It’s Time to Say How You Feel: How the Past Can Plague Your Present Relationships
As humans, we are all born with the potential to love everything and everyone equally and unconditionally. Ideally, we are also able to trust that everyone loves us in the same way. But, of course, life experience teaches us that this is not necessarily the case.
Based on the “good” and “bad” experiences from our childhood, our perspective of love and relationships is shaped into what we inevitably show up with in our adult relationships. But once we find ourselves out in the world as adults, seeking connection outside of our immediate family, we become uncertain and wary that others will be up to the task of loving and supporting us in the ways we need.
Faced with this uncertainty, as adults we tend to stifle our desire to connect by becoming hyper-independent, or else we burn through one relationship after another, as a quick fix for the ache of loneliness inside. But, this does not have to be the case.
With a little bit of awareness, we can begin to notice patterns that show up in our relationships and where they stem from. From a psychological perspective, our earliest experiences can create different sensations and feelings in our bodies which send messages to our brains. From these sensations, we form narratives about the safety of the world around us and how people will relate with us. These nervous system patterns also guide our responses to certain current day experiences.
This brings me to the crux of my message today: How we store memories implicitly as children and how those unconscious memories pop up in our adult relationships. The implicit memories we feel as adults are actually stored as sensations in our body. Which is why it can be confusing in the present moment to think of them as memories. They can plague our adult relationships by constantly dragging the past into the present, and even worse we blame our partner for them because the sensations are strong and we don’t connect them to being part of our memory system.
The Power of Memory: Implicit vs. Explicit
Isn’t it incredible when a song we haven’t heard in years comes on the radio and we sing every word as if no time had passed? And yet, we can study for weeks leading up to a big exam and forget most of what we learned within the few weeks following the test? That’s because there are two distinct types of long-term human memory: Implicit and explicit.
Explicit memories are things you can consciously and intentionally recall. They are likely things you made an effort to remember, like the formula you memorized for that big exam or the time of your dentist appointment next week.
On the other hand, implicit memories are more like stored sensations. This kind of memory is both unconscious and unintentional, like that song from years ago you can’t get out of your head. And for our purposes, we will be focusing on those stored sensations and feelings from our more formative years and how they still show up today.
Implicit Memories: A Felt Sense
As we are developing as children, any time our body feels something, these feelings get sent to our brain where we turn them into “stories” to help us make sense of what we’re experiencing. But we are also storing the sensations that we felt when we were small as a memory and those sensations come up in our relationship. We often don’t think of these strong sensations as a form of memory. The memory is then stored implicitly as a sensation versus a recallable image.
For example: Imagine a child lying in a crib listening to a children’s album their mother left on to soothe them along with an essential oil diffuser. Meanwhile, the child’s parents are fighting and screaming at one another in the adjoining room. This fighting incites fear and anxiety within the child. While their parents are right there in the next room, the child is left to feel and process these uncomfortable sensations alone. These moments are where a child learns to adjust and adapt in order to “survive” any uncomfortable sensations.
This adapting and adjusting for survival, while an incredible human quality, can leave the child with the felt sense that something is wrong with them. For the child, this felt sense can be summed up as feelings, sensations, and a bodily “knowing” within that moment. This “knowing” becomes a core wound and is stored implicitly within the brain and body, along with all of the other things tied to that experience, like the children’s album playing or the smell of essential oils.
As a result, many of us, myself included, enter our adult relationships with this sensation of “wrongness” tucked deep inside and out of sight. But, once we find ourselves moving toward intimacy… There is no more hiding it. The sensations we stored when we were younger show up in our current world.
This is a powerful place to heal, however, more often than not, without awareness we end up pointing the finger at our partner and blaming them for all these big and scary sensations.
Tip: the bigger the sensation the older the wound. This is how babies store memories before they develop their hippocampus. So many people don’t truly understand this and blame their partner or avoid their partner because they want to protect themselves from the deep, embedded pain.
How Implicit Memories Show Up in Our Adult Relationships
When something happens that reminds our brains of an earlier experience, though we aren’t aware of it consciously, our brain remembers all of the emotions and sensations associated with that experience.
Let’s revisit that child in its crib, but now they’re a full-grown adult. They might hear a song that was playing or smell an essential oil that was floating through the air during that fight, which may trigger a similar fearful response today. They likely won’t know why they’re feeling scared or unloved and often can’t make any sense of the physical sensations that come along with it. Nonetheless, that implicit memory that was created in their crib many years back is now rearing its ugly head in their adult life.
These are deep-seeded, unconscious sensations tied to memories. That’s why if it was safer to not be in our bodies as children, our response now may be to become disconnected from our body. If we can sense stress, pain, or fear, we’ll feel safer detaching from our feelings. Or to be hyper aware and connected to what’s going on in someone else’s body. In short, we become insecure when someone we love begins to approach this core wound and likely either pull our energy away (avoidant attachment) or we explode our energy outward (anxious attachment). (What is your attachment style?) Viewed from this perspective, it’s only a matter of time before our partner triggers an implicit memory within us and vice versa.
Perhaps your partner is being a bit avoidant. They aren’t responding to your texts as much as you’d like, or maybe they aren’t spending as much time with you as you feel you need. If you have an implicit memory or wound from childhood around abandonment, like the child in the crib, even their minor avoidant behaviors could wake up all of that loneliness you ever felt as a child… in a split second. Of course, you may not recall the moments vividly as images. But you could feel things like pressure in your chest, a numbness in your body, or gut feelings of uneasiness.
In this case, your first instinct will likely be to blame your partner. It was something they said or did that brought this out of you, after all. And while this is somewhat true, this is where it is important to pause and pull your focus inward before blaming your partner. By choosing to bring our focus inward, we have a chance to ask ourselves… “Is this sensation really happening now, in the present moment? Or is this coming from somewhere else?”
Sure, your partner could just be the wrong person for you. They may just be too distant and avoidant. But the key is having more self-awareness around our own triggers and finding a partner who we feel safe enough to communicate these vulnerabilities with. Because no matter how perfect our partner may be for us, there will be issues, bumps, and rough patches in every relationship we enter.
While it seems frustrating, these triggered moments are a great opportunity to rewire our reactions and have a moment of honest communication with our partner. While we cannot control when implicit memories of trauma are triggered, we can allow ourselves the compassion and safe space to feel what we feel when it happens, reflect, and choose how we react. To do this, it’s imperative that we allow the body and the mind to work in unison once more.
Say How You Feel!
While we may easily view the body as a temple or a home, those who have experienced trauma or emotional neglect may not feel all that safe in their bodies. Like I said earlier, it’s totally normal to disconnect from the body as children as a way of survival. And as adults, we may need to do a little work to come back home to our bodies.
And to really feel at home within ourselves, it’s imperative that we allow ourselves to feel it all. Along with forming a cognitive and emotional awareness of our core wounds and how they get activated, an embodied awareness is a vital part of changing the deeply held responses that get us trapped in unhealthy relationship patterns.
A good jumping off point is to label feelings as they come up. Hey, say them out loud if it helps! “I feel angry,” or, “I feel furious,” or, “I feel let down.” The feeling can be seen for what it is and from this zoomed-out perspective, it also becomes easier to see what needs to be tended to. We can then choose to communicate how we feel with our partner from a place of both logic and emotion.
As a practicing couples counselor for over ten years, and through my own healing journey, I’ve seen and experienced a lot. And what I’ve learned is that it's essential to try and understand our anxious tendencies as deeply as we can in order to cultivate healthy relationships. We can then communicate our feelings more easily and enter our next partnership (or current one) feeling stronger and more secure within ourselves. I refer to this transformational process as becoming Self-full®.
Do you want to start understanding your core wounds and begin your healing journey?
My online course, Understanding Your Core Wounds, will help you become conscious of your patterns, unlock stored memories, and help you uncover what’s holding you back from building the relationships you’ve been wanting. Click here to get access to it now!