Integrating your past (and its role in emotional health)

[Commodent]

I think one thing that is largely ignored within the spiritual community is the importance of acknowledging your past. But I think it's so important that I decided to write a massive post about it. To me this idea of digging into your past was unheard of until maybe two years ago. The past has already happened. Why would I care about the past when only the future lies ahead? Shouldn't I just let go instead of "dwelling" on it? As I've come to learn, your past might be affecting you much more than you might be aware of, and I think it's important to understand exactly how. I understand that it's different for different people, so I will try to focus as much as possible on my own experiences so you can make up your own conclusions.

How does your past affect you?

So when I started this journey I would find myself wondering why I had so much struggles with low self-esteem, social anxiety and chronic depression despite all my efforts trying to improve it. I had read multiple self-help books, watched self-help videos and seen a therapist, all that to no effect. It seemed like I had all the tools in the world to handle the problem, but with no results. I then went into spirituality, started reading Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, Adyashanti etc. in addition to practicing meditation. I felt calmer in a sense, but I could still feel an inner turmoil dorming under the surface. In retrospect I can see that I had become a master at denying my own feelings and experiences, as I still felt crushingly empty and disconnected. My spiritual practice was not healthy.

So I started doing research on child development and I began putting the pieces together from my own past, and I soon came to realize that my struggles were a completely natural reaction to the experiences I had growing up. I was never beaten, my mother never said anything blatantly cruel, and I have many memories of her warmth and love. My childhood did indeed feel like the best time of my life. So accepting that my childhood had been less than perfect required quite a "leap" of thought. Denial and minimization (seeing experiences as less severe than they really are) is indeed extremely common when it comes to these things. My parents were frequently fighting and they divorced when I was four. My mother was very authoritarian in her parenting style, which led me to rebell and we were fighting a lot. I was whipped around (not litterally) without empathy. If I did anything that annoyed her she would angrily criticize me for it. So growing up in an environment like that, is it any wonder that I grew up feeling like people were judging me harshly and thus feeling socially anxious? No. Even though I was no longer in such an environment, I still expected the same treatment from others. Could you honestly say that any of these incidents could be considered traumatic? Not by any modern definition. But it still affected me greatly, and I know that these types of experiences are not uncommon in today's society.

The bottom line is that we internalize the dynamic we grow up with, and you treat yourself the way you yourself was treated. Your upbringing is thus, in my opinion, the key to understanding why you are the way you are. For example, if you were unempathically whipped around as a kid, there is no wonder your're treating yourself (and others) the same way today.

So how do you heal your inner dynamic?

The answer is to grieve your painful experiences, in order to "transcend" them. It's important to deeply understand what you've been through. Former therapist Daniel Mackler goes further in depth on grieving's role in emotional healing:

Four Stages of Emotional Healing (1 of 2)

Four Stages of Emotional Healing (2 of 2)

Video on grieving specifically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c95sfyv-M8M

For those who would like more detail, I'm going to mention a model I really like. When saying "inner dynamic" I guess it almost sounds like there are multiple parts of you interacting with each other. And in my opinion that is not too far from the truth. In everyday speech it's common to say things like "one part of me wanted to do that, another to do that ...", so this model seems correspond with our inner experience. (See IFS for more). It also makes sense from a neurological standpoint, insofar that certain stimuli seem to activate different "networks" in our brain, which could be regarded as different parts of the whole making you. Now in fully healed people, these parts generally work together without conflict, as an integrated whole. In fragmented people they're split off and in conflict. The most primitive form of splitting is right-brain/left-brain splitting, where the left-brain deems the right-brain as illogical and unreasonable and the right-brain deems the left-brain as too harsh and too cold.

With this in mind, the word "self-compassion" might make more sense. That is, you speak reassuringly to different parts of you with the compassion and patience you would to a small child, pet or a loved one. I can provide an example. I'm driving in the car and suddenly notice a part of me feeling very fearful that other drivers are judging my driving. My muscles tense up and I become hyperaware of how I'm holding the steering wheel etc. So I say to myself "this fear is just remnants of the past, it was true in your upbringing but right now people are probably not scrutinizing you heavily". And amazingly enough, after 1-2 minutes of doing this I can notice myself relaxing. Previously I would have been thrown into an endless spiral of me trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with me and how to fix it. (Did I mention how my mother for a large portion of my life tried to "fix" me?)

How does this relate to emotional intelligence and your relationship with others?

You cannot accept experiences in others that you have denied in yourself. I noticed that once I started becoming more open to my own experiences and how they affected me, I also became able to emphathize with such experiences in others instead of minimizing and invalidating them like I had done in myself. By treating myself with kindness, I effortlessly started extending that same kindness to others.

Final note

As a final note I would like to recommend a book that has helped me so, so much in my emotional healing:

The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame by Pete Walker

I honestly think anyone could have benefit of reading that book.

Well that's about it. Cheers

[Harikrishnan]

Thank you ?

[d0ornokey]

Thank you so much for this 

[Ryan_047]

@Commodent Thank you so much for this post, it's eye opening.

I'd like to ask you what practical things you do to bring up your emotions and grieve them.Most of the time I feel numb and when I sit down and start journaling feelings may come up,but very weakly and they go away fast.

[Commodent]

@Ryan_047 In my case it often gets elicited when I think about how hard certain events in the past were for me. Or more generally, self-compassionate self-talk. The book I mentioned also talks about this a bit (sorry for poor formatting):

"It is sometimes easier to recover anger than tears. If the survivor truly wants to reclaim her anger, continued practice of angering techniques will in most cases eventually fire her up enough to genuinely become angry. Several of my clients made this breakthrough by smashing bottles in the bins at a recycling center; others broke through while chopping wood, and many stumbled into their genuine anger via the more “traditional” methods of hitting a pillow with a fist, tennis racket, or plastic bat.

I often wish that there was some comparable way to force tears. Many survivors who truly want to cry find their tears very hard to come by. In early recovery, I spent long frustrating periods aching for the relief I knew crying would bring if only I could get my tears to flow. At one point I visited the airport whenever I was particularly desperate for a crying-release, for I had discovered that other people’s tearful reunions often moved me to tears. One friend of mine, who shared this longing for tears, became so desperate that he tried squeezing onion juice into his eyes to force himself to cry. He only tried this once, however, and does not give it any kind of a recommendation. The poet Rumi, in his poem The Rights of Crying, expressed a similar desperate yearning for tears:

Why so fugitive? I have some right to be with you, rights of crying. If there were laughter all around me, I would feel closed in if you weren’t there. With my children and everyone else I love, I’d still be distracted. How can I tie down one of your feet? I do have enough strength and patience. No matter how far you go, even beyond the sunlight into where Jesus is visible, I’ll come and wait to be told why you go away from me.

Although most of us can’t force our tears, many of us can sometimes coax them with poignant movies and music. I have also helped my clients to begin crying with the method described later in this chapter in the section entitled: “A technique to enhance feeling.”"

"A TECHNIQUE TO ENHANCE FEELING

If you have butterflies in your stomach, invite them into your heart. – Cooper Edens

You can use the following technique to begin or to enhance the practice of feeling. Begin by closing your eyes. Focus your full attention on the sensations in the area of your belly and heart. Breathe slowly, deeply, and rhythmically and simply attend to your visceral experience as you are filled and emptied by each breath. Attend to the expansions and contractions of the muscles that allow you to fully receive and fully release your breath. Focus on the most dominant sensation that appears in your torso during this process. Visceral sensations are often physiological correlates of feeling. If you hold your attention on them, if you feel them, you may become aware of their actual emotional content. By holding your awareness on a sensation, its accompanying feeling either gradually dissolves and passes through you, or it intensifies and wells up strongly enough to be emoted. Such focusing may also bring up painful childhood memories of events that occurred when these sensations and feelings were originally stored in your body. Any pain that surfaces with such memories can be worked through either by feeling it or by emoting it."

I hope that helps. Again, I would recommend everyone to read the whole book, especially if you struggle emotionally. It's pretty amazing.

[Ryan_047]

@Commodent Thank you very much,I've done this unconsciously a few times and I noticed it working.I'll try to turn this into a conscious process.