When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage our Relationships

by David Richo

Our minds may minimize the legitimacy of our feelings, dubbing them irrational. We can offset this tendency by granting hospitality to the full spectrum of our feelings. Then they might take us by the hand back to events never processed or even yet recalled. To accept our feelings now is to accept the bereft-child part of us and hold him at last in ways he was not held when first he felt alone.

Personalizing is the sign of an unconscious transference.

Most of us can never fully imagine just how insulted we felt in childhood. Now, behind the wheel, we feel an insult as giant-size. In childhood, we took abuse or insult in stride and made excuses for our family members or blamed ourselves in order to reduce the wallop. As pain became familiar, it no longer registered as pain to us but as routine. Little bodies could not endure as much as our adult bodies can endure.

The challenge is to sustain our feelings rather than become possessed by them—that is, swept away by them, compelled to act them out inappropriately. This is the powerless-child set of reactions that lets feelings in and then jams them up in continual recycling.

We can look at rage as an example of a feeling that recycles: hate and hurt within a transference can be part of a sad and painful cycle: hurt, hate, hurt. Someone has hurt us in the past. We hate him for it. We show our hate by hurting someone in the present who reminds us of him. But our hurting that person does not satisfy our rage, because we are hurting the wrong person. We are as upset and enraged as we are partly because what has hurt us in our present conflict recalls a hurt from the past from another person. We are trying to get back at a phantom through a live person now. So of course our hurt cannot be resolved, nor can our hate be dissipated.

We interrupt the cycle when we grieve the hurt rather than pass it on.

Grief work leads to our letting go of resentment. Since grief work leads to forgiveness, it is itse...

Healthy people do not hate, because they address and resolve painful feelings, which is the opposite of feeding the unquenchable need to continue punishing.

People with spiritual consciousness do not hate, because they are committed to loving-kindness. People who are psychologically healthy do not hate, but resolve issues rather than turn them into feuds. People who do hate deserve our compassion, not our retribution, because if the circumstances were extreme enough, we too would probably become as confused as the haters, and become enmeshed in the same self-defeating web of recycled retaliation.

Healthy adults let feelings in and through.

Feelings teach.

We stay with ourselves by giving ourselves the five A’s: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing.

When such staying power is applied to another person, it is commitment.

An abused child, in order not to feel like an orphan, may protect his parents by identifying with their negative belief about him. He interprets the mistreatment as his own fault and therefore as legitimate punishment.

The psyche wants to experience connection more than it wants to recognize the presence of abuse.

When one parent is truly mean or malicious toward us, our transference may extend to everyone of the same gender. Our individual experience with mother may turn us against all women. This can be a source of misogyny in men or misanthropy in women. It can also make it difficult for a woman to trust other women or for a man to trust other men.

addressing, processing, resolving, and integrating.

We apply it to abuse when we address abuse by calling it by name and speaking up about it, placing it on the table so it can be dealt with. We process by showing our angry feelings and the full range of our grief and by acknowledging the transference dimension. We resolve the issue by seeing things change as the abuser seeks and uses therapeutic help. If this does not happen, we move on. We integrate the new awareness into our life by acting in new, stronger ways that do not permit abuse or intimidation and that set clear boundaries in future relationships in order to keep ourselves safe.

We may exhibit symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), such as the following: • Anxiety attacks with no obvious reason • Ongoing and obsessive recalling of injury, either mental or cellular/ physical, often with flashbacks • Expecting the worst to happen • Having dreams or nightmares about the originally distressing experiences • Behaving or feeling as if the primal traumas were happening in the present • Feeling intense reactions to any events that symbolize or are reminiscent of what happened in the past • Avoiding, numbing, denying, dissociating, or detaching from any person, place, or thing that resembles or revives the past trauma • Becoming addicted to substances or behaviors or becoming obsessed with a person or belief—all of which serves as a distraction from grief

O time thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me to untie. —Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Both transference and its resolution involves returning to the past. The Greek word nostos means “return.” The word for “pain” is algos. Together they form the English word nostalgia, which is a kind of homesickness for past experiences and connections.

Rather than jump in and uncover the past too hastily, it is important to be compassionate toward ourselves by finding our own unique pace and taking in only as much as we can handle at any one time.

By means of synchronicity, relationships come along that present the next piece of some huge issue we have been carrying and carrying over, transferring it onto others.

The universe seems to join us in our work and to honor our timing too. For instance, in our thirties we do some grief work about our abusive upbringing and then we come back to it in our forties from a different angle in a ne...

Each time the work is complete for the time being. When we want to work on our transferences, we can trust that they will...

In a relationship, a feature of attention is to notice and honor a partner’s resistance to addressing, processing, resolving, and integrating an issue that has arisen.

Deep or persistent inquiry into issues and motivations will feel like intrusion to those of us with slower timing. If we are introverts, our timing is certainly different from that of most extroverts.

Our readiness for intimacy is highly sensitive when we suffer from a fear of closeness. Our inner world remains our sacred space, with walls of safety that no one is allowed to scale, ...

Some of our experience is too sensitive to be dealt with now—or at all—so our repression is in favor of our health.

We may recall in chemistry class that the sturdiness of the container had to be proportionate to the tension in the chemicals being heated. It is no shame to be too fine a glass to withstand the burning issues of one’s past.

Sometimes it is our ego that gets in the way, not wanting to admit woundedness.

the ego cannot admit brokenness of any kind. How ironic this is, since only when we acknowledge how we are shattered do we find a path to restoration.

The redemptive possibilities thrive best when we begin by admitting our woundedness, without the need to dredge up memories until they come naturally.

we know more as we can handle more.

1. We know that something is missing and we know what it is. Here our work is to keep our eye out for fulfillment by placing ourselves in the contexts in which it can happen. We cannot force it; only be open to it.

2. We know that something is missing and we do not know what it is. Here our work is to search the ten most commonly required areas of life to notice which one is lacking and then to work on finding fulfillment of it: • Do I have a relationship that nurtures me? • Is my sex life satisfactory? • Am I in a job that is fulfilling? • Am I in a living situation that is comfortable? • Do I have a healthy lifestyle with no addictions? • Do I have satisfactory connections with family and friends including physical holding? • Do I have hobbies or engage in activities, for example sports, that enliven me? • Am I living life with integrity, honesty, and a good conscience? • Am I making a contribution to the world by being of service to others? • Have I found a spirituality or religion that feeds my soul?

3. We did not know that anything was missing but something has come along that nurtures us and we now realize what had been missing. ...

4. We do not feel that anything is missing. Our practice is gratitude for how good life feels so far while still maintaining mindful atte...

A somatic consciousness means attention to how we live as embodied beings.

Events in the past that were threatening, abusive, or overwhelming produce lifelong somatic effects such as anxiety, depression, a need for constant vigilance, and so on.

When long-term high stress is suffered in childhood, there is cell loss to the hippocampus. This means that something that is past is revived in us now as if it were a short-term memory, giving us the impression that something is happening now that actually happened long ago, the very definition of transference.

When we are constantly on guard, we are trapped in the freeze response, which explains why some people do not move on or take action against abuse in adult relationships.

Our brain makes it seem that this stressful event is one and the same as the original event it resembles, and that we are living it not as adults in this decade but as powerless children from olden days.

The pause is our freedom of choice.