February 7/12 – Why It Is Important to Understand Our Past

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” These words, applied to the history of nations, are equally true when applied to individuals. As a Toronto therapist for over 20 years, I have come to understand how great an influence the past of my clients is on their present lives. Despite this I still hear many people say that it is not important to understand the past, that we ‘have to get over the past’ and live in the present. They say that we can simply reprogram our minds and change any past message. Unfortunately change is not that simple. We cannot simply ignore and overcome our previous history. We need to face it and understand how it has come to affect our present lives. The question then arises, “how does understanding our past help us to heal our present life?”

The first thing that comes to mind when I am faced with this question is the overwhelming power of childhood. When we look at this phenomenon in a purely technical manner we are faced with the huge capacity of the infant brain with its 100 billion neurons and the trillions of neural connections that will arise in the early years of childhood. In other words our wiring is structured during those early years. All the experiences, feelings, impressions, relationships and traumas will construct this wiring. The enormity of this can’t be brushed aside or bypassed. This makes us who we are. Therefore if we want to understand ourselves we need to go to that early place. Certainly many people will say that they can’t go there as they don’t remember a lot back then. However, memory does not simply occur in a standard visual form, it can be retrieved in other ways.

To begin with memory is encoded in our bodies, in the way we experience ourselves and others. People suffering from stress and anxiety or depression are often reliving what happened in their childhood environments. For example, children of alcoholics, whether or not they remember particulars of their childhood, are feeling it constantly. In working with them I help them construct a kind of feeling memory from their present feelings plus a few incidents they might remember. In addition, their adult brains can create a type of ‘mock up’ of the past given this information plus what they know of their parents and siblings in the present. As they build up this information more and more recollections will often arise. The question still remains; “Even if a person remembers a great deal about their past, what value will that have for them as the past is gone and done?”

The past, however, is not gone and done; it keeps repeating itself with many people, especially the ones who do not examine it. Take the example of people suffering from addiction. Their self medication and the pain it produces is often a mirror of a painful childhood. By constantly pushing this pain away they are continuing it. If they were able to look at their past they would begin to understand what they run from, wounds such as childhood abuse, injuries to their self esteem and painful dysfunctional family environments. They could face the past in a new way, a way where they could face these past wounds with an adult consciousness. Why is this important?

It is important because many of the experiences that construct our sense of self are often distorted by the child mind. A child’s mind, while it is vast and sensitive, has certain vulnerabilities that tend to distort reality. One such vulnerability seems to be a tendency to take responsibility for what happens around them. I see this in my clients. Certainly I have seen it in terms of family breakup where a child will assume that this happened because of them, something they did, or didn’t do. A child will also assume responsibility for the pain of an adult. For instance a client with a depressed or troubled parent will somehow feel it is their fault. Children will think, if they were only better children then maybe mommy or daddy wouldn’t be so sad. Even in cases of severe childhood abuse I have seen clients who will defend their parents, feeling somehow the abuse was their fault.

Another key feature of the child mind is the extremely dominant position of parents. Because children are so very dependent on parents, both physically and emotionally, they are also strongly influenced by the parents. Thus, in the early part of our lives we don’t have a mind of our own. In a real sense it is colonized by our parents’ minds. If our parents are not healthy then we are generally not healthy. When we become older we think we have a mind of our own but in many cases we are, as psychiatrist and author Alice Miller terms it, ‘prisoners of childhood’. The only way we can loosen these chains is to use our adult minds to probe as deeply as possible into what occurred in our childhoods.

Therefore, it is important for us to understand that what happened to us in our pasts has a great influence on our present. In addition we must realize that many of our memories of the past reflect the vulnerability of our state of mind as a child. For these reasons we need to use our adult resources to understand how we formulated our past and present perceptions and how these have formed who we are and how we see the world around us.

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January 21/12 – The ‘Identified Patient’ – Assessing Who Really Has the Problem In a Family

I recently saw the movie ‘Melancholia’. The central character played by Kirsten Dunst, is a highly disturbed young woman. And yet is she? When we see her family and the other events in the movie we are led to wonder about who really has the problems in this family.

In psychological treatment circles people like Ms. Dunst are often called the identified patient. This term has an interesting connotation. It refers to the fact that this person is the one who is seen as having the problems. And often this is true; the person is exhibiting unhealthy behaviour. They can be suffering from problems such as addiction or depression. In such cases the family rallies around the person in order to provide help. We often see this on reality television where everybody comes to rescue the person in a variety of ways such as an intervention. However, if we look deeper into the family we may often see much more disturbance within the family.

For example I worked with a person who suffered horribly from depression, anxiety, low self esteem and stress. Throughout her life she had been sent to hospitals and treatment centres. Family members constantly came to her rescue, pleaded with her to stop drinking, had family meetings about her and generally spent a great deal of time worrying about her. She became the family project. Over a period of time, though, I began to learn the family history. The father had been an alcoholic for years, the mother was codependent, the parents had a very unhealthy relationship, 2 of the siblings had substance abuse problems, there were suspicions of sexual abuse regarding an uncle who baby sat, most of the family had anger management problems and the list went on.  What really happened and why was she targeted as the problem?

I argue that, in one sense, my client was the healthiest one in the family. She did not hide the sickness. In fact she took it on for everybody. She performed a service for the family by allowing the members to focus on her so they didn’t have to feel like they had the problem. Psychologists maintain that this is the function of the identified patient. This person unconsciously (usually beginning in childhood) takes on the disturbance of the family in order to help the other members feel better because they no longer have to look at their own problems, just her problems.

I hear similar stories from colleagues who are child therapists. The troubled child will be sent to therapy in order to help him or her. As time goes on, though, the therapist realizes that the child is exhibiting the pain of the family. Often these are children of alcoholics, where the family rule is not to speak of what is really going on. When the therapist tries to bring the family in to talk about the larger problem the parents are frequently deeply offended and, at times, will then remove their child from therapy.

I have often heard related stories from my clients whose family members band together in order to deny the past. For example I had a client who came from a family where there was rampant sexual child abuse. The father was the first abuser and the older brother also became an abuser. Years later my client, was the only one of the 5 children who talked of the problem. Because of this he was shunned by the other family members who either denied the abuse or minimized it. My client was extremely wounded by his past, and it was severely compounded by his family’s behaviour. With his great depression he turned to addiction and was always under a great deal of stress. He felt so alone. And because his siblings denied his truth, he – like many others in similar circumstances – felt somehow that he must have made it up, and consequently was ‘crazy’.

With people such as this client I am very supportive and affirm the truth of what happened to them. I also urge them to widen their support systems through groups that are aimed at helping people who have suffered in a similar manner. I explain to them about how they are carrying the pain of the family and how this can happen. It can be a great burden to be outwardly wounded while the rest of your family appears healthy, or says they are healthy. But remember that psychological illness rarely, if ever, happens in a vacuum, and your feelings are speaking your truth. It is important that you get support and affirm your truth so that you don’t have to suffer for your whole family.

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January 6/12 - The Sense of Self – Who Am I?

We tend to use the word ‘self’ a great deal. We use it in conjunction with identifying who we are. This concept of self begins early in our life and continues throughout, evolving or staying approximately the same according to the individual. Like many things in life it is fairly straightforward until you really begin to think about it. When this happens the question, ‘Who Am I’ is not so simple. However, in my work as a Toronto therapist I am constantly trying to help people answer this question. And it is definitely not easy. Why is this?

It is not easy because there is no such thing as pure self. From the time we are born till the time we die our self is affected by the selves of others. It is also determined by our environment, the culture we come from and the many institutions we are associated with throughout our lives. Most powerfully it is affected by our family of origin, particularly our caregivers, who are, most often, our birth parents.

The health of a family can be defined in terms of whether it allows children to have a strong and healthy sense of self. In the best case scenario parents can recognize and support the emerging sense of self in a child. In this case the child will have a strong sense of self that accords with who they essentially are. The opposite of this can be a family who does not recognize the self of the child and tries to impose a self upon the child. A controlling family does not necessarily have to be cruel or abusive; it can be loving, but not possessing the emotional and psychological resources that allow for a child to have a separate identity.

Alcoholic families certainly do not possess adequate resources. Children of alcoholics often report to me that they don’t know who they are. One man told me that he ‘tries on selves like suits’ to see if others will accept him. For him and others like him whose self was rejected, life becomes a constant struggle to be accepted. What these people do not see is that the person rejecting them is themselves. Certainly people who suffered childhood abuse were given a very strong message of being unacceptable. Whatever happened in a person’s childhood, if their real self was not accepted by their parents, they can come to believe that their self is not good enough. This can lead to very damaging consequences for a person.

A major consequence is often depression. Most of the people who suffer from depression often report that they do not like themselves. They do not have a good sense of self esteem. In addition, many people report problems with anxiety, stress and addiction. Another consequence of a rejected self can be a codependency with others as they try to merge their incomplete selves within the identity of others.  Furthermore, a person with an incomplete feeling of selfhood is rarely capable of nurturing the separate self of his or her children.

This leads to the question I get from my clients; “If I have lost my identity or reject it, how can I come back to who I am?” The good news is that we don’t ‘lose’ our self, we lose sight of it. It is always there and needs to be both recognized and accepted by us. Let’s look at the first task, how to recognize the self.  

In order to be recognized, the self needs a safe place. It has ‘gone underground’ years before because there was no safe place for it to be. A safe place can vary for people. Therapy can be a safe place if the therapist is non judgmental. Or a group, therapeutic or otherwise, can provide a safe place for a person. In addition, nature or animals can bring out the self. Whatever you choose, trust that your feelings will tell you if the person or place you have chosen is safe. Other ways of recognizing the self can be meditation, journaling or any other quiet contemplation. Giving ourselves a chance to be heard in a clear, still manner can be very helpful in returning to the self.

After we begin to recognize our own self, the next task will be to accept that self. This can be difficult, given societal and media pressure to look or act in a certain manner. You may not feel you are good looking enough or smart enough or whatever is deemed acceptable in society. Gender pressure can be immense with people questioning whether or not they are male or female enough to make the gender grade. The list of what can make or break us goes on and on.  

I find there is no simple way to self acceptance. Because self rejection can go very deep, self acceptance will often happen in stages. I say to people that if they can give themselves the same degree of acceptance that they give to others, this will be helpful. I also say that the goal in looking accurately at yourself is truthfulness. In other words you don’t have to inflate or deflate who you are, just be accurate and you will go a long way towards self acceptance, since the problem with self rejection is distortion of who we are.

When we can recognize and live with our self, we can find a great deal of fulfillment in life. We can know what is right or wrong for us. We can experience greater self esteem, enjoyment of life and peace. This can be a lifelong evolution that requires work and patience, but the more we do it, the more we gain of our self identity and the ability to live with who we genuinely are.

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