Hello, welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast. I'm Dr. Caroline Lloyd, just in case you didn't know, and welcome to episode 37. Today we are going to talk about the past. And people's reluctance to go there.
I hear time and time again - Caroline, look, this anxiety is about the future. It's about what's going to happen. It's about how I cope with what's happening in my present. It actually has nothing to do with the past. The past is over and done with. It's gone. There's nothing I can do about it. Why do I have to think about it? And to me this represents one of the major aspects of PTSD, which is avoidance.
PTSD is composed of kind of three realms of difficulty. One is flashbacks or re revisiting the event in either daytime flashbacks or nighttime nightmares. The second is hypervigilance that anxiety, that need to be on the lookout, needing to know everything that's going on. And the third is avoidance.
So in that sentence "My anxiety is all about the future and the present. Why do I have to go back to the past?" It kind of encompasses both of those second and third aspects of PTSD, the avoidance and the hyper vigilance.
I have to say here - I completely understand people's reluctance to go back to the past, the past was painful. It was awful. In some cases it was horrific. And it's very much human nature to want to not go there, to want to avoid it. And minimize it and blank it out. For some people they do that very, very successfully, even perhaps dissociating the memories so they blank it out entirely. It's just not available at all.
But most people want to avoid looking at the past, and so they, they just keep their eyes firmly on the present and the future. But all of our difficulties in the present have their origins in the past. All of our current anxieties, all of our current negative beliefs about ourselves, all of our current depression and low mood has its origin in the past.
The past is when we learned those things about ourselves that are not serving us now. So we learned, I'm hopeless. I am not worthy, I'm in danger. I am a bad friend. I can't do things right. I'll never be successful. We all learned those from the past. I'll just give you a tiny example, which actually just floated back into my consciousness just recently.
I used to learn the violin. I learned the violin for I don't know how many years it must have been, maybe seven years. And I learned the violin because at some stage I expressed an interest in it. My dad had learned the violin when he was young. In our family, the violin was kind of considered to be a cultural instrument and one that was worth doing and just kind of prestigious in a way, I suppose. I didn't grow up in a family that really got into the Beatles or Bay City rollers (that conversation just didn't happen in my house) or rock and roll, anything like that. So I wanted to learn the violin. I enjoyed it for a little while.
I achieved some sort of proficiency, and then I started to hate it. And so I wouldn't do my practice and I'd go along to the lessons with, I think her name was Mrs. Khouri. She's probably long gone by now, but she was a verywell respected, very cultured person, and to hear her play was really quite remarkable.
But she realized that I wasn't very motivated and that I was not doing my practice. I'd turn up again and again, you know, with the same level of skill as I had last week, and she tried a few things to kind of get me a little bit more motivated. I imagine she was quite frustrated with me. She knew that I wanted to be a doctor, and she said to me, Caroline, you'll never be a doctor if you don't practice every day.
It's discipline. You need to learn discipline. And that statement stuck with me. I took that on board At the age of Mm, I think I might've been about 12 when she said that to me. And I understand why she was doing it. She was speaking out of frustration, but I took that on board and the way that I took that on board was I'm not good enough to be a doctor, and I have struggled with that my whole professional life. That statement was the basis for many difficult days and many difficult evenings trying to study to be a doctor. Knowing that, knowing, knowing in my heart of hearts, because she had said this, this important person in my life, she had said this, you are not good enough to be a doctor.
If only I'd had EMDR back then. Right. Uh, I really wish that I could have resolved that a very long time ago. So roughly 45 years later I'm doing that work and, you know, that's helping. But this is a very, very minor example of the things that we learn. So I'm very aware that that comment doesn't really constitute trauma. That was not trauma. That was just learning something that was not helpful to me. If you grow up with trauma, family violence, sexual assaults, alcoholic parents, whatever it may be, you'll have a lot of negative beliefs about yourself. And whilst all of those things that I've just mentioned are very, very hard to approach in therapy and it takes a lot of courage, takes real bravery to confront these things in therapy with any therapist.
I really want to give credit where credit's due because all of my clients are prepared to go towards their trauma. That takes a lot of courage, but we need to do that. We need to confront those traumas in a helpful way. Not in a re-traumatizing way, not in a way that we just, you know, bring it up, talk about it, experience the distress, and then have to put it away again, because that's just re-traumatizing.
But using a trauma-informed, validated therapy like EMDR, for example, like trauma-focused CBT, like cognitive processing therapy. There are a few. Also somatic experiencing, brain spotting all of these therapies will help. So using one of these trauma-focused therapies in a way that you don't have to just bring up the past, relive it, and then put it away again 'cause that's essentially having a very prolonged flashback, but using a trauma-focused therapy to resolve the distress of that experience. Is kind of the only way that we will learn something better about ourselves. We can't learn those positive cognitions. I'm worthy. I'm safe. I'm a decent person. That was not my fault. I'm a good person. We can't learn those positive cognitions without going back and revisiting the past and processing it in some way. It just won't stick no matter how many mantras we recite, no matter how many times we do that sort of top down CBT kind of approach, like just tell yourself, like, look at the evidence.This is black and white thinking. No matter how much we shame ourselves and blame ourselves for those negative cognitions. The only way we can actually install the positive cognitions and believe better things about ourselves, fully and wholeheartedly, is by going back to the past, dealing with the origin of the negative beliefs, the negative cognitions, processing them, and then we can arrive at the positive beliefs with authenticity. Once we have dealt with he past, the positivity about th present and the future becomes effortless. That's why we go back and rake over the past.
I hope that's helpful, I will talk to you next week, until then, take good care, bye for now.
