The past can come knocking at any moment. And catch you off guard, just when you thought you’d finally moved on from it all.
The past has terrible timing. It rarely turns up when you’re sitting calmly, ready to reflect on your life. It appears while you’re making coffee, trying to sleep, having an argument that feels far bigger than what you’re actually arguing about, meeting someone new or right in the middle of….
oops!
Gone.
If an old memory can still knock the wind out of you, it often means your mind hasn’t managed to make a coherent story out of what happened.
In other words, you still haven’t worked through one or more things that happened in your past.
Jordan Peterson, a psychologist who’s acclaimed by some, hated by others and admired by me, uses a helpful image to explain this: the story of your past works like a map.
A map doesn’t just tell you where you’ve been. It helps you understand how you got there, what dangers you encountered and how you should move through similar territory in the future.
The problem is that painful experiences often leave holes in that map. And so you know you ended up somewhere terrible, but perhaps you still don’t understand how.
Why did you stay?
Why didn’t you see what was happening?
Why did you tolerate certain things?
Why did your body freeze when you wanted to run?
What was done to you?
When those questions remain unanswered,
partly because what happened hurt so much that, in many cases, we’d rather draw a veil over it and pretend it never happened,
the part of your mind that detects danger doesn’t consider the experience finished.
What a bastard the mind can be.
As far as your mind is concerned, you once wandered into dangerous territory without knowing how you got there. And because you still don’t know, it could happen again.
So the memory comes back.
And comes back, and comes back.
Right when you least expect it, as I said before.
Your mind isn’t tormenting you for fun. What’s happened is that…
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