“It’s ancient history”
“Why drag up the past?”
“Don’t poke the bear.”
“Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus.” (For Harry Potter fans…)
Concerning difficult or painful memories from our past, these might be just an assort-ment of our responses. Sometimes in my therapy room with a client, we veer towards memories or situations that are painful to recall, and they might ask for clarification on why raising this hidden history can possibly be worth it.
To help them understand, I use a metaphor.
Imagine a wardrobe in your bedroom. This wardrobe has everything you’ve ever owned, worn or collected inside it. Any time you use or encounter something, into the wardrobe it goes. It gets to a point the wardrobe is bursting at the hinges. It’s full up, and you know it’s a mess in there, so there’s no way you’re going near it. But you know that if you don’t do something, the doors are going to burst open and everything will come spilling out.
So you decide to organise. You open the doors, and like you expected…avalanche. It’s so much worse than when it was contained. But determined, you pick up everything and in the process the memories return of where each item came from (when you wore that, who gave you this gift, that memorable holiday this trinket is from) and you place every-thing back neatly inside the wardrobe, this time arranging the shelves and hanging up things in a more ordered way, armed with the knowledge of exactly what the wardrobe contains and where it is.
Therapy is a little like going through the wardrobe.
There might come a time in our lives when our past, the things that have happened to us, feel no longer able to be contained. We see tendrils of the past begin to spill out into our present, perhaps in depression, anxiety or other stresses associated with those memories.
We might say “There’s no point digging it up!” and be fearful of the moment when we open the doors to our minds, knowing the things we’ve worked hard to put behind us will come flooding back. It can feel like those moments on the bedroom floor, surrounded by all our possessions, saying: “Why did I start this? It was easier when everything was hid-den away!”
Tidying up our messy bedrooms is an unpleasant task, and so too might be this act of sifting through our history, particularly if we’re replaying or retreading difficult or trau-matic memories. It’s important then that we make sure we’re doing this in a safe way, where we feel held and supported by good friends or professionals.
It can be a difficult, and maybe even long process, but just like cleaning the wardrobe, as the past gets sifted and sorted through, we make sense of, arrange, categorise and make connections to the different events and moments of our lives. Noticing associations we may never have been aware of. There may be realisations of reasons why we act or react the way we do, buried deep in the wardrobes of our memories.
Unlike doing a good clean out where we often find ourselves getting rid of a few bin bags full, everything is going to stay, our past, after all, is our past. But after giving ourselves the chance to think through and become aware of our history, we may find ourselves more able to act with that awareness, having faced the past, acknowledged its contents, and chosen to move forward in freedom. We might no longer act beholden to uncon-scious motivations, but with full awareness of our behaviours and the ability to choose the best way forward for us.
Our past will always be our past, but in this act of sorting through it, from the vantage point of the present, perhaps we will discover a new way to see our future.
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