it sounds to me and it looks to me like when I'm connecting with people that a lot of things from the past past memories past pains hurts traumas are being brought to the Forefront for a lot of people with the chaos of the now how do we start to heal the the memories of the past the traumas of the past uh so that they don't keep hurting us in the present well the first thing I would say is you know sometimes there's a crisis in well-meaning mental health professionals rush in to discuss the trauma well
it's still happening that's a really bad idea people are generally traumatized because something actually horrible happened and dwelling on it in the moment just makes it worse it's not like anybody has a solution here's how you should understand this you know someone's just shot up your kid School here's how you should understand this that'll make it all better it's like no it won't if you have old baggage that often comes up if you're having an argument with someone doesn't it you know how it you know how it is this is partly why people don't like
to have a dis dispute within a relationship because it's a thread and you pull on that thread and just God well that we had another rule do not agree with something you don't agree with oh like if we're gonna if we decide you and me that we're doing this we don't go back and say well I didn't really mean it we don't get to play revisionist with our history so if you if you don't agree don't agree fight object or hold your peace because you see what happens with couples is there's a little fight and
then one says to the other yeah but you did this and then that person says yeah I know I did that but then that was because you did this and each this gets bigger until what's on the table is why the hell should we stay together at all right and so every fight becomes why the hell should we stay together at all so that's another thing you want to do is you want to have the fight about this thing not about everything past not everything it's like okay you were flirting I think you were flirting
more than you should have been okay so I go away and I think well okay maybe I was okay um well then we have to have a discussion about why and maybe we can solve that but mostly what we have to do is figure out how to not have that happen again okay so we're going to go see the same couple again what is it that you want me to do so I'm the flirtatious one let's say what do you want me to do well you have to figure that out it's like no I'm stupid
like you we're equally stupid I need to know what would satisfy you and you need to figure out what would satisfy you so I know and that like that's also extremely useful is let your establish your conditions of satisfaction make them explicit let the other person know yeah you can't read someone's mind yeah we're very bad at that we're bad at reading our own minds for that matter yeah so if we if I have a fight with with Tammy let's say sometimes I remember to say okay what what do you want me to do right
now what can I do what what should I say and mean you know and you think well you shouldn't let the other person put words in your mouth well fair enough you know I'm not act I'm not asking for something false I'm saying I'd like to not have this happen can you see a way out is there something I could do to increase the probability that that's the route we could take and you know sometimes that works but the other person has to let you know what they would find satisfying you mention you mentioned sexual
shame um and it triggered something in me about just the shames of the past that people tend to hold on to I think I might have mentioned this to you the last time we talked I'm not sure if you know but I was I was sexually abused when I was five by a man that I didn't know and for 25 years I held on to the secret the shame uh and if anyone ever knew about this then I would never be loved I you know right because you feel contaminated permanently yeah I would you know
I wouldn't have any guy friends no girls would find me attractive my parents would disown me you know I went down the rabbit hole these stories of you know I'm the only one this has ever happened to I never saw any examples of this happening to right and about eight years ago I I started to really heal that and started sharing that shame in many different therapeutic experiences that allowed me to start the healing process uh I'm curious from your perspective with all the work that you've done what is the best approach for someone to
really heal their shame if whether it's around sexual abuse or trauma or just anything whether it be small or big or any type of shame that they might have how does someone release shame in a healthy manner so that it doesn't make them a prisoner of these emotions of the past that hold them back well you hinted at a few things when you just described what what happened to you is you said well first of all you know I thought I was the only person this had ever happened to it's like no it's a universal
Human Experience to one degree or another now you know I'm not saying everyone was sexually abused and I'm certainly not saying that some people aren't sexually abused to a degree that's so extreme it's unimaginable where their others you know get off relatively lightly but it's still it's it's well within the realm of normative Human Experience that sexual that sex goes wrong in some way at least you regret something that's happened something you've done or something that was done to you so the putting it in to when when you're the only person that something has happened
to that's really not good right because it alienates you even from yourself you have no idea what to do with that and so that's sometimes why people find it such a relief to have their illness diagnosed it's like oh there is this is known there's a category other people have had this experience maybe there's a pathway through it so just knowing that you're not the only person like that can be very helpful um updating it's like how you were how old five okay well one thing to realize when you're 25 and you were abused when
you're five is that you're not five anymore right right that the person to whom that happened is no longer there you're there but so you know you might feel afraid of relationships you might feel afraid of all sorts of things but a lot of that was you're sort of feeling that like that residual 5-year-old I tell a story about one client I had she was abused by her older brother and she told me the story and I drew a picture in my head while she was you know I kind of pictured her of at five
and this teenage hulking teenager you know taking advantage of her but as she told the story I realized that her older brother was only a year two years older than her while he was seven was like okay well they were she wasn't the victim of a tyrannical male in some sense she they were two badly supervised children now that doesn't mean that what he did was right but she was still the 5-year-old in the memory but she was 27 when or so when she came to see me and so the first thing I did was
just point that out it's like think about the seven-year-olds you know right from for a 5-year-old a seven-year-old is an adult but for an a seven and a 5-year-old are clearly both children well that just changed things somewhat it made her feel less vulnerable in the moment what your brain wants from you in relationship to a traumatic memory is indication that you're no longer vulnerable to the same problem that's what memory is for right you remember something bad and you process it so that you change your interpretation or your behavior or the situation or whatever
you can change so that it isn't going to happen in the future and that'll if you do that thoroughly you'll generally let yourself rest it's to you have the memory to protect yourself from it happening again well that's the purpose of memory in general you you you you make sense of your past Behavior so that bet the good things that happen to you can be duplicated and the bad things can be avoided it's not to make an objective record of the world it's to make a functional map of the world that you can apply to
the Future and so part of yeah how do we let that go how do we disassociate something that happened a year ago 10 20 years ago that is no longer happening but is seems to be triggering us oh it's very it's it's very difficult well I would say you know one of the things you need to develop if you've had an experience like the one you had perhaps because I don't know the details you probably need a theory of malevolence you need an explanation it's like how could a person do that well you have to
have what if the explanation isn't good they were just bad person they just well then you need a philosophy of bad you need a philosophy of evil you have to understand it so that you're no longer a victim of it you have because otherwise you can't put the event in a in a context right you know and sometimes that means the development of real a real philosophical sophistication and that can help because then you know then you can start to separate out malevolence from benevolence because maybe you're afraid of any intimate relationship now because it's
been contaminated with that and everything's fuzzy and foggy and so you need to understand the person who did that at least to some degree so that you can separate that person out from all the other people around you who that you encounter in situations that might be reminiscent of it you know so you you felt vulnerable for for per perhaps you felt ashamed all those things have to be gone through what do you think you know when you're ashamed when does what elicits that what are the eliciting cues what do you think when that happens
all of that has to be taken apart I said in this Beyond order book that you know if you have a memory older than about 18 months that still bothers you right it's still got emotional resonance write older than 18 months ago or before yeah no older than 18 months ago or more got it yeah otherwise it's not really in the past right it's still happening that that whether you should delve into something how you should delve into something traumatic that's currently happening is a whole different issue but if it's an old memory and it
still bothers you it means that you haven't decomposed that experience sufficiently to detach it from the emo emotion so imagine when something terrible happens to you you don't understand it so then you might saywell if you don't understand something that's happening to you how can it be terrible because doesn't terrible mean that you understand it and the the answer is well you understand things in stages and the first way you understand a terrible thing is by freezing in Terror or running that's the understanding it's not conceptual it's embodied and emotional and so event Terror that's
the first category okay now the next question is how do you get it out how do you get out of the terror well you realize that nothing truly dangerous is happening well what if something truly dangerous did happen then you elaborate your view of the world to the point where you're no longer vulnerable to that terrible thing and that's extremely difficult so the memory of something terrible stays terrible until you effortfully process it and decompose it into well often into a much more sophisticated map of the world and it's really hard to do that
