“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.