Are we victims of our pasts?
People seek me out in my practice for a variety of reasons. Some are struggling with impactful life stressors or changes, relationship or job losses, problems with thinking or emotions, or sometimes just a general sense of unease or dissatisfaction in their lives. While most of us can usually identify when something is wrong inside of us, or in our lives, we don’t always have such an easy time figuring out what the problem is, exactly. Given that we are with no other people as much or as intensely as we are with ourselves, it’s amazing how mysterious our own internal experiences can be.
Your brain is responsible for many things, including interpreting your internal experiences, as well as things you observe outside of yourself. It’s an amazing machine, with complex interconnections among parts involved in cognition, emotion, memory, sensation, perception, and movement. So, if our brains are so amazing at crunching and interpreting all of this information, why do we sometimes think, feel, or act in ways that we don’t understand? The answer lies, at least in part, in the information the brain uses to process and interpret – our past experiences.
Imagine your brain as a research scientist – wearing a little lab coat, glasses, maybe a pocket protector. It collects data from multiple sources (e.g., sensory experiences, bodily sensations), and then compares this data to data collected in the past. It then interprets the new data in light of the old data, since that’s what’s available and known. This isn’t altogether different from how actual scientists work – refining hypotheses based upon previous findings. But, here’s the rub – what if the old data is faulty, skewed, or incomplete? If this is the case, we’re interpreting new findings based on bad data.
This is what happens when we are influenced in the present by past experiences that have generated a specific view of ourselves and our worlds – a view that is not wholly accurate or adaptive. For example, you may have had experiences in your life that have communicated to you that you are a failure. As a result, when you (in the present) struggle to reach a goal, or consider embarking upon a new goal, your brain is likely to feed back to you the old data about failure – e.g., thoughts that you will never accomplish anything, feelings of sadness or anger or shame, and behaviors that involve quitting or self-sabotaging.
Does this mean that we are all fundamentally broken in some way? That we are doomed to move through our lives, victimized by faulty data? Definitely not. Fortunately, we are always having new experiences, which, over time, become past experiences. We can utilize strategies to change our internal and external experiences – challenge maladaptive thoughts, find ways to experience positive emotions and better regulate our emotions, nurture healthy relationships, set reasonable goals and make steps toward achieving them. All of these have the potential to generate new data, new sources of information for your brain to access as time goes on, thereby relegating the older data to the bottom of the brain’s database.
No matter where you are in your life, in your process of change, and no matter what you’ve been through in the past, know that you have the power to change your current experience – and, as a result, change your future.