Recognizing our Past

In the field of counseling and psychology people talk a lot about the significance of the past. What has happened in a persons life to directly influence who they are today, and how have those past experiences hardwired them to think and feel the way you do? Our pasts influence on the present is a powerfully simple idea that when applied well can be extremely helpful in uncovering why someone is the way they are. In today’s world these ideas have become colloquialisms among teenagers who make fun of each other for being “triggered” and characters in movies who joke about their daddy issues. Yet in all our levity most people still struggle to accept the truth behind these ideas. Our past has deeply influenced our present.

I have a favorite anecdote when I’m helping individuals to bridge this gap between intellectually understanding their past’s influence and emotionally accepting its reality. It starts off with a scene familiar to most people: the malnourished dog sitting behind a chain linked fence at a pound. There isn’t a human alive besides a special few who could walk into a pound and accuse one of those animals for the choices they made which have led to them being locked up in such a situation. Can you even imagine such a scene? Try to visualize yourself standing in the entrance of a pound looking onward as some person berates a group of dogs for the scars they have, the lack of food they’ve clearly been given and the broken system and people which have led to them being there. Pounds are not full of animals that put themselves behind fences, pounds are full of animals that humans have put behind fences.

In this visualization we begin to capture the difficulty and complexity that most of us have with our past experiences. Are not many of us to a certain extent that animal sitting behind the fence at little fault of our own, and yet each day many of us walk up to the battered parts of our being and become so upset at how locked up and bruised we feel? So many of us are disconnected from the experiences that have led to our emotional capture, that we treat ourselves as the perpetrator of our own captivity.

The greatest hurdle in most people’s recovery is that they don’t have a healthy understanding of what it means to be a product of their past. If there was one quality I could magically place in many of those I work with, it would be that measure of insight which would help them to connect their past experiences to their feelings in the present. Additionally, to also give people the ability to have compassion on themselves like they would for a dog sitting in a pound

What if we could have grace and mercy towards ourselves and not just everyone else? With time and practice we can overcome that disconnection between joking about daddy issues, and realizing we are the ones with them. We can come to believe that each and everyone one of us is just trying our best to thrive in this crazy world, and that not everything we feel or experience is by our own volition. The crosses we bear are many times much older and more complex than the few weeks, months or even years we’ve spent struggling to carry them. What in your past would you benefit by having more compassion and acceptance for?