You've been having a recurrent, out-of-the-blue dream lately about your father and you as a little girl. Or you find yourself suddenly wondering why your parents really got divorced, or thinking, for no apparent reason, about your long-ago ex and your breakup.
Our past is always with us, fading in and out of our everyday lives. Is this something to pay attention to? Is this just a mental burp that means not much at all? Is this something that you need to pay attention to, a tip-of-the-iceberg of something else going on that’s important, that your life is trying to teach you?
Psychotherapy, of course, has been long firmly rooted in the role of our pasts in our everyday lives. The psychodynamic approach has long held that by unraveling our pasts, we gain not only perspective on our lives now but we can — by deconstructing and then reconstructing our narrative about who we were and why we became who we are — redefine who are now and who we want to be. Connecting all the dots makes us whole.
While some of us may enter this world, feel that it is valuable to unearth this fodder, and find out what it may teach us, for many of us this seems to be an exercise in self-indulgence and of limited value. But that said, the fact that your past is rearing up and coming into your consciousness now does always mean something.
Here are some guidelines for deciding when its time to pay attention:
Closure
Endings and grief are all the same. With any ending, be it good, bad, or indifferent, it brings with it the psychological process of grief. This is not about the events, the facts, a value-judgment whether the ending was a good idea or not, but rather about the impact of the ending itself. Any and all endings naturally set off a chain reaction of obsessing, the replaying of history, the struggling to make sense of what has happened.
And if these endings are incomplete — if there were cut-offs, and unfinished, unsaid words, if the events were pushed to the back-burner of our minds and compartmentalized into some box of bad experiences, time-to-move-one, glad-that-is-behind-me thinking — the remnants, the tatters of those experiences can come back to haunt us when they are triggered, such as by seeing your ex, or struggling in your current relationship, or feeling lonely and depressed.
This may be about closure, saying what you couldn’t say, getting what you didn’t get off your chest. Now may be a good time to put this to rest.
If you’ve had traumatic experiences — big ones like abuse, war — but seemingly smaller ones — car accidents, the sudden ending of a friendship or firing from a job — your brain reacts in the same way: pushes those experiences to the non-verbal part of your brain. As a result, you are left with raw images that have no words, that trigger flashbacks, over-reactions, an overall hyper-vigilance and fear that can infect your everyday life.
Most dreams are about now, but the past can become part of the storyline because of association. While a dream about your father may say more about what is happening in your life right now, if they are recurrent, if there is an emotional theme to them, they may give you a clue about the need for closure, about something that needs to be put to rest, about a need unfulfilled, a problem not being addressed.
Integration
Why wonder about your parents’ divorce now? Probably tied to something in the present that is triggering it, such as your being in another time of transition — a new relationship, the ending of one, a new job or challenge. But it can also be about reconnecting the dots, making a more continuous emotional and mental line between what went before and now. Often this circling about something in the past comes up when we least expect it — when things are actually going well, when life is stable. It is at these times, because things are stable and not so preoccupied, that we have the ability to reflect on our pasts.
Putting the Past to Rest
Closure
If you suspect that something from your past is rising up because it has never been more fully put to rest, it’s a good time to take action. Write that email to your ex saying all that you couldn’t say at the time, or write it to yourself just to get it out of your head. Better yet, write out what you ideally would like the other person to say to you.
Post-traumatic stress
If something from your past has been plaguing you, making you hyper-vigilant, triggering harmful habits and behaviors, flashbacks and intrusive memories, this is a good time to seek professional help. No, you don’t need to endlessly plow back through the events of your past, but new techniques and therapies can quickly get to the heart of your problem and help you put them to rest. Look for professionals who specialize in these kinds of therapy and techniques.
Dreams
Like closure, doing something with the content of your dreams can often make a big difference. I had a friend who had quit his college soccer team suddenly — after training with them for most of the year and just before the start of the game season — and had a recurring dream about rejoining the team. While he rationally knew that the dream came and went based on what was probably happening in other areas of his life, he also knew that it was about own feelings about his decision. He finally was able to put it to rest by joining, playing, and sticking through the entire season on a community soccer league for a season; after that, his recurrent dream went away. Often such direct behavioral action can help break the cycle.
Integration
Time to explore. You don’t need therapy for this, although that is always an option. Here you call up your mother and ask about the details of the divorce or snag your grandmother at a gathering and ask her recollection about some incident in the past. Or you sit down with a parent and simply ask for them to describe their childhood.
This is about updating the narrative of your life, filling in those gaps, the childhood impressions and images that were precisely that — grounded in childhood — to get a renewed, and adult view of your past. With this more solidly in place, you can craft a better sense of our present and future.
The key is not becoming drawn into and obsessed about your past, but instead to use it as a marker, not only of the state of your current life but rough areas of your past that your life is telling you that you are now ready to finally put down to rest.
What do you have to put to rest?
