionally overloading rather than protect the child.

Anxiety is created in the child by the knowledge that a given rule doesn't make sense but is required by the parent to remain connected . The level of anxiety reflects the sum of our experiences in our relationships. In that sense, we are a human time machine. We experience the history of our lives in the level of emotion we experience. We never live solely in the moment. The past is always present in the level of our emotions every moment of our lives.

In order to manage our emotions in a healthy way, it is critical to understand that the past is always present. We cannot "just get over it", as some people often ask me, because we would have to eradicate our memories from our brain to react only in the moment. While it is a nice idea to think that we can be solely in the moment as some New Age treatments suggest, I do not believe we are built to process our thoughts and feelings in that way. It is contrary to our psychology and biology and puts us at risk to ignore the rules of relating that we have learned.

Memory is the reason we can flood with emotion and "over-react". The meaning we assign to a given event is based on our history with significant others. The new event reminds us of how we were treated in the past, and the emotions all rush into the moment. Internal defensive reactions are triggered that minimize the overwhelming emotion, but suppress the natural reactions that conflict with the family rules.

Slowing down this process to discern past from present emotion is one of the goals of psychotherapy. Reviewing the patterns in relationships, and the continuous repetition across all relationships, increases the person's awareness of the patterns and reduces the need for the defenses. Through retrospective review and learning, the person becomes emotionally healthier because they can anticipate the strength of their emotions, know when to trust themselves, and when to suspend their judgments to better sort out their emotions. The person becomes less afraid of their own emotions and learns to use them to solve problems and promote healthier relationships.