– Nashville Individual Counseling and Our Past

Last Updated on February 1, 2016 by Chris Roberts

WHY DOES OUR PAST (CHILDHOOD) MATTER AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR US NOW?

Reference: “Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora.” Polly Young-Eisendrath. 1997. Texas A&M University Press College Station

We have all heard the concept that our past influences our present. We all know the clichés about “mommy issues” and “daddy issues.” These are a large part our pop culture. Most people relegate these concepts to outdated or overused “psychobabble” and don’t spend intentional effort or energy delving into the possibilities of their impact on our daily lives. However, sometimes the old clichés survive millennia, because they hold seeds of truth.

This article will argue that unaddressed or unattended past events will haunt and influence our lives whether we believe in their reality or not. In a previous article about individual therapy, we discussed how significant events are encoded into images and stored as “memory” for the remainder of our lives. In essence, we don’t really remember specific facts and details about the past, but instead create images or maps that hold these events in story form. Dr. Bessell A. Van Der Kolk has done remarkable research to articulate how past events, specifically those that created stark emotional reactions within ourselves, are stored in our brains. Dr. Van Der Kolk believes he can show through brain scans that during extremely emotional situations our left brain stops working and only our right brain is involved in the experience. In essence, this means that our languaging and sequencing part of the brain (the left brain) isn’t being used when we are in hyper-aroused states.

CAN NASHVILLE INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING IMPACT OUR PAST?

The question then becomes obvious: If our left brain isn’t working during these emotionally charged states, then how do we have any memories of these situations? Polly Young-Eisendrath has an answer. She works under the theories of Carl Jung and believes that we store these past emotional experiences in terms of images. Our right brain is the “artsy” part of our brain that uses creativity, spontaneity, pictures, and emotions. So, we store these past, significant events in terms of pictures and feelings. But as humans, we do use language, and we make up stories with our language to make sense of these pictures and feelings. What we forget (or more accurately: were never taught) is that these stories we create out of our language are incredibly inaccurate, at least factually.

If we begin to grasp the reality that most of the stories that drive the purpose of our lives are derived from past experiences, then we learn to be more flexible with the way we manage these stories. As humans, we must make stories to create meaning and to create organization of our lives. However, if these stories are too deeply slanted one way or the other, we can be living out a narrative that doesn’t do justice to the direction we really want to go.

REDEFINING OUR LIVES THROUGH NASHVILLE INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING

If we want to take the courageous step of entering our past feelings, we may find that there are alternate ways of telling these stories that have been driving most of our life up to this point. This is not easy or simple work. We are all scared to death (literally) of opening up past emotions in a way that could re-expose us to those painful experiences. However, if we don’t go back and understand these past situations, we will be stuck in living out the story that we created about the event when we were 4 years old, or 10 years old, or 17 years old.

These emotions we felt in the past are just that: Emotions. Emotions don’t actually hold meaning or coherence. An emotion is just a feeling, and we can’t control our feelings. The only thing we do have control over is our telling of the story about how the feeling occurred.

REACHING OUT FOR HELP TO NASHVILLE INDIVIDUAL COUNSELING

This, I believe, is not psychobabble.   It is the core defining principle of how we experience and affect life. We will affect life to the degree that we believe we have the power to make our influence known.

If you are wanting to cast a different shadow and create a different legacy for you and your loved ones, then Nashville individual counseling may be beneficial for you. Chris Roberts is an individual counselor in Nashville, TN that would love to be of assistance on your journey. Chris can be reached at chris@nashvillecounselor.net or (615) 800-9260.