Circles
Circles, circles, circles. That old song keeps tripping through my mind… ‘Like a circle in a circle like a wheel within a wheel never ending or beginning on an ever-spinning reel like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.’
Recently I found myself back in my old neighbourhood, travelling roads I thought I’d never find myself on again, bumping into people from the past and wondering what happened in all the intervening years to bring me right back where I started as if everything I’d experienced meant nothing. Situations I thought I’d long left behind I find myself having to deal with once again, things I’d made and effort to run from and shrug off, I find are still very much a part of my life and still need to be faced.
And every time I think my trip down memory lane may be over, someone or something reminds me of the past. What is this all about? I keep asking. Every situation or person I meet in some way recently is my mirror reflecting past issues in my life. Is this because these issues have not been effectively dealt with and therefore are being presented again under new guises? Although the people are new, the same old same old emotions and circumstances that evoke those emotions are the same. In the last few weeks, I find my crumple buttons being pushed all the time, and all the fears, anxieties and hurts are old, and not new to me at all, so why? Why have I attracted to me in the most personal ways those who are recalling all these old and seemingly forgotten feelings? Cycles, patterns, and repetitions, I ask myself “do I really need to keep doing this all over and over again?”.
I don’t entirely buy into just ‘dropping the baggage’ or the potatoes in the famous carrying a bag of old potatoes around with you, analogy, and just moving on. To me, this is too flippant an answer. I believe we need to deal with the potatoes first before we can toss them and so there must be a way, a better way to cope with the past and similar issues in the present than just ‘dropping’ them and running away. The problem, as the saying goes with running away, is that you always take yourself with you.
If you just throw the potato away, you’ll very soon pick up a new potato which is going to much the same as the old, which you will also carry around with you, I don’t believe the point is to just ‘throw-away’ the issues, So that leaves us with the question of how to deal with them effectively.
The fact of the matter is that we are shaped by our past experiences, everything that has happened to us to date has shaped, and formed us into who we are now, and our responses and reactions to any situation are based on our past experiences and the outcomes of those experiences. Therefore most of us get locked into cyclic behaviour and attracting similar situations and circumstances to us. We stick with what we know. We become our own jailers, aggressively defending our issues. Someone reminded me of this quote recently
‘Isn’t it funny how we are quicker to defend our wrongs than our rights?’
I am notoriously non-confrontational, always seeking the route of least resistance and backing away/ backing down/ or removing myself as far from possible from the source of any confrontation or conflict.
This behaviour, of course, has its roots in the past. Recently, however, I found myself in a situation where this could not be avoided and in fact I was as much a constructor of the situation, as the other person involved and as I’ve never really effectively dealt with any confrontational situation in my life, I handled it, to say the least very badly.
On consideration more than a week later, I’ve come to some sort of understanding of this ’emotional baggage’ and how it played a role in the situation. While I was so hooked into my own past stuff in this conflict, I was missing out on truly ‘hearing’ what the other person was trying to tell me. I was so busy trying to defend my situation, avoid similar pain and not ‘lose ground’ in the argument that I missed the point completely.
The resultant emotional fallout is now taking time to resolve. This could have been avoided if just at the moment I had responded differently to having an emotional button pushed instead of reacting with the same conditioned response of the past and causing conflict that could have been avoided.
This is how our ‘baggage’ trips us up. It’s in the same reactions to situations and circumstances that have arisen in the past rather than finding new and more effective ways of responding to another person that perpetuates the cycles of behaviour and brings about the same experiences repeatedly.
I was forced to ask myself this question ‘ Is my own need to ‘defend’ my past pain and hang onto it, and also using it as an excuse to a certain behaviour, in fact stopping me from really, truly hearing what someone else has to say? How can I come to an understanding that responsive communication in a situation will change the way I perceive the circumstances I find myself in?
When the common denominator is you when you are experiencing the same pain repetitively, perhaps it’s time to look at yourself first before blaming someone else for your hurt and anger. You may not be ‘doing’ something wrong, but you may be reacting incorrectly.
This is when a change of perspective and a new response would change the experience of that situation. If you can change your perspective in the current set of circumstances, perhaps you can view the past differently too, and come to some peace and understanding of the role you played and where you stood in the situation.
If the above can be achieved, this ‘old potato’ can be released from the bag so that you can focus on new experiences in your life.
While it is true to say, everyone has a history (His story), it’s often our own refusal to acknowledge the fact that your history is as real to you as mine is to me that gets us into all sorts of emotional mix-ups and miscommunications in our relationships.
Our experiences have been different, yes, and comparatively speaking, yours may be much worse or much better. Yet because we are so keen to hang onto our past wounds, we often get involved in comparing who’s is worse when defending our current behaviour.
This is the trap I fell into. However, on reflection what is needed now is to face these feelings and emotions with the maturity of an adult and not the fear of a child to change my current understanding of the place I now find myself in.
That is what is going to make the difference, remembering that as a child, you may not have been able to express or understand what was happening to you. As an adult, however, using emotional maturity and compassionate understanding, you can express your needs and your issues and make the understanding of the experience different.
This does not mean that you need to give up your boundaries and your limits and let someone else walk over you. It does mean that you need to find ways to assertively and not aggressively define your needs and find more meaningful and mature ways of communicating those things to get along with and understand one another. Allowing our past stuff to interfere in our present makes us defensive and less willing to try again, and far more prone to over sensitivity and reactional behaviour.
We do not live our lives alone, and it’s only the bonds we form here that we take with us when we pass on, we need each other to evaluate grow and experience where we are now.
We need the mirrors we provide for each other in terms of being able to understand how to do it differently next time, and the mirrors work both ways. No-one’s history is less relevant than someone else’s when dealing in the relationship arena. Everyone has buttons to push, and if things can be dealt with differently to the past perhaps you can change not the events in the past but your perceptions of them in order to do the new situation differently, in doing this you heal both the past and present issue so that it does not come up again in the future.
When we become locked into our fears of past cycles and repetitions and repercussions of those things, we are unwilling to try and do things differently and we revert to what is known and seemingly ‘safe’ behaviour, becoming our own prison warders holding back the outside world and staying ‘safe’ and locked away within, thereby denying ourselves the love, joy and abundance we so long for.
This issue is all about understanding the role you played, no matter how passively, or innocently and it is also about forgiveness. Most importantly, it’s about forgiveness of yourself first then others.
This is especially true when it comes down to long outdated and childhood issues. Most of us hold onto some sort of guilt or feelings of having been ‘at fault’ somehow in the things that happened to us as children, most importantly we need the reassurance, love and forgiveness from ourselves first and to acknowledge that we did not, in fact, have the power or control then that we do now to change the situation.
Then when we forgive the other parties involved, we need also to acknowledge that you forgive for yourself, it is the emotional release that forgiveness gives you and not the other person that is important.
Releasing emotional baggage is also about taking responsibility and changing what you experience in the now. What happens to you, as an adult are opportunities represented to be dealt with differently to change to outcome of the new, and the perspective of the past and to release outdated beliefs that no longer serve you.
You don’t drive your car by looking backwards; however, you do use your rear-view mirror to guide you going forward. Our history and our past are very relevant and should not be forgotten, it’s only in the lessons of the past and the understanding of those events that we can guide our future.
Yes, we all need to move onward and forward, we cannot become locked into our past pain. We can use that pain; however, to make our lives different in the future, by dealing with the same and similar issues differently in the present.
About The Author
