How to Make the Past the Past Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

Dr. Deb How To Make The Past, The Past

By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

“When you said to me that you were through, Pesach, that drove a knife in my heart,” Breindy said.

“Oh, for G-d’s sake, Breindy, are you going to bring that up again?”

“But it HURT! Can’t you understand that? We made a commitment for life and instead you shocked me out of my mind with that. How can I ever trust you again?”

“I apologized, didn’t I?” Pesach interjected. “This was fifteen years ago, Breindy. I didn’t know which end was up. That was how I felt in the moment. It wasn’t how I really felt and certainly not how I feel now….

“But then again, when you keep bringing this up, I feel like I’ve been put through the ringer, like a criminal or worse who did such a thing to an innocent person,” Pesach responded. “And that isn’t helping our relationship go forward at all.”

Uh-oh.

First the complaint.

Then the implied threat.

And Breindy becomes totally justified in her fright that the past will be the present after all.

But – hold up, a minute.

Why does Breindy keep bringing it up, anyway? Why is it still there for 15 years?

The Role of Negativity Bias

Breindy is scanning the horizon for a saber-toothed tiger.

That is normal. That is the way we are hard-wired: we look for danger.

Because if Breindy doesn’t keep her eye out for danger, she could end up being surprised by a horrible and unexpected message from Pesach. Better to be prepared, right?

That’s called negativity-bias. We are more conscious of the negative than the positive.

As in the parent saying, “I see 4 A’s. WAIT! What’s with the B?!”

See what I mean?

You wouldn’t realize it, but this really is a survival mechanism. This negativity bias is controlled by the amygdala, a part of our brain that pre-eminent trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk calls our “smoke alarm.”

The left side of our brain detects positive emotions, yet the signals from the amygdala are quicker to arouse us and don’t pass through any fact-checking. After all, if your brain thought it smelled smoke, would you rather it pondered about whether it really was smoke or just got you running?

You can see the problem here. Maybe Pesach has done nothing wrong since that fateful day 15 years ago when he said he was through. Maybe Breindy is simply misinterpreting everything.

Or maybe not.

How does she know? How can she be sure?

She can’t.

No one has any certainty in this world, unfortunately.

However, there are certain things that she can do to stack the deck in her own favor: 1. She can learn to tell, pretty quickly, when Pesach isn’t in Self energy and when he is. She can decide from that whether they can have deep, serious conversations or not. (Next live: “How to Tell When Someone Is Not In Self.” I do these Thursday nights at 9 PM on Zoom webinars. Go to my website’s homepage to be added to my email list for the weekly link.)

Remember one basic rule here: When your parts have taken over you, you can’t receive whatever it is someone else wants you to know.

So you have to be in Self to have a meaningful conversation. 2. She can learn when her own parts have taken over her. Her victim part will annoy the heck out of Pesach. Her angry part will chase him away. The part that jokes about the times she said something hurtful will not help her either.

Remember another rule: Parts have an agenda, and your Self does not. If you want a fair and rational conversation, be in Self. 3. She can practice as much as possible being able to get back into Self and lovingly tell her parts to take a step back because she’s got this.

Here’s a third rule: Parts will trust Self the more Self can lead. The more you’re used to your parts taking over, the more they’ll do just that.

So how does she get back into Self when a part has taken over?

We have an exercise taken from Dr. Richard C. Schwartz of literally asking parts to “step back” so that Self can feel that freedom of not being encumbered by them. It works. 4. She can lovingly encourage Pesach to work on recognizing his parts and tell the difference from being held captive by parts and being Self-led. (That’s what my team and I do.) Which means that he, too, will be able to talk to Breindy from a place a Self.

Why will all this help?

How will it defeat our natural negativity bias?

Here’s the answer: Self-led conversations are honest, open, and intimate.

You get to know what your spouse is really thinking that way.

Okay, Dr. Deb, but how does that fix the past hurt?

Two ways: #1: You will know if your spouse was sincere in their regret for what they did that hurt you.

This is because when you get used to your own Self, your own parts, and other people’s parts and Self you can recognize sincerity when you experience it. #2: Oddly enough, the best person to heal our past hurts is us. We have within us the capability of healing ourselves. This is part of the IFS (Internal Family Systems) process, and it is powerful. In fact, neuroscientists have actually pinned down exactly what happens in the brain that makes it work (See my articles on Bruce Ecker and memory reconsolidation or Google him).

Finally, there is something I would call a moment of truth. You just have to decide if you’re going to give someone – and yourself and your marriage – another chance.

When you’ve gone and healed the past and your spouse has apologized from their heart, that’s when you can over-ride the natural negativity bias.

It’s a decision. And one with lots of potential for joy.