“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana
I believe that we humans spend a lot of time repeating our past — the mistakes, the patterns of behavior, the way we communicate with others. We’re creatures of habit and habits are hard to break. We believe, “Hey, this has worked for me in the past, so why not keep doing it?”
Except that sometimes, we’re deluding ourselves. We think something has worked for us in the past, when in fact, it hasn’t at all. We believe our style of communication is effective with our partner, when all the while our partner sits there and wonders what the hell it is we’re thinking.
History can be a great teacher and source of wisdom. This is true of history in the traditional sense — wars, a nation’s independence, how empires rise and tumble into time. But the kind of history I’m talking about is your own personal history. You know your history better than any other person alive today. You are the world’s foremost expert in the subject of You. So while a psychologist or therapist can help guide you to better understand You, at the end of the day, it’s still going to fall to one person to make a change — You.
Removing the Masks
To start, you’re going to need to take off some of the masks you wear — especially those you wear that delude yourself into thinking you’re a different person than you really are.
Start small, with something that isn’t really a big deal, but might help you do something just a little bit better than you do it today. Maybe it’s doing something around the house without being asked, maybe it’s taking an extra 10 minutes of the day to just be with yourself, maybe it’s actually talking to a loved one about something important on your mind. Maybe it’s deciding to talk back to just one negative thought you have every day.
Become successful with that one, small thing, and just keep doing it. Do it for a day, a week, then a month. You’re a winner — you’ve made one small change in your life and succeeded!
Taking Change Further
We often get bogged down in over-analyzing our past, hoping it will give us clues into how we can change our lives right here, right now. We believe — mistakenly, all too often — that the knowledge or insight we will gain from the past will give us what we need to change our behaviors, thoughts and feelings today.
Indeed, the past and our personal history has much it can teach us. Rome’s expansion into greater Europe can help guide future leaders into understanding what to (and not to) do in similar circumstances, but it can’t actually lay out a detailed blueprint for such guidance. So while our personal history can help us understand how or why things may have become the way they are today, it often cannot actually tell us what to do to change things right here and now.
Our history, therefore, can act as a reminder to our present. It doesn’t have to explain our present in order to change our current situation or life. It simply has to offer some clues as to what to do and not to do.
Learning from the Here and Now
What we can learn directly from personal history is often-times more immediate. “When I make this smart remark to my partner, he gets angry at me.” So sure, you can try and figure out why you’re so sarcastic toward him all the time. But maybe sarcasm is generally one of the traits he loves about you (just not directed at him all the time). Or you can simply stop making the same smart remark over and over again, and immediately solve the problem.
Yes, such change takes patience and trying over and over again. For instance, the next time you make the same remark, you may think, “Doh! I just did it again. I must try harder to remember next time.” If you keep thinking these thoughts to yourself, you’ll eventually catch yourself before you make the remark. And then boom, you’ve done it! You’ve successfully made another positive change in your life.
Living more in the here and now — or, as the popular term goes, more mindfully — helps us appreciate what to do next. Our history can provide us some general guidance, but changing our behavior requires using history as a source of wisdom, not as a source of change itself.
Happy Independence Day! May you celebrate your own personal independence day someday soon.
9 comments
If your future lies before you will your past be after you?
the great number of ‘client-consumers and providers’, i.e. the psychotherapy ‘industry,’ attests to the need for ALTERNATIVE methods to help them and RCTN, in some ways, agrees with the criticism publicized in Newseek magazine against paying “some fool $80 an hour”. Rational Insight Therapy is one of the most innovative approaches toward saving people from the disasters common to the traditional therapies. You can pay thousands for years to ‘discover’ a memory they consider 1 of the necessary keys to unlock your ‘unconscious’, but RCTN has proven this approach ineffective, theoretically unsound (based on clinical research: there is no unconscious!!) and proposes in its place a goal oriented therapy based on conscious-rational principles (thus the name Rational Insight Therapy) where the COPING MECHANISMS are strengthened based on true, personal INSIGHT.
back again to explain why i wrote what i wrote. in sum the statement:
“Our history, therefore, can act as a reminder to our present,”
is an indication that the old Freudian conception of UNconscious and Repression is in full force, even if slighty modified. Dwelling on the past will not strenghtn the coping mechanisms targeted by RCTN’s Rational Insight Therapy. This si the article I am basing this on:Journal of Psychotherapy Integration © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 20,
No. 2, 152–202]Dr. Rofe is the author and cites a previous review article [Review of General Psychology Copyright 2008 by the American
Psychological Association 2008, Vol. 12, No. 1,
63–85]disproving Unconscious and Repression based on vast amounts of scientific clinical studies. If RCTN isn’t a revolutionary method, I would like to be ‘cured’ of my conviction…
Thank you.
I’m convicted that in counseling, psychotherapy, etc. we should be willing to look at how our past impacts our beliefs and subsequent behaviors in the present. It does give us a greater sense of control if we understand ‘why’ we do, feel or think something (ex., a co-dependent understands that (s)he does, feels and thinks as (s)he does because of, say, a chaotic childhood and subsequently being parentified by adults around him or her).
I personally have found that insight alone can cause change but not always. I can relate to the article and agree with much of what has been said. “Starting small”-although a simple concept–is good advice. Sometimes simple approaches are dismissed or overlooked but end up to be effective means to achieve a broad goal.
Just as sometimes dated approaches can be dismissed or discredited. Mitch, I don’t have an opinion about RTCN but would like to say I will gladly pay my Freudian therapist $200 an hour to use theoretically unproven techniques about my non-existant unconscious before I’d pay even $10 an hour for the more theoretically proven methods-and I’ve tried several of those in the past.
Just because something is unproven does not mean it is not true. Science is largely based on decisions by men and women-influenced by such realities as economics, personal bias, and culture.
What’s true is sometimes decided to be true before it is even proven.
hi JR and S! thanks for the feedback. I suppose the main point of RCTN – that convinced me — is that in traditional forms of therapy much time is devoted toward recovering memory-chains and talking about the ‘why’, whereas the present-moment decision making process is the most logical and effective topic/issue to deal with in the presence of a trained therapist (the ‘how’is central). The memory-search method cultivates a strange introspective thought process (sometimes even leading to depression or worse), whereas Rational Insight Therapy only sharpens the wits and response-action timing by helping us become familiar and identify (a) how we deceive ourselves into thinking we are not responsible and (b) how we CHOOSE to handle stressful situations by self-destructive measures, which include neurotic symptoms. The traditional approach is backwards!! they say ‘repressed trauma from the past’ is the cause of later symptoms, but in reality the person’s symptoms serve as destractive strategies to ward off stressful thoughts. For example, someone can choose to obtain a sentiment of “control” by consciously controlling the intake of food by not eating, i.e. anorexia ! then the person is so involved with his/her anorexia that the real problems are “repressed.” RCTN helps uncover these self-deceptive mechanisms.
Secondly, interesting about “economics, personal bias, and culture”, because RCTN claims to be the only comprehensive theory of psychopathology that accounts for prevalence in these areas.
I don’t know, maybe i should find a link to those articles on-line, but it took me a while to see that the memory-search method actually sets up a false scenario and promises good results. You’ll be cured once you understand why you behave the way you do and that means you must find the ‘repressed material’ which is determining your present behaviour. RCTN doesn’t ignore the ‘why’, but it just places the focus on the coping mechanisms, which affect How you choose to behave in the present moment, i.e. give into the cycle of stress/symptom or strengthen the means of successfully coping with the stressors of the present moment.
Doesn’t this all seem logical and clear? If not, please ‘bring me back’ from these recent convictions… Thanks again and wishing you all the best
“is that in traditional forms of therapy much time is devoted toward recovering memory-chains and talking about the ‘why’”.
This isn’t the case with my more traditional therapy, although my therapist’s education and training could be considered traditional. Having repressed and dissociated trauma-emotional memories, working through them allows me to integrate my emotions and self-which causes natural changes in my behavior, core issues such as self-worth, and overall well being. This is opposed to ‘recovering’ and talking about ‘why’. It’s none of those-it’s feeling and experiencing under the guidance of a safe and attuned therapist. It’s being accepted and understood that allows me to do this integration rather than someone trying to change me through methods. If someone was trying to change me directly, it sort of reinforces the more unconscious feelings such as ‘bad’ or ‘defective’ as reinforced by parents both directly and indirectly. The changes occur partly due to the fact that my therapist is not trying to change me.
It’s more than recovering and talking about why-my therapist uses experience and perceptions of my personal ways of relating rather than certain ‘techniques’. That my therapy is individualized/customized makes it effective, in addition to the personal qualities of my therapist, rather than focusing on specific methods.
Mitch, I appreciate that you explained the concepts in more detail. I think if therapy wasn’t working so well for me now, I’d probably read up on RCTN. But I did want to emphasize that the way my attuned therapist skillfully customizes and individualizes my therapy, I believe, is a primary reason it is as effective as it is for me. Still-thanks, it was interesting to hear more about RCTN.
It could be that various therapies work differently for people with different mental health symptoms, temperments, and childhood experiences – rather than certain theories for all. Plus, how the theories are actually applied is important, and in my view, should be individualized rather than standardized. This might not be the case for others, but it is true for me.
This topic is really interesting to me and I just noticed something else you said about RCTN.
Basically, as I see it-you have said one of the critical effective components of this therapy is turning around the ‘defense mechanism’ of rationalization (and yes I agree that we do use our defenses to protect us from hurtful emotions) in a therapeutic way to “ward off stressful thoughts”, which is similar to saying to strengthen the rationalization defense to further reinforce the repression of emotions because you said repression is not the cause of symptoms but prevents their emergence. (Although I would replace the phrase ‘stressful thoughts’ with __ emotions.)
“helping us become familiar and identify (a) how we deceive ourselves into thinking we are not responsible and (b) how we CHOOSE to handle stressful situations by self-destructive measures, which include neurotic symptoms. The traditional approach is backwards!! they say ‘repressed trauma from the past’ is the cause of later symptoms, but in reality the person’s symptoms serve as destractive strategies to ward off stressful thoughts.” Mitch
Whose reality? My reality is that repressing trauma is the cause of later symptoms–that was part of the problem! The defense mechanisms eventually do not hold out as the emotions will find other ways to emerge!
I used rationalization since I was a child to prevent feeling painful emotions. Eventually, this strategy was no longer effective, and I was channeled to CBT therapy–where the therapists and I continued to “rationalize” all my behaviors and how to ‘change’ them. I had already known of these behaviors through rationalization-reading about psychology for a decade and thinking about it–so the therapists partnered with me to strengthen this defense! And different therapists! Well eventually, despite strengthing my rationalization skills after talking how they influence me, etc., the unaddressed emotions could not be repressed any longer and depression and severe anxiety worsened.
While I agree our defense mechanisms do serve a purpose of warding off emotions as you say, if you leave those emotions unprocecessed–they will find a way to emerge! Unless (maybe) the person developed a narcissistic personality to compensate, for example.
This concept only prolonged my recovery, but I did not realize this until I started seeing a traditional psychodynamic therapist. Within a week, I realized that rationalizing my behavior was a large part of problem all along! What you said here was the problem, not the solution in my case:
“helping us become familiar and identify (a) how we deceive ourselves into thinking we are not responsible and (b) how we CHOOSE to handle stressful situations by self-destructive measures”
Yes, repressed trauma from the past was the cause of neurotic symptoms and through discussion of the above with the therapist, I ended up strenghthening the rationalization defense, which led to more emotional problems in the long run.
Continuing the repression might be a good strategy for short term managment, but I have found it worsened things in the long run.
RATIONALIZATION:
“A defense mechanism involving the construction of a logical justification for seemingly illogical or unacceptable feelings or behaviors. Rationalization can be conscious or subconscious, and is one of Freud’s proposed defense mechanisms.
Example: A person purchases a luxury car and then justifies the purchase by telling people how old and unsafe their old vehicle was.”
http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/2009/rationalization-2/
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