History Schmistory

From its very invention, therapy has been inextricably intertwined with personal history.  Freud began with a technique of free association designed to elicit hidden feelings his patients had towards their parents.  Though his writings are extensive, his basic theory is very graspable: people are ashamed and afraid of how they feel about their parents, so they’ll go to great, often destructive lengths to hide it. By this tenet, the next step writes itself; If you can get patients to say their secrets out loud, they’ll be cured of the burden of carrying them.  It made sense at the time. So much sense, in fact, that it has been carried forward to this day. But is it right?

In modern psychotherapy, personal history is accounted for in Bion and Co’s Attachment Theory.  This evidence-based and widely supported theory gets pretty complex, but the gist of it is that as children we are powerless to take care of ourselves, so we attach emotionally to our caretakers as our best survival strategy.  Chaos ensues! The way this often plays out in session is that clients will spend time talking about their childhood and the relationships they had to their parents and other caretakers (teachers, babysitters, siblings, etc.). This history is then mined and analyzed to determine what kinds of lessons people internalized when young, as a way for clients to understand what internal forces still act on them as adults.

And it works!  Clients come away from this process feeling empowered, and with a sense of grace towards the problems that brought them to therapy in the first place.  But it isn’t real. Memories are distorted, childhood memories even more so. Clients don’t have the full picture of what was going on when they were kids.  Analysis is just a good guess, at best. This process of understanding how a person’s history continues to effect them seems so real in treatment, but is never more than a compelling fiction.  So what is working?

Before you get super depressed, understand that something very powerful is happening within this narrative process.  The act of going back through your own history, however fragmented and subjective it may be, teaches you that you are allowed to experience all of what you were thinking and feeling as a child and to recontextualize it.  To look back at your impressions of what life was supposed to be, acknowledge the parts of that which required you to wall off parts of yourself, and to say to yourself “I don’t need to wall those off anymore, and I won’t” frees up a personal freedom that we spend much of childhood packing away.

In addition to this personal freedom, the process also creates a profound interpersonal relationship between client and therapist.  Being able to go back through your history and uproot it in the light of day - to say the hardest, most secret parts out loud to another person lets you experience the shame-abolishing process of being honest about who you were, who you are, and who you want to be with another person who understands your pain and affirms your hope.  Talking to your therapist about what you never talk to anyone about is a corrective experience, regardless of the accuracy of your memories.

So history, and the process of exploring it with your therapist, turns out not to be quite what it seems.  But it’s also a lot more. Therapy is a sometimes mystifying process, one where you’re not always sure why you do what you do.  But rest assured, if you’re talking about your thoughts and feelings in an open manner, and being listened to in a nonjudgmental way, it is always helpful.