stressed and why he felt he had to be the best at everything, to which his first reaction was ‘Fine, I’m willing to explore my attitudes but none of this exploring the past. I don’t want to go delving back into my childhood, that’s just so much sentimental and emotional wallowing.’
Unfortunately he stuck by that view and so there was little we could achieve. He tried visualizations and relaxation and deep-breathing techniques, but not surprisingly these helped little.
Years later his wife came to see me, after their divorce, and told me that as a boy his father had beaten him when he didn’t come in the top five in his class and the whole family had taunted him with not being as good at school as his older sister. When he had failed one subject at school his father had refused to help him any further in his education. If he had been able to understand that he was using these experiences to expect, quite inappropriately, the same type of treatment from his peers and colleagues he could have lessened his stresses considerably, enjoyed his work more and saved his marriage.
All that you think and do today is thought and done against the background of your past experiences. If you are having trouble today, if certain things stress you today, then there is a good chance that the underlying reason for this stress derives at least in part from previous experiences. If you can discover these experiences and reassess them you may well find that your current fears and stresses are unwarranted or inappropriate.
We will now explore some more of the many possible situations that could have occurred in your life, or in anyone’s life. My purpose in giving you these examples is two-fold. Firstly, the examples, all taken from patient files, suitably disguised, will help you to appreciate the experiential basis on which my conclusions and recommendations are based. Secondly, the ideas and examples may help you to trigger recognition of some of your own situations. If, as mentioned above, you want to explore this further for yourself then the ideas elsewhere in the book will help you. Alternatively, or additionally, you may find enormous benefit from going to someone who is qualified to help you.
Back to the beginning
Where to start? For most people their first conscious memory is somewhere between two and four years old. One friend told me they could remember their mother’s pendant swinging as she stood over the pram when they were less than a year old. Another told me they could remember nothing before they were seven years old, but these seem to be exceptions.
If you truly search your memory you may be surprised to find just how much you can remember. You will almost certainly find that you can remember more than you thought you could and that you can remember further back than you thought you could. Think about the time you forgot something you know well such as a person’s name, their phone number or their address. You’ve forgotten it, it has gone completely out of your mind, then suddenly you recall it again. You forgot what you did on your last birthday, then something happens to trigger your memory and the whole occasion comes into focus.
What happens to these memories, to these thoughts, that you can have them, lose them and then have them again? Where do they go? It has been suggested that all our memories are there still inside us, locked away somewhere, somehow, waiting to be accessed when we find the key to them. Certainly this is what I have found in my practice, with patients. From the years I have spent working with people and researching their past as a way of helping them with their present and their future it seems clear to me that it is possible for us all to remember right back to our earliest moments, not only to the moment of birth but even back to the time in the womb.
Under the appropriate circumstances patients have gone back to the very beginning of their life and been able to recount experiences that throw a lot of light on their present situation. When I first tell them this will be possible most people are sceptical. You may be too. I find the best way round this is to recount some examples from my own experience and so I will do that now.
Examples
The major stresses in Mr A.’s life came from the fact that he always felt he was unwanted, that no-one really cared about him, that other people were more popular, more successful, more in demand, more efficient and that he was not good enough. He always worried about future events and feared that he would not be included. When he was included in invitations or events he worried that people had asked him simply to be polite. If a working committee was formed and he was not co-opted he knew it was because he was not good enough. The same was true when he was not asked on to the parents’ committee at his children’s school or to be involved with a certain project at work or invited to social events. All these situations caused him enormous worry and anxiety and thoroughly irritated his wife who had tried hard over the years to rationalize the situations that he took as comments on his unworthiness and for which she could see many other more logical explanations.
He was willing to go back in time and the results were surprising, interesting, enlightening and very helpful. He was one of twins and had been born half an hour before his sister. When he regressed back and experienced how it had felt when he first found himself in the womb with her, the two of them were together and surrounded and protected by mother. Then he found he was being pushed, pushed out of the only place he had ever known. Not only that, but his sister wasn’t being ejected. His first conclusion was ‘Mother doesn’t want me, she does want to keep my sister. I’m not good enough, I’m second best.’
After birth he was quickly put in a cradle and left while the staff attended to the mother who was in distress with the second twin. His second conclusion was ‘These new people don’t want me either, I’m not good enough.’
When his sister was born it took the midwife some time to get her breathing and instead of being put down as he had been she received a lot of attention. His third conclusion was ‘They do want her, she is better or more desirable than I am, I’m not wanted, I’m second best.’
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