You know it is coming. As you are driving to your family’s house for the Holiday’s you imagine how the conversations are going to go. You imagine who is going to say what and how to respond. Maybe you feel good because you’ve done your homework and feel like you have responses primed and practiced for difficult conversations. Or maybe you are resolute to not take the bait and just watch the football game instead. Family gatherings can both be a wonderful time as well as a stressful and difficult time for many. Family conflict around the dinner table is nothing new, and old family patterns seem to spring up around the Thanksgiving table. I always find it interesting how many of us, fall back into old, well-worn patterns when we reconnect with people, doing and feeling things that we haven’t done or felt in months or years. For many of us, getting together with family is like a little time machine, where we go back emotionally and functionally to a place where your mom is still treating you the way she did years ago, or sibling rivalries and arguments that have felt long dead and buried seem to pop up out of their graves to live on again.
Author William Faulkner once stated, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
While we’d like to imagine that progress can be linear, and our growth as individuals means we are not the person we were 5, 10, or 20 years ago and that we can continue to move and improve towards a better or ideal self. The reality is that we are constantly developing individuals, but we are inherently connected with others and our histories in relationships are part of who we are, even currently. Now for many of us if we’ve experienced pain or past traumas this can feel like a challenge, or anchor to our ability to grow and flourish. We may get frustrated that we can have successful healthy relationships with some, but continue to fall into unhelpful and painful habits with others. But the reality we experience, that our past is still in some ways our present, is not curse but an opportunity. While we don’t have a physical time machine to go back and undo the past, our relationship to the past is a chance to not just move on, but to choose a path towards greater understanding and empathy for one another as well as a chance to live into a better story in the present. Our past may not be dead, but neither is it an all powerful controlling force over our current reality. Our past notion of ourselves is largely made up of different stories we tell ourselves, stories that influence deeply held beliefs about our world. When we connect with our past, and with the stories that have shaped us, we are able to choose a better story for the next chapter in life. Instead of holding onto and living out of a place of being wounded or resigned to a belief that things will never change, we have the chance to live out of a better worldview. One that is open to healing, one that is willing to embrace the truth and also do the hard work of self-reflection owning our own mistakes and patterns, choosing to control what we can as opposed to focusing on what is outside of our control.
In this season of Thanksgiving and gratitude may we choose to be grateful for our past and our personal stories: the good, the bad and the ugly, because there is hope that all of our story has the potential to be incorporated into our healing and the path towards wholeness.