Understanding the influence of our past

I can’t count the number of times I heard, or read: « I really don’t know why I am so depressed / anxious / in pain ; I was raised by a loving, ordinary family and nothing terrible ever happened to me; the problem is just me”.

Or another slightly different version “ I really don’t know why I am so depressed / anxious / in pain; I know my father had quite a temper (read he was physically abusive), or people in my family really knew how to party (read I was brought up in an alcoholic environment), or I’ve been to war, but I’m sure all of this has nothing to do with how terrible I feel; the problem is just me”.

I used to think the second version of this wonderful statement. And it really, truly breaks my heart, whenever I hear it coming from someone who is suffering. Because it cannot be true.

Psychological suffering is always caused by trauma

Here is what I think, and I’m certainly not the only one: there is no such thing as someone suffering from depression, or an addiction, or low self esteem, without a very good reason. And this good reason is emotional (and sometimes also physical or sexual) trauma.

This trauma can often be traced back to our childhood, but it can also happen later in life, for example exposure to war or to an abusive partner as an adult. It may have been caused by our families or origin, school, our society – strong racism or sexism for instance - , our workplace, or a violent stranger. Possibilities are unfortunately endless in terms of causes of trauma. The consequences though are strikingly similar: depression, addictions, low self esteem, repetitive relationship problems, panic attacks (and no you don’t need to suffer from all of these problems to qualify as a trauma survivor).

We tend to downplay both the incidence of trauma and its consequences

I'm amazed to see how our society tends to avoid the simple truth that psychological problems are responses to traumatic events. I was speechless the other day while reading an article pondering how come a few adolescents could go and kill a number of people including themselves, and wondering if the culprit is not video games.

Video Games? You must be joking.

God knows what they had to endure to be so full of desperate hate for others and themselves. Understand me: a traumatic pas is never an excuse for perpetrating violence. But to think there has been no serious problem in the lives of these souls is, well, blind.

What is true for perpetrators of violence is also true for people who are “simply” suffering from enduring psychological problems: there is always a cause of our suffering in our past. If we are battling with depression, addictions, low self esteem, or anxiety, it has absolutely nothing to do with who we are, and everything to do with what happened to us.

Sometimes we don't remember this past consciously. Sometimes we deny it. Sometimes we do remember, but we downplay its impact on the issues we are experiencing. But there is always a very difficult and painful cause of our problems to be found in our history.

We are not, in any way, abnormal. We are just normal people who are reacting to an abnormal situation, be it past or present.

What to do with our difficult past

I do not mean that we must spend years dissecting our childhoods with a shrink. In fact, for me, this method did not work very well.
What helped me more was to concentrate on the present, my way of thinking, feeling (or rather not feeling), relating, and all the patterns my difficult past had left me with.

We have to correct these patterns, and doing so doesn’t really need a close examination of what happened to us. What is necessary though is the help of someone who does not have these dysfunctional patterns and who can unmask them for what they are (dysfunctional patterns rather than The Way Things Are, or The Way Things Should Be).

Somewhere during our journey though, we have to look back, integrate and reframe our painful past in order to really get well. There is a lot of positive work that can be done without thinking about what happened to us, but complete healing cannot take place unless we view it in a different light, and unless we understand how much our history has shaped our being.

The main things we really need to understand is that:1/ we are not responsible if difficult things happened to us and 2/we are unfair with ourselves if we believe we "should" be happy and balanced nevertheless. We should not: we are reacting normally and appropriately considering what we lived through. It doesn't prevent us from working on healing ourselves to get well, but it can prevent unecessary shame about how terrible we feel.