When Memories Get in the Way

Memories aren’t just sepia-toned snapshots that live in our minds and occasionally crop up to evoke certain emotions; they serve an even bigger important purpose. Although we aren’t often aware when it happens, when a new experience triggers an old memory, our minds spring into action to make sense of it, as if to say, Oh, this is familiar! You’ve dealt with this before, and here’s what you need to do now! As we all know, memories can also be a valuable resource for us therapists; when we explore them with clients, we gain greater insight into their self-narratives and why they behave the way they do.

But sometimes, we can get so absorbed by a client’s memory that we assume it’s an absolute truth—and we get locked in it, right alongside our client. For psychoanalysts like myself, who often search for some connection between clients’ current struggles and a formative past experience, an old memory may be a red herring that keeps us from focusing on what’s really relevant: what’s happening for the client in the here and now. Not long ago, I fell into this trap with one of my own clients, John. But by helping him let go of his attachment to an old memory—and gradually letting go of my own tendency to focus on old memories in therapy—we both turned a corner.

Taking a Wrong Turn

John walked into my office and sat down on the couch looking especially flummoxed. He’d called me a week earlier to tell me he needed help processing some insecurities in his relationship with Lisa, his girlfriend of almost three years.

John started talking right away about his concerns. He told me he cared deeply for Lisa, but added that he was having trouble taking the next step. “She wants to get married,” he said flatly, “and I do too. But I’m not ready yet, and I’m afraid she’s going to get tired of waiting and end things. I really don’t want that to happen.”

John told me that he loved Lisa and wanted to commit to her, but that he’d been badly hurt by an ex-girlfriend, Marianne, which was making it hard for him to completely trust Lisa. “I trusted Marianne,” he said, “and look where that got me! I’d bought her a ring. We’d been planning our wedding—and then she dropped me.” He folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. “I’ve never felt so betrayed or hurt in my life. I don’t ever want to go through that again.”

As I listened to John’s story of rejection, I thought about what psychoanalysts once called a screen memory—an event that represents another life experience. Developmental theorist Daniel Stern called memories tied to a specific event “representations of interactions generalized,” meaning they become part of a personal narrative that influences our sense of who we are and how we expect other people to behave toward us. These memories can also get in the way of processing new experiences, due to the conscious or unconscious belief that closing ourselves off from them will protect us from further pain. I began to wonder: Was it possible that John’s fear of commitment was a result of being abandoned by someone he’d trusted to care for him when he was younger? Perhaps a parent?

With my prompting, John willingly explored this with me. He shared how his parents’ marriage had fallen apart and how he’d learned that his father had been having an affair with a much younger woman. He’d admired his father, he told me, and was angry and disillusioned when he realized his father wasn’t the man he’d believed him to be. We’re onto something! I thought. We spent the next several sessions unpacking this experience.

“Do you think I should tell my dad how much his behavior affected me?” he asked me at one point.

“That depends,” I replied. “How do you think it might help?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I just need him to know.”

I wondered what John thought he could accomplish by confronting his father. Did he simply need him to understand his confusion and anxiety about relationships? Did he need an apology? I encouraged him to imagine how this conversation might play out.

“I don’t know what I want out of this,” he finally concluded. “My dad wouldn’t take responsibility anyway.”

“Is that what you want?” I asked. “For him to take responsibility?”

John nodded.

“And what if he can’t?”

“You mean what if he won’t,” John muttered.

“Either way, what if you can’t get what you need from him?” I asked.

John shrugged. “I’m not sure how I’d feel.”

I was beginning to question my own focus on John’s parents. Would John get anything out of this conversation with his father? Would it have any impact on his relationship with Lisa? Something didn’t quite line up.

The Here and Now

As I sat with this dilemma, I remembered a moment from early in my training. I’d been seeing a psychoanalyst before switching to a different one who was certified by my institute. My first therapist had helped me contextualize childhood experiences I’d long overlooked, and I’d expected my new therapist would do the same. But when I told him about the pain of feeling in competition with a classmate, his response surprised me. “What do you mean by competition?” he asked.

“It’s something I felt toward my younger brother most of my childhood,” I explained, adding that my brother had been born when I was 18 months old, and my family often joked about how upset I’d been at his arrival.

But before I could finish my story, my therapist interrupted me. “Tell me about that competitive feeling that’s coming up now, with your classmate.”

I kept trying to address the historical context for these feelings, but the therapist kept insisting that I focus on my present emotions. At one point, I summoned the courage to confront him about it. “Aren’t you supposed to be an analyst?” I asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be interested in the past?”

He laughed. “I’m supposed to be interested in analyzing your experience,” he said, “and in understanding why and how you feel the way you do. Talking about the past seems to take you away from what you’re feeling right now, and that makes it hard for you to process those feelings or find ways to understand or manage them right now.”

I was struck by the truth of his statement. Recounting old memories had become a way for me to blow off steam or redirect distressing feelings. As I thought about that moment in my session now with John, I began to wonder whether he was doing the same. Was it possible that focusing on his frustration with his father was leading us astray? Was comparing his relationship with Marianne to that with Lisa was his way of avoiding something difficult happening right now? I thought about the story he’d told me about the breakup with Marianne. There’d been warning signs, he’d said, like Marianne being less affectionate, but when his friends brought this up, he’d brushed them off. Were there warning signs now too, or was John simply afraid of being rejected again because he’d been rejected in the past?

“You mentioned that you’re having trouble trusting Lisa because of what happened with Marianne,” I said. “But I also suspect you’re having trouble trusting yourself because of that experience.”

John looked puzzled. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“You told me there were signs that something wasn’t right with Marianne, but that you didn’t listen when your friends pointed them out, which you regret now. Maybe you didn’t listen to your own doubts either.”

“But I didn’t have any doubts,” John replied. “That’s why the breakup was such a surprise, why it hurt so much.”

“And this time you have lots of doubts,” I said.

“Well, not lots of doubts. I do have some. But mostly I just don’t want to make the same mistake again.”

“Some doubts are normal, you know. In some cases it’s helpful to ignore them, which I’m guessing was what you did, maybe without realizing it, with Marianne. But it’s better to confront them so you can decide which ones are realistic and which ones aren’t. What do you think might happen if you acknowledge that some of your doubts are normal, but that not all of them may be realistic, and that some of them are getting in your way?”

“I guess it would be helpful to talk to you about those doubts,” he said. “But what if you think they mean I should break up with Lisa?”

I could’ve told John that we were looking at his internal conflicts and confusion, but I suspected he felt my opinion was important, just as he felt paying attention to his friends’ opinions would’ve helped him in the past.

“Do you feel like you wouldn’t be able to ignore my opinion, the way you ignored your friends all those years ago?” I asked.

“Probably,” he replied. “I learned my lesson the first time around.”

“Well, are your friends expressing concerns about your relationship with Lisa?”

John shook his head. “No, but I worry maybe they’re keeping them to themselves. I got upset with them last time.”

“So what would it mean to you if they—or I—had concerns?” I asked.

John shrugged. “I’d have to take them seriously,” he said.

I could see that John was putting a lot of stock into what others thought about his relationship, leaning on what he felt, mistakenly, was something that could’ve saved his relationship with Marianne, or at least saved him some pain. It was here that I realized how we could break free from the clutch of John’s memory of that pain—and it had nothing to do with his father.

A Turning Point

To counteract the power John’s memories of the breakup with Marianne were holding over his current relationship, I knew I needed to put the power back in his hands, to show him, somehow, that it wasn’t his friends, or anyone else for that matter, who could protect him from future pain: it was him.

“Rather than run your doubts by your friends or me to find out whether other people have concerns about your relationship with Lisa, what if you asked yourself some of those questions,” I suggested.

John took a deep breath. “Well, first of all, Lisa is nothing like Marianne.”

“That’s an interesting way to begin,” I replied. “It sounds like you’ve chosen a partner who wasn’t anything like your last.”

John furrowed his brow. “Wait, aren’t I supposed to be telling you what I’m thinking?”

I laughed. “Well, yes,” I replied. “But how about if we focus on what you’re thinking and feeling about Lisa, without comparing her to Marianne?”

This was hard work for John—and I’ll admit it was hard for me, too. John had to catch himself when he’d periodically return to the memory of his breakup with Marianne, and I had to resist the urge to look for some connection between his relationship with Lisa and that with his father. Those relationships were certainly significant, but I knew they mattered less than his present relationship with Lisa. As we continued to work on focusing on his present-day anxieties, those old memories began to fade into the background instead of creeping into the story of what was happening now.

“I’m starting to realize there was nothing I could’ve done to save my relationship with Marianne,” he said in a later session. “It was doomed to fail. I want to be with someone who shares my values, and ours were just too different.” Gradually, John was able to put into words his deep love for Lisa. “Lisa just gets me,” he said. “She loves me, but she also understands me in a really profound way. It feels like we can talk about anything.”

As our sessions went on, John began to acknowledge that maybe his thinking about relationships had been romanticized, and that even the best relationships have some degree of conflict. “I know that Lisa and I will have arguments and disagreements,” he said, “especially when we start a family.” He looked out my office window and fell silent, as if imagining that future. “But we have some arguments now, and we’ve worked them out. I think we’ll be able to get through difficulties in the future,” he said decisively. “Our connection is strong enough to weather the ups and downs.”

***

Memories can guard against future challenges and pain we may encounter. But leaning too heavily on them to try to make sense of current experiences can make keep us trapped in the past, shut off from fully engaging in life in the here and now. As John discovered, when we’re able to catch our automatic, self-protective tendencies to use past experiences to inform present ones, we open ourselves up to possibility, and to some of the most wonderful pathways in our most important relationships.