Is It Stuck In the Past?

I am coming to the end of some training in Integral Eye Movement Therapy, a brief change model that allows you to dissociate from upsetting memories and process difficult emotions.

I asked an acquaintance of mine if she would be interested in being one of my case histories - 2 sessions of focused therapeutic work - as she had expressed an interest in coming for hypnotherapy for a particular issue.

The work did not flow easily and I recognised that what we call a pattern of chronicity was at play. This is where the person has had an issue for a long time and has almost become resigned to it to the extent that attempts at change are interfered with. None of this is conscious, by the way.

During the course of the second session, a memory was identified that had something to do with the issue we were working on. After we had worked with it, my client exclaimed that that had happened about 20 years ago and she had moved on from it.

Of course, there is truth in this. When we look back on things that happened in the past with our current adult resources, we often see things differently. In the moment however, we handled the situation with the resources we had then; the resources of a 7 year old, or a 10 year old, a 17 year old, and so on. We handled it with the resources we were encouraged or not encouraged to adopt by our caregivers. This means that we may not have been able to handle an event for example in a way that was meaningful or beneficial to us. This means that old hurts and injustices can have left their traces in our being. The self seeks to protect us from experiencing something similar again and so we find ourselves experiencing anxiety in certain situations, or avoiding certain situations or responding in a way we don’t want to in certain situations.

When you feel an overwhelming response to something or you feel strong emotion that hangs around for a while, you can be fairly certain that some old hurt has been tapped. You are no longer responding with your adult resources but rather as the younger you who didn’t have the resources back then to deal with the situation in a satisfactory way.

Some people feel a sense of hurt pride that these old responses rear up and make their presence felt and want to try and squash them with such phrases as my acquaintance verbalised of ‘having moved on.’ There is no shame in these happenings. You did the best you could back then. By laying these matters to rest by working through them in whatever way you are attracted to, you will feel better and will cease to be triggered in the old ways so that your best self takes the reins, and will live a more comfortable and edifying life.

If what you are doing in therapy suggests that old memories could do with some re-visiting in order to release stuck emotion, isn’t that better than living your days with anxiety, lack of confidence or something else - indefinitely?

We don’t always need to revisit old memories in order to do therapy effectively. It depends what you want to work with. But where your therapist suggests it would be helpful, my advice is to seize the opportunity with both hands and go for it. After all, it’s just between you and them.