The Chains of the Past

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland.


Have you ever noticed how some people relate to past events in their lives? Things that should be gone and forgotten are as real and alive today as when they happened. They are the bad memories that refuse to go away, the past events or occurrences that refuse to stay in the past. You will often hear people say how they try and bury them or not think about them but it doesn't seem to work.
We are used to thinking that the event or incident must been particularly traumatic, it must have been something particularly awful that was done to us. And frightening events such as physical or sexual abuse come into this category and will indeed be difficult to forget. But very often there can be small psychical traumas too that arose from quite ordinary events that we also try and bury.
A person's siblings got more attention than they did; a person grew up with a mother who was unhappy all the time; they had parents who didn’t exactly hate each other but there was no love in evidence; they cannot forget a moment in early childhood when they realised they were not quite as special as they thought; someone close to them died and it was never fully explained or understood.
The pain these incidents bring, often many years after the event or series of events, is real and unmistakable. And the effects in a psychological sense are often subtle but powerful. A person ends up living a life onto which trauma, big or small, is irreversibly glued, like something we can’t shake off.
Bad memories don’t go away just because we want them to. In fact the more we try to push them away or bury them the more they return to us. It’s like that burial scene in the Coen Brothers' 1984 movie 'Blood Simple' where the character who has been killed just won’t stay dead. The potency of that scene, in part, derives from this primeval concept that burying something is no guarantee that it won’t come back to haunt us.
A common definition of trauma is an experience that is completely unexpected and one for which we have had no time to prepare ourselves. You can think of a car crash or unprovoked violence as an example. But if you look at rescue services or armed forces, who train for their jobs quite extensively, you will still find trauma ocurring quite frequently. The incidence of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, is unusually high. So even situations for which we are trained can be traumatic.
In other words, this notion of trauma can crop up in places that are far from ‘usual’ and in ways for which we cannot prepare ourselves. Even emotional relationships that end suddenly and unexpectedly can bring a degree of trauma with them.
The common element with all forms of trauma is the inability of the person who has undergone it to put the experience into words. This is a result of not being able to find a place or a context for what has happened. It is as if it had taken place in a realm outside of our reality. And, indeed, this is close to what has actually happened. We live our lives according to a set of rules, values and understandings. But then a situation or event occurs that completely up-ends those systems which allowed us live so successfully. And because it has hit us at such a fundamental level we are left quite literally speechless. That is trauma.
It brings with it a number of features. The first is that, in the absence of having words that might make sense of the experience for us, we re-visit the memory again and again in order to try and understand what has happened. This is also why people dream about it repeatedly. It is forcing itself on us again and again so that we might gain an understanding of it.
The second feature is it shakes our trust. We stop trusting everyone, and everything we have been told or taught or trained to think is now open to question. We even lose faith in ourselves.
At the large end of the scale, with major trauma, the person is left in a world where nothing makes sense anymore and this, if untreated, can lead to serious mental health problems.
At the lighter end of the scale, the lack of trust makes itself felt in an unwillingness to seek help from any other person, trained or otherwise. Without help, some spend their lives glued to a set of hurtful ideas that stifle growth, happiness and fulfilment.