How to change our past: Memories, Stories, Identity.

Psychotherapy is moving away from grand, unifying theories of human experience and wellbeing. Carl Roger’s potato and Freud’s unconscious are only partially helpful and certainly insufficient to help us understand what people are like and how they can be helped. 

Postmodern ideas has led to the “deconstruction of absolute truths” (Cooper, M. Rowan, J, 1999)

In other words, we don’t know. We don’t know how every person comes into being and we don’t know what can help them change and grow. There is no unifying theory for human beings.  

But as we come with suffering to the space of psychotherapy, as we seek for knowledge, as we hope to receive a contribution from this field – what can we expect in return? And what should psychotherapists try to offer the world?

The special gift of psychotherapy is knowing that the past can be changed. And knowing that changing our past improves our future. 

But rather than a grand theory, this allows us to propose a framework: the combination of a north star (changing our past) and a set of individual experiments. 

Why change our past? 

Our past holds the key to our future and our wellbeing. 

Zimbardo’s studies on time perspective found that people with a positive view of their past enjoy better mental health. He says “a sense of a positive past gives you roots. The centre for self-affirmation, the past connects you to yourself…provides a sense of continuity of life, and allows you to be connected with family, tradition and your cultural inheritance.”  (Zimbardo, P. 2008: 297). 

If our past grounds us, it follows that the past is the foundation to our future: our ability to make plans, to overcome obstacles and to enjoy our process of becoming: our lives. 

As Byung-Chul Han writes “happiness is not a momentary event. It has a long tail that reaches into the past…it feeds off of all that has been part of life…we owe to our happiness the salvation of our past”

On the other hand, Buddhism and the mindfulness movement urges us to focus on the present. The Buddha said “The past is already gone, the future is not yet here”. Neither of these two statements seem controversial. 

But to think of our past as “gone” implies in it a solid, unchangeable nature. It implies the events in the past are now facts and that there’s nothing we can do to change them. 

The well-intentioned invitation here to focus in the present remains valid. It’s about paying attention to life as it happens, to embody our experience. 

However, as Zimbardo and Han remind us, the past is. 

And the thing is, focusing on the present experience and focusing on building a great future are things that can become easier by also attempting to change our past. 

What’s even more, we can do this without endless revisiting of trauma, but rather through an empowering process that is essentially creative and healing.   

What is the past?

If the past is not the collection of unchangeable facts and events now behind us, what is it? 

• Memories, leading to 
• Stories, leading to 
• Identity. 

As we grow, it follows this direction. 

However over time, we have a complementary, perhaps more important opposing direction too. 

• Identity leads to 
• Stories, which leads to 
• Memories. 

How can we change our past?

So if we want to change our past, we can:

• Reframe our identity 
• Enhance our stories 
• Reconstruct our memories

The joint acts of reframing identity, enhancing stories and reconstructing memories can be understood as “selfing”: a process of meaning making and emergent becoming. 

How we do those things will be unique to ourselves – remember, no grand unifying theories. But using this framework we can find a few different ways to experiment with our selfing. 

One helpful perspective to embark on this work is William James’ theory of truth embedded in pragmatic philosophy. 

He said “ideas become true just insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience” (James, W. 1907) When you take this into its logical conclusion, truth is something that is helpful to lead a better life by making sense of our experience. 

We need to stretch our minds and be creative. The same memory can be framed in many different ways. The same story can be told in many different versions. The same person can frame many different identities for themselves. And along the way many stories and identities can be let go. 

Reframing our identity

To reframe our identity, we can

• Move from labels (passive, static and heavy) to contributions (active, fluid and light). 
• Move from injunctions (what others made us believe about ourselves) to permissions (what we allow ourselves to become)
• Move from given to intentional identity. 

From labels to contributions. 

When we introduce ourselves or when we try to use shortcuts to understand ourselves we may say things like “I am a doctor”, “I am a dad”, “I am 75 years old”, “I am autistic”. All those aspects of identity can enhance or hinder our self-understanding, depending on how we carry them. 

If we “are a doctor” because we are passionate about healing and committed to the role of medicine in our contribution to the world then it may be a helpful symbol of our identity. 

But the same symbol can hinder our self-knowledge. We might “be a doctor” because our family pushed us to be one and forget about drama school. Now, we like its status and it means we don’t need to dig deeper. 

If we say we are 75 years old or simply that “we are old” because we feel the weight of these years, this could be a limiting self-label. 

But if we talk about being 75 years old to convey the pride of having made it so far, hint to all the acquired wisdom and invite people to relation that makes use of it, then, this can be a contribution. 

In other words, thinking of our contributions, what we have to offer the world is empowering and growth-promoting. 

Question – what is your contribution? What is your gift? 

From injunctions to permissions. 

We may also say things like “I am not very creative” and when it’s just us, we may say “I am stupid” or “I am not good enough”. These are what Eric Berne would call injunctions – remnants of parental messages coming from the negative, controlling parent. 

He suggested we can change those into permissions. 

• “I am not very creative” becomes “It’s OK to play, it’s OK to try”
• “I am stupid” becomes “It’s OK to think for myself”  
• “I am not good enough” becomes “It’s OK to succeed, it’s OK to 

fail” 

Question – what new permission do you want to give yourself to try, do or be? 

From given to intentional identity. 

McAdams (2005) sums this up as “To a certain degree . . . identity is a product of choice”, “we choose events that we consider most important for defining who we are and providing our lives with some semblance of unity and purpose. And we endow them with symbolic messages, lessons learned, integrative themes, and other personal meanings that make sense to use in the present as we survey the past and anticipate the future.”

Therefore, bringing a degree of question and intentionality to how we define the elements of our identity is one of the ways in which we can start changing our past while offering a direct bridge into a new, redefined future. 

Sue Sully has a wonderful mantra to support this reframing identity as an intentional exercise: stay your ground, find your place, find your voice and be creative. 

Question – what is your place in the world? 

Enhancing our personal stories 

Narrative savages the past, give the world meaning and help us overcome the vertigo of an otherwise meaningless existence. 

A personal story is a life strategy. It may be built from what we know from the past, but it’s also the intent and the courage to imagine new futures, new beginnings. 

The story we tell is, therefore, the future we make. 

To enhance our life stories, we can try these experiments 

• Moving from selling yourself to selfing yourself 
• Moving from the individual journey to the collective 

From selling yourself to selfing yourself

Our capitalist values and the nature of the media we use for self-expression (content feeds that reward popularity with dopamine in the form of “likes”) have led to “story-selling”. This is an idea explored in the Crisis of Narration, a book by Byung-Chul Han.

The author argues for the power of narration to make sense of our lives and in parallel exposes that our current focus on always-on sharing of ephemeral and unreflected digital “stories” is leading to disconnection, isolation and an inability to use narration for meaning-making.

Good storytelling leaves gaps for tension, builds reflection and meaning to events, creates distance and looks for timeless and deep insight that invites new beginnings and change. It’s courageous, inclusive and creative. 

Instead, storyselling is the merchandising of our life, escaping boredom, discouraging nuance, seeking completion, flattening experience and ultimately commercialising ourselves as members of an utilitarian society. It’s selfies, cliches, platitudes and beautiful empty personae.  

We storysell because technology companies have productised us to do that. They have engineered tools that reward our posting, liking and sharing in exchange of a “personal brand”. And what happens after we travel this road for some time? 

In the heroine’s journey, the archetypal story of the feminine, we learn that the boon promised by society leads to an arid spirit and feelings of emptiness and disconnection from ourselves. Instead of selfing ourselves, we sell ourselves. We abuse our bodies and neglect our minds. 

But after the descent into the dark night of the soul, we can be nourished and come back with renewed energies, wisdom and self acceptance. 

• We don’t need the everlasting body we don’t have 
• We don’t need the impossible streak of success 
• We don’t need the growing numbers of fans 
• We don’t need everyone to approve of us 
• We don’t need our own personal admiration

What we need instead is a healthy body, a spacious mind and the acceptance when either of those things may leave us. 

And when we move away from being the merchants of our self we can become the nurturing selfers who reflect, learn and grow as a result.  

Moving from the individual journey to the collective 

Joseph Campbell said “the hero is the man or woman who has battled past his personal and local historical limitations into the generally valid, normally human”

We tend to see our journey as individuals. And this is right, for aloneness is a given of existence.  

But we need to hold the paradox that we are alone and together. 

We “are the only subject in a world of objects” (De Beauvoir) as is everyone else. Everyone is a subject even if we can’t see that, and this means that “I am because we are”. 

Our story becomes richer when we embrace the collective upon which we depend. Our family, our friends, the society makes our life possible and therefore part of our story.  

We aim to transcend our personal quirks and our rupture with the rest of the world: perfectionism, narcissism, competitiveness and all the obstacles that prevent our belonging. 

We can feel less isolated when we explore our common humanity, a key ingredient in self compassion. 

When we tell our stories, we can enhance them by seeing us part of the collective. By seeing the contributions we make to others, and the way others make us who we are becoming. 

Questions

 Who are our people? What is our story? 

What do we lose when we try to win at the expense of others, or when we try to stand out? 

Reconstructing our memories

Memory is a reconstructive system (Howe, 2011). Its purpose is not to simply store and retrieve facts, as it is often supposed. Rather, it’s an adaptive system that supports broader and more crucial functions such as trust, future planning and behaviour regulation.  

Our memories help us survive the future, and to do that it supports functions like remembering, but also selecting, forgetting and misattributing. 

To support a healthy ongoing reconstruction of memories, we can 

• Forget all, remember some
• Revisit old memories as new people

Forgetting all, remembering some. 

Our memories aren’t imperfect databases by their failure, but evolutionary equipment by their design. 

As Daniel Schachter argues, memory issues such as forgetfulness or misattribution are “not fatal flaws in the architecture of memory… (but) more usefully conceived as consequences of processes that contribute importantly to the adaptive functioning of memory”. 

Memory as it has evolved allows us to select memories into a cohesive story and a supporting identity that facilitates the selfing process and the meaning making that allows us to build a future. 

To facilitate this, we can welcome forgetting, trusting that future versions of ourselves will be able to access a different version of the same memory to suit our current situation.

In other words, we need to let go as a life strategy. 

Forgetting and then selecting memories can be a healing process to support newer life goals and ambitions. 

Revisiting old memories as new people. 

When we access past happenings from memory, they may remain fairly unchanged. However, we are a different person each time we visit them, and recognising this is a key to evolving the meaning of our memories for more empowering stories and identity. 

When Heraclitus said “you never step in the same river twice” he may have realised that just as the river never stops flowing and changing, so do we.

Hence, we also don’t see the same painting twice (Spinelli), for as even if the painting remains objectively unchanged, the meaning-making systems that form part of our perception are also constantly flowing. We may be more interested in the painter, we may be more sensitive, or we may be in a better mood. And this will affect our perception of the same painting. 

So it is with memories. 

As we gain strength through our enhanced stories and strengthened identities, as we grow as people, we need to be open to revisit old, painful memories and bring new meaning to them. 

Stories of abuse can become stories of survival against odds. Perhaps in the past we used to focus on the perpetrator of the abuse or the betrayal, and now we focus on our capacity to withstand it or the skills we developed from it. 

This process of reconstructing memories is key to psychotherapy. For example in Internal Family Systems, we revisit old memories with the guidance of resilient internal self to appreciate how things have changed since those times. 

Making use of narrative forms to process painful memories

Trauma can distort our memories by disabling conscious processing at the time of the event. As a result, we may develop coping mechanisms that limit our actions and bring suffering to our experience. To get closure in this unfinished business, we need to revisit and re-interpret those memories, but this may feel dangerous and threatening as the emotional load of the events are overwhelming.

Narrative forms such as poetry, fantasy or memoir gives us a range of tools to explore “facets of the self and our experience” (Bolton, G. 2010). They work because they give us the strength to confront painful memories from a multitude of perspectives. 

Gillie Bolton tells the story of Mark, who as an adult wrote a poem about the experience of losing his younger brother in a traffic accident. He had felt guilty ever since, because he had made the decision not to walk with him to school. As a result, he struggled to cope with childhood death, which disabled him in his work as a doctor. 

Poetic form is an enabling device, making use of literary forms such as metaphor, repetition and succinct expression to communicate deeply painful events. 

As Mark explains: “I have never before in detail talked about how I felt about (my brother’s) death. Now that I have written about it, I can and do talk about it…it has made me feel completely different”.

Conclusion 

Selfing is a process of meaning making across past, present and future that supports healing and growing as well adjusted individuals. 

Rather than thinking that our past is unchangeable, we can actively engage with it by reflecting and reframing our identity, enhancing our stories and allowing the reconstruction of memories to emerge. As we do that, we may experience a healthier present and a more hopeful future.  

We may start with our identity, bringing intentionality and self-given permission to make choices about how we want to see ourselves. 

We engage in the process of storytelling, moving beyond vain social media posts and into the cosmic order and collective meaning of our own journey. And we use the story as a strategy to bring an intention about the future we’re making. 

And finally, we gather our strengths to revisit old memories and find new angles and possibilities to connect them to the stories of who we are becoming. 

Bibliography

Thanks to Sue Sully from University of Brighton for bringing many of these ideas together.

Bolton, G. (2010. Reflective Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Cooper, M. & Rowan, J. (eds) (1998) The Plural Self: Multiplicity in Everyday Life. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

De Beauvoir, S. (1947) The Ethics of Ambiguity.

Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Han, B.-C. (2024) The Crisis of Narration. Translated by D. Steuer.

Schacter, D. L. The seven sins of memory (2023)

Spinelli, E. (2005) The Interpreted World: An Introduction to Phenomenological Psychology. 2nd edn. London: Sage.

Murdock, M. (1990) The Heroine’s Journey