Oprah had a show a while back about happiness and how to tell if you are happy and how to “get happy”. It was interesting and certainly thought provoking.
Her expert psychologist was a charming, attractive Brit with a lot of witty sayings (Dr. Robert Holden).
It was a great show with a lot of pithy advice, which will make you feel good. Certainly understanding the things that make us happy is helpful. Knowing that our happiness comes from inside is really important. Yet how do we do it?
Dr. Robert Holden suggested that we simply turn our attention forward and let go of the past. Great plan. But how the heck do you do that? I have worked with clients for more than 18 years. During that time I have never seen anyone successfully “let go of the past” when their past included childhood abuse or trauma. And, it is rare that children are not traumatized by something from their childhood, because they are always getting into dangerous and scary situations no matter even with the most careful parents. There is an important reason why human beings, well really, mammals, can’t just “let it go”. It’s called survival.
Our brains are wired to retain information crucial to our survival. When we are hit with trauma our brains don’t react as they do to every day information and experience. This is why those people who study normal memory (like Dr. Elizabeth Loftus) and try to compare it to traumatic memory are so far off base. Our brains store traumatic information differently than ordinary information. Traumatic memory gets stored in our limbic system (that means our animal survival emotions of fear and anger) in such a way that our thinking brain cannot interrupt them. No matter how smart we are, we can’t think our way out of these emotions.
We store these memories in our limbic system in order to survive. By recording every detail of what occurred and how we responded we increase the chances of our surviving should something similar occur to us in the future. Unfortunately, our brains, at this level, don’t know the difference between the past and the present. This part of our brain doesn’t know that what occurred was a one-time event (say a shooter on a college campus) that will likely never occur again, or that the threat was from someone who is now dead (say parents who abused us that are now dead), or that we were so little at the time we had no ability to protect ourselves. All of these things don’t matter to the old brain limbic system. Our brain simple keeps this data in our emotions to keep us alive just in case it ever happens again.
The result is that any small thing that resembles what occurred (a smell, a tone of voice, a color, a time of day) will throw us back into those feelings. The difficult part about this is that we seldom know that this is what is happening. The triggers occur at a pre-conscious level and send us into a survival mode without our really knowing why!
What can we do about this? Is it as hopeless as it sounds? Fortunately, no, it is not hopeless; there is something we can do about it. First we have to become aware of the reality that we are constantly being bombarded with triggers outside our control.
Second we have to recognize how we are reacting to them. To do this we have to develop the ability to tune in to ourselves. We have to find a method for connecting with our bodies and our minds.
Mindfulness mediation is one, any kind of therapeutic body work is another (InterPlay, Radix, Hakomi, Somatic Integrative Therapy, Bio-energetics – just to name a few). Being able to listen to our bodies and to our internal feeling states allows us to focus on the irrational reactions our brain is having to what is going on in our world. You can’t change something you don’t know is happening.
Recognizing the patterns of behaviors based on our survival mechanisms helps on a cognitive level. In my book, The Cycles of the Heart: A way out of the egocentrism of everyday life, I describe the survival mechanisms that kick us into certain roles that help us survive but keep us stuck in unhappiness. When we perceive that our survival is threatened on any level (real or not) we are thrown into one of these roles: Victim, Rescuer or Self-Protector. By understanding our tendencies to rely on these mechanisms and learning how to make other choices, we can begin to experience others and ourselves differently.
Once we learn how we react to our traumatic history and to current perceived threat, we can separate out what is real and what is not real. We can then process through the old pain and fear and release the old beliefs. Only by doing this are we able to “let go of the past” and move toward the possibility of a happy future.
Melody Brooke is a Professional Counselor and Marriage and Family Therapist, graduating Texas Woman’s University in 1989. She is published in Radix Journal, Dallas Recovery Magazine, The Southwest Morticians Journal, Plano Child Magazine, on the Dan and Jennifer Relationship website, and is the author of Cycles of the Heart; A way out of the egocentrism of everyday life. Contact Melody at www.awakenedheartproductions.com