Exorcise the Ghosts of the Past That Bind You
We all live in haunted houses and sleep in memory’s unmade bed. What do those metaphors mean? Do you not wonder from time to time how your life is turning out, why the repetitions, why the patterns emerge — especially those that prove harmful to yourself or others? Just how free are we when we make critical decisions? No one rises in the morning and thinks, Today I will do the same stupid things I have done for decades. But chances are we will. And why?
Our ancestors believed in ghosts, the spirits of the dead, the existence of malevolent powers in the universe, and the possibility of captivation by those powers. Their beliefs arose from the fact that our psychological energies are reflexive in character, invisible to the mind’s eye, even as their consequences in the world are visible. One of the ways to begin to reflect on these matters is to consider that we don’t do stupid or counterproductive things intentionally, or rarely so; we do things that make sense to our emotional state at the time. We do what is logical given the emotional premises under which we operate in any given moment.
As we have seen, we all begin reading our environment — family of origin, popular culture, the zeitgeist — for clues as to what the world is about and how we are to comport ourselves to ensure safety and a modicum of satisfaction of our needs. Because acquired early, before rationality, before comparative experience, before our capacity to fend for ourselves, those premises lead us to evasive, controlling, or compliant behaviors. Those behaviors evolved early on in our formation and become an operational sense of self. Years later, these conditioned reflexes, these protective programs, are hardwired, constitute a shadow government of unchallengeable authority within. Why would we abandon them, drop our defenses, and render ourselves vulnerable when these protective mechanisms have brought us this far?
In addition, traditional cultures have all recognized the power of invisible energies, sometimes calling them spells, states of possession, or malevolent forces that must be propitiated, fled, or suffered irredeemably by a captive soul. Indeed, when Jung talked about how a complex can usurp control of the ego he used the German word Ergriffenheit, “the state of being possessed.” When we are in the grip of a powerful complex, we are a possessed city-state, experience its occupation through our bodies, and serve its program by repetitive enactment of its instructions. Given that the complex is also a splinter script, no wonder the pattern is reinforced since that historically generated program is unchallenged in its power. Each time we serve the complex, its power is ratified and reinforced.
One of the ways in which this haunting occurs in each of us is the reactive patterns from mother and father. After all, are they not our primal models, our role enactors? And not just in imitative ways. We are just as much at the mercy of what they do not do, what is forbidden, or what is frightening to them. In the face of the unlived life of any parent or role model, we too are driven to repetition, are governed by a drive to escape that limitation in overcompensation, or fall victim to our unconscious treatment plans that generate a life of addictions, distractions, or compulsive agendas to breathe free.
Similarly, many suffer the lingering effects of deprivation, which diminish one’s sense of legitimacy and permission to stretch into one’s own possibilities. Others feel contaminated by guilt for things done or things undone, and this noxious emotion shuts them down or forces them to overcompensation. Still others feel driven by shame to repeat its toxic corrosion or to treat this devouring affect in patterns of overcompensation. And others feel marked by betrayals, disappointments, or disillusionments past and fritter away today’s possibilities in regret, paralysis, and recrimination. It is as if one is defined by a past sense of oneself rather than as a person who can learn from the past, learn what works and what doesn’t work. It is an abrogation of our essential freedom to begin each day with new possibility, new choices, new outcomes. No one would dream of walking backward down the street, but many times we do, haunted by, defined by a dismal past, rather than the lambent possibilities of a new day.
We are as a culture also haunted by the ghosts of constructs past. For my parents and my parents’ parents, such constructs as gender, economic class, racial, religious, ethnic, and economic categories were thought ontological in character — that is to say, given either by nature or by divinity. Given the normative powers of culture, children are labeled, categorized, and treated according to those localized constructs, until they become exempla of those formative forces. The deconstruction of those received categories has steadily progressed through the last century into our own, yet they retain staying power in many minds. Slowly, these stereotypes are challenged by gifted individuals, appellate judicial review of prejudices ensconced in local law, and our own insurgent imaginations. Slowly, the right of the individual to self-determination is increasingly possible, yet still these lingering categorical chains haunt all of us. While time is on the side of increasing liberation of the human spirit, none walking the planet this day will fully feel the freedom to be oneself, so subtle are these invisible threads that bind the spirit to its fearful past.
Perhaps the greatest haunting of all is found in our collusion with the vagaries, velleities, and vacillations of our past. We all learned, as we know, that we were relatively powerless in a world beyond our capacity. We all learned that our survival at worst and our acceptance at best depended on acclimation to whatever the environment dictates. In the news of the hour in which I write this sentence, members of a fundamentalist church, including the parents, have been arrested for beating one of their children to death and gravely injuring a second. What was their children’s outrageous crime? As now young men, they were seeking to leave the reservation, step out into the world as free. How terrifying to the terrified such a choice becomes. If our children depart our ranks, how solid can our own footing be? But such a formulation, obvious as it is, is a step too far for those living in fearful embrace of simplistic categories, and they seek to destroy their own fears by destroying their own children. How great that fear must be, how shallow their grip on their own souls, that they should thus violate the central task of every parent to protect their young.
In every culture, there are stories, laws, customs, and sanctions that seem venerated by time and common practice which a later age will find arbitrary, ideocentric, and sometimes grotesquely violating of the human spirit. Pious souls have and continue to condone slavery, human trafficking, and discriminations of all sorts, yet we claim we are an enlightened society? Such are the hauntings that infiltrate our world and decay our souls.
We only begin to confront these hauntings when someone gets in our face and confronts us with the evidence of our behaviors, attitudes, and consequences; or when we have haunting dreams, dreams that speak to us of our unlived lives or confront us with our constricted range of choices; or when we find ourselves gripped by strange moods, seemingly not triggered by external events. Sometimes we find that all that we do and have done still produces ennui, a lack of satisfaction, a dysthymia. In such moments, our tendency is to redouble our efforts, and the disaffection multiplies. Or we anesthetize our internal discord with drugs or distraction, or we look for tangible people to blame out there somewhere. Only when the distress reaches a certain proportion are we likely to look within, to reexamine the principles and perceptions that govern our lives, or to enter a serious self-examination. Yet it is in those moments that the opening to a larger life begins.
Perhaps the biggest haunting of our lives is the overlearned fact of relative powerlessness in a world of giants and mysterious, inexplicable, and inexorable powers. What is lost in this appraisal is, of course, the contrary fact that there is a magnitude of possibility in each of us, a core strength, an abiding resilience that brings us to the summons of life with an ever-increasing capacity to take it on. Earlier this day, in doing supervision with a therapist considering her cases, we observed how some people find the resilient capacity to survive abuse, the loss of cherished others, and wounds to their self-worth, while others are blown away by the same events. It appears that it is not what happens to us, but how we internalize what happens to us, how we message it. What breaks some souls seems to energize others with resolve and determination.
While learned helplessness is one of the functional definitions of depression, we all learned helplessness in our childhood experience. For some, this learning was truly traumatic and invasive, but even those most injured by life often demonstrate a renewed capacity for growth and development, an overwhelming resilience. Rather, these childhood experiences, containing considerable energy as they do, may fuel resolve to confront, push through, persist in the face of the obstacles life presents. Few things will outlast the truly resolved, persistent person. I know this for a fact, not only personally but also in the lives of decades of clients. We cannot give this strength to another, but we can mirror it in ourselves and remind others, stimulate and reinforce the inherent powers granted us by the life force. We learn by going though these fears, not by running from them and thereby ratifying their preemptive powers.
In the end, we are haunted by the examples of the past, the denied permission to live a free journey. We are haunted by the partial examples of those in our purview, taking their pusillanimity or oppression as predictive of our own. We are haunted by the social constructs that tell us what a woman is and what she can or cannot do, and what a man is and how he will be shamed by living beyond these calculated constrictions. We are haunted by bad theology, bad psychology, and bad social models into thinking we are defined by our history, by our race, or by cultural heritage. We are haunted by the unexamined lives of our ancestors and caregivers. We are haunted by the widespread impression that history is the future. We are haunted by the limited imagination of our complexes. And even more, we are haunted by the small lives we live in the face of our immense possibilities. Haunting is individual, generic, cultural, and extremely hard to challenge because it so often seems bound by generations of practice, ancestral fears, and archaic defenses of privilege.
The biggest haunting of all, the biggest shadow that occludes our sense of sovereignty in the outer world, is the specter of our unlived life. Something within each of us suffers, longs, despairs, persists, and even goes underground to reemerge as fantasy, as projections onto surrogate objects of desire, or as anesthetizing self-soothing. When the soul is not honored, when our possibility is denied by an outer oppressor, a social proscription, or worse, our own pusillanimity, our pathology intensifies. We are bombarded with pharmaceutical anodynes, cultural distractions, and rationalizations and evasions that facilitate these deflections from the summons to personhood. In the context of such hauntings, the greatest ghost for us is the apparition of what was possible but that we shunned. Such moments are not very pretty and may have to haunt us even more to get our actionable accountability. If we live in haunted houses, we are called to turn the lights on and clean house.