How Past Pain Can Present Present Problems.

When you’ve suffered a scar—whether that’s a physical, emotional, or relational wound—you’re naturally not going to want to place yourself in the same kind of situation to where you’d get hurt again. Your fight-or-flight response kicks in, and if given the option, you’ll fly away from the person or circumstance that may try to hurt you again, just a like a child who only needs to touch a hot stove once to know not to do it again.

And yet we find ourselves in such positions in life over and over again. Whether that’s an abusive relationship of some sort, a dysfunctional parent/grown child relationship, or a demeaning boss, we sometimes suddenly find ourselves in very defensive positions because we have the sneaking suspicion that we’re about to be hurt in the same way we’ve been hurt before. 

The thing is, the stories we’ve told ourselves about that past pain presents present problems. In fact, it could even be part of the reason why we find ourselves in repeat predicaments with similar outcomes.

We cast the people in our present lives using scripts based on past pain. 

He’s going to leave me the same way the last boyfriend did.

I’m never going to get a promotion. That boss is as mean as my last one.

And when we start expecting people to react in certain ways, we’re no longer dealing with the real people in front of us. Rather, we’re re-enacting long dormant stories in our heads. It should be little wonder then when they fulfill their roles.

But to get out of that rut, you need to get out of your head. You need to try to see the person in front of you for who they are instead of who they represent. You need to attempt to see the present reality instead of the fantasy based on your past pain. When you can begin to separate current relationships from similar ones in your past, you may just begin to see the possibility of a hopeful and better outcome because you’re allowing the other person to exist as a real person and not just a caricature of someone in your past.

After all, if the shoe was on the other foot, wouldn’t you want to be treated like the real you?