Jun 8
Make Peace with the Past
“The past is never gone. It is not even past.” wrote William Faulkner. The statement may be truest about past adversity. Negative events echo loudly inside our psychic architecture.
The reason is evolutionary. If a tiger attacked you in the forest, you’d do better, survival-wise, not to forget about it, lest you venture again into the forest unprepared. Our brain has evolved to seek order in the environment — to make sense of things — because we’re less vulnerable if we understand what’s going on. Adverse events disrupt the existing order, introducing an element of chaos and senselessness. Our brain is compelled to return to the site of the trauma to try to “solve the case,” piece together the narrative, and restore order to the world.
Little wonder, then, that people find moving on from past adversity difficult.
While visiting the past event our mind keeps on weaving stories around the event based on our perception. These stories may change over time based on the current environment and circumstances. The stories keep evolving over time and a big danger due to this is that the stories might not be factually correct representative of the actual event. The stories become distorted versions of the original event.
How you perceive what happened influences how what happened affects you. This is good news because while you can’t change what happened, you can change how you perceive it. A useful first move is to let go of the misperception.
Dealing with traumatic memories often means tangling with negative emotions. The blizzard of negative emotions can overwhelm the order of the soul.
Managing emotions, however, is a skill that can be mastered. Generally, it involves a three-step process.
First, we must recognize that emotions are always part of our experience, never the whole of it. Your emotions are yours, but they are not you, in the same way, that waves are not the ocean.
Second, we need to learn to accept our emotions. Acceptance does not denote agreement or liking. Rather, it is a stance of attentive curiosity. To wit: Listening attentively to someone does not require us to judge them or agree with what they’re saying. Emotional acceptance is listening attentively to oneself.
Third, we need to realize that the information conveyed by our emotions is often distorted or incomplete. The fact that you feel bad does not mean that you are bad or that your situation is bad. Thus, we should not blindly obey our emotions. Rather, we may learn to consult other available sources of data — our capacity for reason, worldly experience, meaningful goals, and personal values — and arrive at a considered decision, rather than an emotionally driven one, about the course of action to take.
Moving forward from past adversity does not happen on its own. It requires intentional and persistent effort. It takes a balanced approach that acknowledges difficult past events and circumstances without sanctifying them as the pillars of identity and directs us to acquire the mental health skills needed to appraise accurately, deal successfully with — and ultimately transcend — the legacy of a troubled past.
