Today's message comes from the Renewed Man Boot Camp. Renewed Man is a systematic teaching and coaching series designed to help men grow emotionally, relationally, and spiritually ... developing the essential character quality of "self-mastery." Even though this community is created for men, the principles are universal -- women will benefit from these insights
as well.
We build this teaching around 12 Keys, and this week, we're focusing on key 6:
Making Peace With Our Past. Here's how we put it:
Peace with our Past - We recognize the power of early
life trauma and deprivation, and we take steps to come to terms with our wounds. We can’t fix deep habits or compulsions without getting below the surface and dealing with what drives them.
Here's one of the daily messages from this week's teaching series. I hope this will help you:
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Coming to terms with memories of past trauma is a core challenge for many people — and especially for people in recovery from addiction. The more I learn about how the brain works, the more hopeful I am about the prospect of healing in this critical area of life.
Bessel Van der Kolk is medical director of the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Mass. In a really helpful interview with Krista Tippet in the On Being radio
show, he makes the intriguing observation that, while most of our memories change over time (the details get fuzzy, the meanings we make of them change), for some reason, intense traumatic memories stay fixed.
By the way, if you doubt that memories change, just get together with your siblings some time, and start reminiscing about your experiences when you were kids. You will likely notice how
differently your siblings remember things that happened than you do. It’s not that they have the same memory as you, but from a different vantage point … they often remember the same “event” very differently, with different details. It might even seem that there were two different events that happened, like you existed in parallel universes.
Over time their memory of that event changed, as did yours. The memories just changed in different directions. It’s likely that if you had captured the event on video camera in its entirety, you’d find that it happened differently than the “exact memory” either of you had.
Why do our memories change … and what does this mean?
Why is this? Why is it that our memories change? And why is it that traumatic memories don’t? And what can we do to “heal from” — or at least come to terms with — these traumatic memories?
This is important because unresolved early life trauma is often a key piece of the addiction puzzle. Many people develop the habit of reaching for what becomes an “addictive”
substance or behavior as a way of coping with pain that stems from early trauma. As life goes on, experiences trigger that old pain, and they in turn keep reaching for that old addictive substance or behavior as a way to cope with the pain. Dealing with that unresolved trauma is essential if lasting recovery is going to happen.
Recent brain research offers some interesting insights about memory that may help us understand how healing happens. The most significant is this: Our brains are not computers that file “memories” away in a certain place on a hard drive.
Our brains do not retrieve memories …
our brains reconstruct
memories.
They do this by taking fragments of data that we might think of as impressions, sights, sounds, smells, and feelings that are located in various parts of our “brain” (note
that neurons are not always located in our head) and then pulling them together to create a memory.
How to Use This to Our Benefit -- Healing and Reconstructing
If our brains reconstruct our memories, it only makes sense that over time, they reconstruct those memories differently, especially as new information is added, new perspective, new context, etc. That’s why our memories change.
I wonder … could it be that the reason that traumatic memories become “locked” is that we don’t recollect them? We resist trying to “remember” them because they are too painful. And could it be that the way we find healing from these past memories is to look at them again … but to do so with other information (our adult perspective, a different context, God’s compassion and forgiveness, etc.)?
I think this is what happens in various effective forms of talk therapy. I’m aware that some forms of talk therapy can actually be NOT helpful … leaving the person re-traumatized by reinforcing the pain of the memory. This happens
when the memory is reconstructed without adequate new information being introduced. The event is not recontextualized, and therefore remains fixed … even reinforced.
NEXT ACTION
Today spend some time
reflecting on significant memories you have of your childhood. Have you ever talked to siblings, or others who might have been part of the same experience? Was your recollection of the event similar to theirs? If you don't have a way of checking to see how closely your memory matches theirs, just think about this question …
What does it mean, when you consider the possibility that, if you were to be able to go back and time and actually witness the event, that it might have happened differently than you "remember"
it?
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Would you like to go "all in" and join the Renewed Man Boot Camp? It's a 12 Week Immersion in these principles. You'll get these daily teachings, a weekly video on one of the 12 Keys of Being a Renewed Man, and access to a support group and/or a coaching group that I lead.
Find out more about the
Renewed Man Program here.
