Don't Be a Victim of Your Past

As the existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom put it, sooner or later, you’ll have to "give up hope for a better past." Here’s how to move forward with your life with meaning and hope.

An excerpt of the chapter "Don't Be a Victim of Your Past" from my upcoming book Rise Above: Overcome a Victim Mindset, Empower Yourself, and Realize Your Full Potential (April 22) is featured in the latest issue of Psychology Today! Here is the excerpt.

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“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” It’s the tormented refrain uttered by Aunt Ada Doom in Stella Gibbons’s comedic novel-turned-movie Cold Comfort Farm. When she was a young girl, Ada encountered a deeply unsettling sight. Sixty-nine years later, she still has not recovered. She lives as a recluse on the second floor of the family home; her meals are brought on a tray left outside her door. Whenever someone implores her to leave the room, she moans, “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” And it’s not only Ada who suffers. When her determined young niece Flora arrives at the farm, she asks what Cold Comfort Farm is like. “There’s a curse on the place,” she’s told. The seeds won’t grow, the soil is eroded, and the animals are barren. “All is turned to sourness and ruin.” When Flora asks why they don’t sell the farm and move on, she’s told the family can’t leave because the farm is their cross to bear, all because of what Ada saw.

All too often, I see some version of this plot play out in real life. People have an experience—they suffer adversity, have a difficult start in life, or are confronted with challenges to their physical or mental health or performance—and that’s where they stop. They fixate on what happened or the obstacles in their path, and everything turns sour and ruined. They become attached to a belief that life is over, or at least severely limited. They become stuck.

Several decades ago, psychologist Martin Seligman conducted seminal research on what he called “learned helplessness.” Starting with a series of studies on dogs who learned to stay imprisoned even when they were free to escape, he showed that adversity can cause us to give up hope that life can be different. If opportunity does arise, when in this state, we fail to capitalize on it or even recognize that it’s there.

Humanistic psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, describes when Allied forces arrived to liberate prisoners from concentration camps: Some rejoiced. Others, however, stumbled numbly through the gates only to pause, then turn around and wander back into the camp. It had become impossible for them to contemplate another reality. While some of us may gravitate toward learned helplessness more easily than others, research over many years suggests that it is our default response. But we can learn how to be hopeful.

Bryan Derballa / Used with permission.

Stephanie Foo remembers her mother crying and wishing that she had never been born. Her parents abused her both emotionally and physically—her mother hurled her down the stairs, and her father whacked her with a golf club. Her experiences could have crushed her; instead, she became a journalist and producer on public radio and also wrote a book about complex PTSD to help others.

Learning Hopefulness
Our future expectations of life are based mostly on our prior experiences. When we cultivate experiences that provide us with more empowered messages about life and our abilities, that becomes what we expect out of life. Much like a weather forecast, we can reprogram our expectations about what weather to expect from the world.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, the author of 7½ Lessons About the Brain, describes how our brains function to create our experience of life. Most of us believe that the brain is like a reporter. It takes in the information from our senses and uses that input to tell us what’s going on in the world around us.

If the brain is a reporter, it’s not a particularly good one; it likes to turn in its stories before they’re fact-checked. It’s also not great about attribution. For instance, it can misinterpret body signals. If your body lacks energy, the brain might hastily announce: “We’re hungry! Give us food!” That lack of energy is due to dehydration, and you need water. Or you might experience a rapid heart rate and sweaty palms. Your thoughts declare, “We’re afraid!” In reality, you’re about to step onstage to deliver a presentation for which you’re well prepared. The truth is that you’re more excited than anxious.

What does this have to do with overcoming adversity and learning hopefulness? When our brain tells us that life will always be like this, it’s not stating a fact, it’s making a prediction. Instead of being a reporter, your brain is a prediction machine.

Let’s say you grew up in an unstable and unpredictable environment, in which case your brain may be sculpted to forecast a life of instability. You may overgeneralize and be acutely attuned to cues of instability: “The world is unsafe!” Coupled with this, your brain might ignore all the good things happening around you, including important contextual information to tell you what’s going on.

Fear learning and fear unlearning happen in separate parts of the brain. Fear is automatically learned, but fear must be actively unlearned. We have to choose a different way of living, and we can start by taking responsibility for unlearning fear—or past patterns—which can take a lot of inner work. Many of us equate responsibility with saying it’s our fault, but that’s not what I mean. As Barrett notes, “Sometimes we’re responsible for things not because they’re our fault, but because we’re the only ones who can change them.”

When you take responsibility, it’s not about saying that you’re to blame—that your mother wasn’t a present parent, that you’re neurodivergent, that you were assaulted, or that you have a predisposed temperament to experience stressmore intensely. It’s about saying, “This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and I will play it out. I will make active, intentional choices about how I engage with life.”

The only person who can determine what you do is you. Aunt Ada chose the passive route, demanding that her family dote on her and bend to her every whim. This protected her status as one who was wronged; however, it also kept her from living a rich and full life. Then, she made a different choice.

One day, young Flora knocks on the door, and Ada finally bends to Flora’s repeated pleas to engage with her.

“I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” she says. “What was it?” Flora asks. “I don’t know. I was little,” Ada replies. “Something terrible!”
“Are you sure?” Flora asks, prompting Ada to revisit her potentially faulty memory.
“I’m sure!” Ada declares. “Or maybe the potting shed. Or the bicycle shed.”

Maybe the story isn’t the story after all. Maybe what she saw wasn’t so horrible. Maybe it was. This brief moment of questioning raises the possibility that this memory—whether faulty or not—doesn’t have to hold Ada. A belief that’s been reinforced for 69 years suddenly seems less certain. The question becomes: Have I made other assumptions that may not be true?

Taking responsibility involves recognizing that our brains are just doing the best they can with the information they have. We can make a concerted effort to feed them different information by having more varied experiences. And we can become more critical of the negative things our brains tell us. We can second-guess the messages we get, not only about what’s possible in life but also about what we think and feel in any moment. You can be a more informed user of your brain and not simply accept everything it hands you, because a rather surprising amount of the time, it’s wrong.

Our level of happiness in life correlates strongly to our sense of responsibility and agency—specifically, to something called our locus of control. When we have an internal locus of control, we believe that even when life hands us a boatload of lemons, we still can make sweet lemonade. When we have an external locus of control, we believe that factors beyond our grasp dictate our destiny. When we’re in this headspace, we see the world in more negative terms, making it easier for our darker emotions to get the best of us. Not surprisingly, people with an internal locus of control are likely much happier.

How can we make this switch? One actionable step in turning down the volume of our emotions and seeing things more clearly is to ask ourselves what, not why.

Tim Goodman / Used with permission.

Artist and author Timothy Goodman used to curse at himself and anyone who hurt him. While he had early wounds and an absent father, he learned that the power of his emotions signals his passion for life. He now channels his intense feelings into his art through graphic novels.

What, Not Why
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich studies the insights we have about ourselves, including why some of us possess high self-awareness while others struggle. She and her team studied “self-awareness unicorns,” people with low to moderate self-awareness who learned to become more self-aware. In analyzing transcripts of their conversations, the team discovered an interesting speech pattern: The participants often asked themselves what questions, but rarely described engaging with why questions.

One participant, a 42-year-old mother, explained. “If you ask why, [I think] you’re putting yourself into a victim mentality. When I feel anything other than peace, I ask myself: What’s going on? What am I feeling? What is the dialogue inside my head? What’s another way to see this situation? What can I do to respond better?”

As Eurich observes, “Why questions can draw us to our limitations. What questions help us see our potential. Why questions stir up negative emotions. What questions keep us curious. Why questions trap us in our past. What questions help us create a better future.”

Consider that you don’t sleep well because you’re tending to a sick pet. If you feel sad and ask yourself why, your brain will be more than happy to offer all kinds of answers. “Why am I sad? What kind of question is that? The world is in ruins, that’s why!” Instead, asking yourself what you’re feeling drills down to a more precise answer: “I feel tired and worried about Mr. Fluffy.” We can name what we’re feeling and not over-identify with our emotions. This distancing trick helps to keep us from getting overwhelmed by what we’re experiencing.

From these observations, we can construct a useful response. First, you can have some compassion for yourself—it’s hard to have a sick pet, and it’s hard when you lose sleep. Then you can take steps—call the vet and take a nap. The world isn’t coming to an end.

Psychologist and Holocaust survivor Edith Eger observed that victimization comes from the outside world, but victimhood comes from the inside. According to Eger, at some point, we will suffer some kind of affliction or abuse caused by circumstances over which we have little or no control. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but because we choose to hold onto our victimhood. Keeping ourselves locked up is an inside job.

Obsessed With Trauma
Trauma is real, but we can heal from it. To many, that’s an unwelcome truth. Some will fight tooth and nail to defend the idea that trauma is permanent. But why?

Trauma can leave indelible marks on us, but as research has consistently shown, adversity can also be a powerful lever for learning and development. Both of these can be true at the same time. Our experiences can permanently affect us, but we can use our challenges to become stronger.

Edith Shiro, a clinical psychologist who has spent decades helping people not only survive severe trauma but grow as a result, makes a distinction between recovering from trauma (returning to the state you were in before you experienced trauma) and experiencing post-traumatic growth (having a life that’s better than before). She notes that trauma is complicated. The road to post-traumatic growth requires conscious awareness of our intention to move beyond the trauma without dismissing or downplaying the difficulties. Transformation is possible but can’t be rushed.

Suffering is real; people deserve to have it acknowledged, and they deserve to be supported in their healing. But if we get stuck in our suffering, then we’re no longer the narrator in our story or the hero—we’re simply a victim.

Sadly, much of our current culture supports and even encourages this. Certainly, some of this is well-intentioned, and we must recognize and validate people’s experiences. But somewhere in this, we’ve crossed a line, assigning a special social status to those who’ve suffered, and this has started to backfire. We’ve begun to disempower the people we’re praising because to keep that status, they must remain victims, even adopting that label as part of their identity. To move on would mean moving out of this protected or celebrated class, thus losing valuable social capital. As podcaster and author Tim Ferriss—who recently opened up about his history of sexual abuse—says, it has become disturbingly common to “trauma vomit” on someone within 10 minutes of meeting them, sharing all the ways the world has wronged you.

We’re selling ourselves short. As George Bonanno has reported, we’re pretty damn resilient. That doesn’t mean that everything bounces off us, but overall, we can recover from even the most difficult experiences. Yes, some people do suffer a full derailment after a spouse dies, for instance, but most can get back on track after such a tragedy.

In our mostly well-intentioned efforts to name real challenges and help people get real support, we’re inadvertently catching people in a trap that can be very hard to get out of. By overemphasizing trauma and attributing every normal challenge we might experience in life to it, we’ve gone down an adversity rabbit hole.

For “trauma response” to mean anything, it can’t mean everything. Unfortunately, we’ve oversimplified things in our quest to compress a potentially complex set of physiological and emotional responses into material short and snappy enough to share via a tweet or a 20-second video. And there’s big money in trauma right now. Loads of folks who aren’t nearly qualified to be speaking on such complex topics are raking in followers by convincing people that absolutely everything wrong in their lives is due to trauma. More often than not, they also offer a—usually expensive—solution. Sometimes, though, the solution is simply coddling the victim.

The following might sound like an overboard caricature, but it’s not. Here is a paraphrase of a post from a therapist: “Man, what happened to you was wrong, and you would be justified to do nothing but sit on your bed and cry for the rest of your entire life.” If this guy didn’t feel terrible about himself before, he sure does now. He also probably believes there’s no chance for him to ever get past it. But we want better for him. If you’ve experienced trauma, this is not what you need to hear.

You can sit in your room for the rest of your life like Aunt Ada Doom, but that’s a choice. And I question the motivation of anyone who encourages you to make that choice in the name of “compassion.”

We’ve tasked one word with far too much work. We’re making trauma do the heavy lifting of describing every adverse event a human might experience. And that’s extremely disempowering. Our propensity to see trauma lurking around every corner and to self-diagnose with mental health problems has the effect of pathologizing everyday life. Many of us now view ourselves as hopelessly traumatized, which we interpret as damaged beyond all repair. Thank goodness that’s not the case.

AP Photo / Ivan Sekretarev

At the 2016 Olympic trials, runner Brenda Martinez was close to winning the 800-meter when she was clipped by a competitor from behind. She could have been filled with blame and bitterness, but she did not feel sorry for herself. She let go of the misfortune and later qualified for Team USA in the 1,500-meter race.

Your Past Will Never Change, But You Can
In many ways, how we interpret circumstances relies at least in part on the language we have—or don’t have—to characterize them. If the only term we have to describe the challenges we’re facing is trauma, then every adverse event becomes traumatic.

Words matter because they bring with them an entire array of beliefs. If you’re a college student struggling with a certain topic, that can be an isolated experience. But if you were “traumatized” by how hard the class was for you, that indicates a deep and lasting effect that may have rewired your brain and shifted your entire perception of life. And by employing that language, you may shift your perceptions to believe it. See the problem here?

Of course, trauma is real, but it would benefit us to have a broader language we can invoke when describing challenging experiences. This is linked to emotional granularity, where we describe our feeling states with nuanced terms that more accurately characterize what we’re experiencing.

We’re not just sad; we’re disengaged, disenchanted, worn out, and so on. Interestingly, research shows that people with more emotional granularity—who can differentiate more specifically what they’re feeling and label their experiences with more precise language—tend to be less reactive to negative circumstances and have greater psychological resilience. If we can connect with and describe our experiences beyond this one big word, it can help us relate to what’s happening in subtle and meaningful ways.

Our mindset and capacity to deal with challenges are not predetermined—they can be learned. Take a good, honest look at what you’re working with and start making some choices and real changes; write a new story.

The existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom describes one of his patients as a strong and resourceful woman who was the head of a major industrial company. As a child, she suffered vicious and continual verbal abuse from her father. In one session, she described a daydream she had where she was seeing a therapist who had the technology to cause total memory erasure in a patient. In her daydream, she was asked by the therapist if she would like to do a total erasure of all memory of her father’s existence. While this sounded great, she told Yalom it was a tough call. Her response: At first, it seemed like a no-brainer: My father was a monster who terrified me and my siblings throughout our childhood. But, in the end, I decided to leave my memory alone and have none of it erased. Despite the wretched abuse I suffered, I have succeeded in life beyond my furthest dreams. Somewhere, somehow, I have developed a lot of resilience and resourcefulness. Was it despite my father? Or because of him?

Yalom notes that this fantasy was the first step in a major shift toward forgivingher father and coming to terms with the inalterability of her experience; he added, “Sooner or later, she had to give up hope for a better past.”

To orient ourselves toward growth, just like this patient, we must accept what has been and turn toward the future— not by ignoring our past but by processing it meaningfully and using it as the seeds to become the person we wish to become, sometimes even changing our narrative about trauma.

That’s exactly what Aunt Ada Doom did. With some help from young Flora, she realized that there was a whole world out there she was missing. She accepted that she couldn’t unsee whatever she saw in the woodshed—or the potting shed, or wherever it was—and realized that while she sat confined to her upstairs room dwelling on it, life was passing her by. She got up, combed her hair, put on her fancy clothes, and flew to Paris.

Moving on doesn’t mean that whatever happened and what you experienced doesn’t matter. Of course, it does. And it always will.

It means that you no longer allow past experiences to control how you experience your life right here, right now.

Moving on also doesn’t mean that you’re accepting blame. It means that you’re accepting responsibility.

It means you’re deciding that you’re going to slide on over into the driver’s seat and take it from there. Yes, crappy experiences can change your brain. But you know what else can change your brain in the way you want it to be changed?

You.