Why Your Past Matters
Exploring your relationships and why your past matters is more important than you realize – and ignoring them might actually be hurting you.
If you’ve been to therapy before, or read much about it (or listened to my signature approach before), you’ve probably heard the idea that your past affects your present.
And if you’ve rejected that notion, then you’d be in good company 🤷🏻♀️
In fact, I get a lot of pushback from this idea. What I often hear in response to this concept is either one of two things:
“I don’t agree with that! It’s not helpful to bring the past back, I need to figure out skills for now and that’s it.”
“I don’t agree with that! It’s not helpful to bring the past back, I need to figure out skills for now and that’s it.”
In today’s episode, we’ll break down why analyzing your past doesn’t mean you had a bad childhood… and why ignoring your past can actually hold you back.
Listen to the Episode Now
When It Feels Like Blame
If you’re reading this and getting the uncomfortable feeling that we’re pointing fingers and blaming others in our past for our present problems, then let me reassure you…
Our aim is not to blame.
First of all, if we’re going to blame people – like our parents, for instance – then ultimately, we become the victims. We become just a product of what happened to us – and that decreases our personal responsibility for working our own stuff out.
So, it’s not about blame for two reasons:
Ultimately, it’s about you taking responsibility for your own life, and understanding yourself and your relationships better, and
It’s about being able to view your past with nuance.
Because when we can approach our past without blaming others, we can start to appreciate it in a newfound way and really understand ourselves today.
*I’m also not saying that this absolves anyone from their responsibility for causing harm. But this is about your journey, not theirs.*
Nuance
Part of the healing journey in this is about learning to embrace nuance.
When we learn to view our past with nuance, we can start to look at our past significant relationships in a way that promotes understanding and acceptance. Then, we can begin to appreciate the way we turned out, the people around us, and all of our past experiences.
However, doing that is VERY difficult if we’re stuck in the viewpoint that our past life was terrible 100% of the time (or great 100% of the time with no room for nuance).
What we’re looking for instead is a growth mindset. We’re trying to get to the point of being more emotionally mature and more aware.
One of the telltale signs of growth is being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at once. For instance, you might begin to accept that you had a pretty good childhood, but also, you might not have gotten everything you needed.
Those two ideas feel really, really difficult to hold in your mind at the same time… but definitely worth working toward. Trust me on that.
Your Eating Disorder Tells a Story
Part of the reason why I really promote this idea is because of what happens when we DON’T think this way.
If we completely separate out our past – our experiences, significant relationships, and the rich history that our body holds – then we cut off the entire story that our eating disorder and decision making is trying to tell us.
Without looking at your past story about WHY these issues are present… we are completely handicapping you in your recovery journey.
So, to say “what’s in the past is in the past,” is sort of a joke 🤷🏻♀️
What happens is ultimately, our past continues to stay encoded in our body, our actions, and our decisions.
In the Passenger’s Seat of Your Decisions
If we don’t address our past, we will remain in the passenger’s seat (rather than the driver’s seat) of all the decisions that we make.
Ultimately, it’s up to you. You can choose to try and let your past remain in the past and to just ignore it, and find that it always pops back up somehow…(probably unconsciously, BTW).
OR, you can think about it, work through it, and try to understand it. Yes, it’s incredibly difficult – but ultimately, it’ll give you a shot at getting into the driver’s seat of your own life.
Curiosity Without Judgment
We really underestimate the power of curiosity without judgment. If you feel like examining your past is about pointing fingers and blaming, then that’s your judgment talking and clouding your curiosity.
There’s nothing wrong with asking yourself questions like:
How did I interact with my family? How did they interact with me?
How did I become a person who can’t ask for what I need?
How do these patterns keep my world together? My family together?
How has it been safe all these years to think and behave this way?
The goal is to be able to ask these questions with genuine curiosity and without judgment.
Example: instead of saying, “My mom didn’t pay attention to me, she was obsessed with herself and her own narcissistic needs,” you can recognize that it’s not about that.
Instead, you can say, “I can now understand how my mom interacted in that situation and how it affected me. I can maybe better understand where she was coming from. I can feel sad for this situation and really, really angry that I didn't get what I needed.”
And all of that can live together… if we are curious.
Easier said than done, I know. But I promise that’s possible. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
Repeating Old Patterns
So ultimately, if we really want to look at our relationships – with ourselves, with our bodies, and with food – we have to look at the original relationship that set the stage for it all.
What we might be doing is repeating old patterns. We might be trying to get what we need with newer relationships, but not realizing that we’re doing things exactly the same way as we’ve always done them. We end up recreating our original relationships in order to get what we’ve never gotten.
If we work toward an acceptance of the fact that we didn’t get what we needed, then we don’t need to continue patterns in relationships that are just getting us hurt. The acceptance only happens if you are completely honest with yourself.
If we go into this with our eyes wide open, we have to look at our past. We have to look at our relationships with our families.
And it might take you a couple of years of doing this to be ok with it… and that’s totally ok.
But if we get into this argument of whether or not it’s significant? I think we’re completely missing the point.
Your Next Steps
So I would encourage you to dig deep and ask yourself some of these questions:
Am I avoiding my past? If so, how?
How is my avoidance serving me?
What is so terrifying about examining my past?
When you ask these questions, with genuine curiosity and not judgment, you can start to understand why you do what you do.
You can start to understand what’s difficult about this, understand the importance of looking at our family relationships of origin, and take one step at a time toward healing.
Tweetable Quotes
“If we completely separate out our past experience and all of our significant relationships, and the rich history that our body holds… then we basically cut off the entire story that our eating disorder and decision making is trying to tell us.” – Rachelle Heinemann
“If we really want to understand all of our relationships, we have to look at the original relationship that set the stage for it all.” – Rachelle Heinemann
“What we might be doing is repeating old patterns – trying to get what we need with newer relationships, but not realizing that we’re doing things exactly the same as we’ve always done them.” – Rachelle Heinemann
“If we work toward an acceptance of ‘I didn’t get what I needed’... then we don’t need to continue banging our head against a wall and repeating all of these patterns in relationships that are just getting us hurt.” – Rachelle Heinemann
Resources:
Understanding Disordered Eating Ep. 55 - My Signature Approach to Eating Disorders
More From Rachelle
Hey there! I’m Rachelle, the host of the Understanding Disordered Eating Podcast. As a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, I work with clients to make sense of life’s messy emotional experiences.
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