The impact of our past

"When difficult emotions come up, we may find ourselves retreating from their true significance. Troubled and agitated by their intensity, we just want to make the feelings go away. It's hard to think about our pain. So we might eat, shop, exercise, seek out addictions of various kinds, and---above all---stay busy. The net result is poor self-reflection skills; we lack the ability to come up with any real sense of our feelings, let alone why we are behaving in certain ways. And, of course, this lack of awareness limits our ability to communicate in our marriage.

God created us to have emotions, not get rid of them. Ignoring our feelings can literally make us sick. I have seen a number of people in my office who came to counseling for various reasons. While hearing their stories, I discovered they suffered from chronic illnesses. Many times these clients routinely ignored their feelings. As they became aware of their emotions and learned to process them, they were surprised to see their health improve. Suppressed feelings are the cause of more illness than anyone realizes. Holding emotions inside without ever releasing them is hard on the body.

Some of us, however, grew up in homes where positive thinking was the rule. There is nothing wrong with positive thinking unless it means we can't deal with our negative feelings. Perhaps you grew up with "Look on the bright side," "Ignore it and it wil go away," or even "Rejoice always." These simple answers do little to help our souls, because some feelings linger and even intensify long after the cause has passed. As you may have found, emotions won't just go away."

-How We Love, Chapter 16: Seek Awareness, Milan and Kay Yerkovich

This is a great book that has been extremely helpful in my own journey of learning how negative emotions and behavior patterns can affect communication in our relationships. While reading this section this morning, I found it extremely relatable to my own story, as it was a pattern I've played out most of my life, up until the last 6 years or so. 

I have come to believe that developing a willingness to engage with our emotions is crucial as a starting point for growing in our relationships with others, and with God. I would not stop there though, as I don't think it's enough to simply be aware of how we feel, or even to be willing to talk about it instead of running away from negative thoughts and emotions.

At the end of the day, how helpful is it to simply replay past events and acknowledge how those things made me feel if I don't go any further with it? The reality is that it's not the past event that shapes us, those things led us to believe things about ourselves that are often not true. The reason we often get stuck in these cyclical behavior patterns in our relationships is because current events that may feel similar to something that happened in our past trigger beliefs that are lying beneath the surface, and we feel it all again, whether we acknowledge it or not.

One of the things that has amazed me is how many people simply do not want to engage with their past, even if they encounter someone who has found tremendous amounts of healing from their past. Many people have built incredible defense mechanisms that they simply do not want to get rid of. This is how I lived my life for years though, but that's because I didn't know any better for the longest time. Once I learned that those emotions that I tried so hard to bury for so long are the key to unlocking the doors to the beliefs behind them, and that God wanted to show me the truth in those beliefs, I could never go back to how I used to live.

In one sense I would think that a person who has encountered the healing power of Jesus to be true in their life would be more willing to engage with difficult things in their past, I also have come to believe that Christians often find a new excuse with their new identity as a believer, to pretend like the things of the past didn't happen or didn't affect them the way they truly did. Christians may often use their new identity in Christ as a way of dismissing everything unpleasant in the past and trying to wipe the slate clean without actually dealing with the aftermath of past events. Christians especially love to quote platitudes and use scriptures out of context to justify emotional avoidance. There's probably an endless supply of believers who have misquoted Philippians 3 as a way to justify their repeated ignoring of whatever is in their past.

I have heard the saying many times that we should let sleeping dogs lie, which is just really another way of trying to avoid dealing with something in the past, "just leave it alone," they mean to say! Someone close to me recently said about this saying that it didn't work for them, because the dog was really never asleep, it was barking and growling the whole time. We can pretend that the things of the past didn't affect us. We can escape through various addictions, but all of those things are short-term Band-Aids for the pain that we feel from lies we have believed based on our past experiences.

Jesus doesn't want to simply erase our past, he wants to restore it by teaching us who we truly are in him. He wants to show us that the lies we believed about ourselves in relation to our identity, were never true in the first place, and we can find our true identity in him. My experience has shown this to be true. My life has been completely changed by engaging with the past and letting it draw me closer to my Savior Jesus. Although I believe God can simply wipe that pain away, I think it's generally more true that he wants us to walk through the pain and learn about how it has impacted our relationship with him first, before he restores it. After all, how can he heal what we don't know is there? Jesus is there wanting to show us how much he loves us and who we truly are, but we have to be willing to open the door to let him in. Sometimes, it can feel like a long painful process to even find the door to be able to open it for him, but I can personally attest that it is so worth it when we encounter him in those most painful moments and beliefs that we have been carrying for so long.