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Making Peace With Your Past: The 6 Essential Steps to Enjoy a Great Future

By Harold Bloomfield WebMD Live Events Transcript

Event Date: 05/01/2000.

Moderator: Welcome to WebMD Live's Mind Matters Auditorium. Today we are discussing Peace With Your Past: The 6 Essential Steps to Enjoy a Great Future with Harold H. Bloomfield, M.D.

Over the past twenty-five years, Harold H. Bloomfield, M.D. has earned a reputation as "the psychiatrist America trusts." A leading psychotherapist and psychological educator, Doctor Bloomfield has been at the forefront of many important self-help movements worldwide. His books have sold more than seven million copies and have been translated into twenty-six languages.

The opinions given by Doctor Bloomfield are his and his alone. If you have specific questions or are concerned about your health, please consult your personal physician. This event is for information purposes only.

Doctor Bloomfield, welcome to WebMD Live. Why is it so important to make peace with the past?

Dr. Bloomfield: According to the latest medical research, it's not just your relationships, success in life, personal happiness, that's at stake. Our very lives may depend upon making peace with the past. It's as important to our physical health as stopping smoking. That is, having a painful, adverse past is as high a risk factor as smoking, in terms of our medical well being. We all carry a great deal of unfinished emotional business that we hope is neatly tucked away, but recent studies in major scientific journals such as the AMA, confirm what physicians have always known. The past can wreak havoc on every aspect of our quintessential self; our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual self. Unless these painful experiences are dealt with, the impact persists. This can lead to depression, which entails suppressed emotions like rage and sorrow, can result in habitual patterns of behavior that lead to the same mistakes over and over again.

Every day, marriages breakup because of unresolved pain from past relationships. That's where you wake up at three in the morning, look over at your spouse, and say, "oh my god," that you swore you'd never find someone like your father, and you've created your own nightmare. Research shows that a painful past can result in a serious illness. All the wisdom traditions, depth psychology and scientific research show the root cause of all human suffering is the accumulation of unprocessed experiences from the past. In my thirty years as a psychotherapist, I've learned that no one can experience true love or a joyful present or create an optimal future until they make peace with the past.

Moderator: In your book, Making Peace With Your Past: The 6 Essential Steps to Enjoy a Great Future, you talk about quintessential peace. What is that?

Dr. Bloomfield: Quintessential peace has two meanings. One, the word "quintessential" means the essence of the essence of peace. In the Bible, it's referred to "as the peace that transcends understanding." It also means five aspects; our spiritual peace, being able to feel connected to Source, and not feeling separate. Emotional peace, that is, we feel at ease with ourselves, to come to ourselves to make peace with ourselves. Mental, where there's not all kinds of conflict between our intellectual and emotional self. Quintessential peace also refers to our relationship self; our relationships have come to peace; we've made reconciliation and amends where appropriate, and we're not carrying around grudges or resentments with a parent or ex-spouse. And finally, it refers to the physical; our bodies are at ease, able to experience the blessings and bliss of life as opposed to having a disease process going on, that over a 20 year period, can lead to serious illness. If you can picture that peace, it looks like a 5-pointed star. You can think of the transcendent center of the peace being the place from which we transcend our ordinary daily roles, or "roll-bots", where we're just on automatic pilot. 

There's another aspect of self, where we can really experience the awe and wonder of what it is to be a spiritual being in human form. Having that stable interior of peace enables you to rectify old rifts between you and others with much greater skill, and because of that core of peace, you are able to feel more kind-hearted towards others and towards yourself.

Moderator: Your book cites scientific research showing that people with adverse childhood experiences are more prone to serious illness and early death. Can you explain how this is possible, and what the implications are?

Dr. Bloomfield: It's true for three reasons, and that's a great question to bring up with Mother's Day coming up, and Father's Day a month later. As those two holidays roll around, making peace with your past becomes such a huge issue. The reason is, as children and adolescents, we mostly identify with the parent of the same sex. That's a generalization, but it's true, even if it means that we see the parent of the same sex doing things that we swear we'll never do ourselves. Nevertheless, we internalize those traits because we've learned primarily through modeling. Those negative traits show up in our own lives. Secondly, in order to develop our own identity, we have to, as it were, push away from the parent of the same sex. The daughter has to push away from the mother, and find her own way. A son has to push away from the father, in order to really become his own person. And thirdly, the unfinished business of your parent is passed on to you, almost by osmosis. If you have a mother that is shame-based, she's carrying shame from her own life, that's very contagious. It can be easily passed onto the daughter with such teachings as "men are no good," "you can never trust them," and other misbeliefs that can cause struggles. Also, the way that a father treats his son can lead to all kinds of rage that gets suppressed. One of Freud's discoveries that will last the test of time, is that all intimate relationships are ambivalent. Where there's love, there's also the capacity for anger, and in the extreme, hatred. And yes, that becomes very unacceptable to some of us, so we push it into our shadow, where we put our disowned thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. So we feel uncomfortable, when we're with that parent of that same sex. Even if you don't have that reconciliation, you have to resolve those issues inside yourself, because all of us reach stages in life where we go "oh my god, she is in my cells and I can't extricate seemingly those negative love patterns." 

Keep in mind that we're the first generation to be more conscious of children and what they need. Up until this generation, most children were raised with shame, hostility, and fear as being the primary socializing agents. Most of us grew up feeling levels of anger with the parent of the same sex, and then with both parents, for not seeing us for who we really are, but rather projecting their own unfinished dreams, unfinished business, upon us. We certainly can go into more detail on how to make peace with mom and indeed yourself, for Mother's Day.

Moderator: You mentioned shame. What role does shame play in our emotional makeup?

Dr. Bloomfield: Shame is something we're so ashamed of, that we don't want to admit that we might have those feelings. Its very different from guilt. Guilt is where we've done something wrong, and shame rather is where we feel like we're wrong, like there's something wrong with us, that's why our parents treated us so poorly. I think of shame as the cancer of the spirit; for some, it's a raging malignancy. It can feel so bad that these people become convinced that they are truly bad people, broken beyond repair, whereas for others, shame is more like a localized tumor that causes deep-seated pain and discomfort. Shameful memories arise at certain times and stab you in the gut, but where it's localized to just certain events. Shame is very toxic, and it's very important to identify where in your childhood and adolescence you may have picked up waves of shame. Some good questions to ask yourself, looking for the subtleties of shame: Do you feel that things aren't going to work out, and that people will let you down, and you're bound to be disappointed? Do you feel unsatisfied with how you look? Do you fail to stand up for your own beliefs? Do you constantly doubt your abilities, skills, or competence? Do you have thoughts going through your mind, like who do you think you are, or you'll probably make a fool of yourself, or you're so stupid? Do you think of yourself as unlovable, or pitiful, insignificant, disgusting, defective? Those are all signs of shame, either having been imprinted as a child --  that is, your parents literally socialized you with shame, either with a look or with physical or sexual abuse -- or in adolescence. Peer groups can be very shameful in the way that we treat one another. You perhaps might have felt that you were never good enough to fit in with those kids whose approval you really wanted.

Another psychic promise pain that you may have, made on some level, is that you'll be the total opposite of your parent, and that'll teach them. If they were extremely moralistic and shame-based, then you become promiscuous, defiant to all your parent's teachings. Another psychic promise is doing anything to win their approval and acceptance, so they won't abuse or abandon you. In many situations like that, no matter what you try to do to please them, it just doesn't work out. Or you'll turn out just the way they're afraid you'll turn out -- they say you'll never be happy, so you become miserable. They say you'll become a big slob, then bring on the chips and fries. Fulfill all their unrealized dreams, if they were losers, then be a huge success. So there are all kinds of ways we internalize these psychic promises of pain, but inevitably, like a Chinese finger lock, you're still caught up in the shame. What you have to do to throw off the shame from whence it came, because the legacy of shame can cause a tremendous amount of illness. We now know that a wave of shame produces high amounts of cortisol and, over the long haul, chronic excessive cortisol secretion suppresses the immune system, elevates blood pressure, and produces chronic muscular tension with increased chances of headaches, backaches. Hyper cortisol secretion produces higher levels of cortisol, calcium depletion, decline in sex hormones, and even kills brain cells, thus damaging memory, concentration, and IQ. So shame is not just psychological. It affects all aspects of our quintessential self. In our relationships, if we have internalized shame, then we're likely to choose people to reinforce that shame. That's where we pick lovers or mates that wind up abusing us, or being condescending, or we become solicitous doormats.

Even spiritually, shame is a buzz saw that severs the connection between who you are and all that's sacred and pure, where you feel separate from a source, God, all that is, and it's a terrible loneliness. Knowing how to identify where you've been shamed, sharing that pain, writing about it, bashing out the shamers in your life, and finding ways to really exorcise the rage that's safe and constructive, but fighting for your life so you don't remain shackled by shame. The shame you internalize is a lie. The truth is, you're a child of God, a beautiful being just like everyone else. It's just that you internalize these lies of shame, and now you have to throw them out, and give them back from whence they came, and then you can throw off the lies and go from the falsehood of humiliation to true humility.

chartres_WebMD: It seems that dealing with the past (like parental osmosis, as you called it) can go one of two ways: You either incorporate those bad aspects of your upbringing into your own life, or you learn from those mistakes and avoid them in your own life. What factors determine which route you will take?

Dr. Bloomfield: What determines is, first and foremost, if you adopted a style to cope with that parent that involved either compliance or defiance. Women, for example, have been socialized to be compliant, and always be nice, and do whatever their parent tells them to do. These are generalizations, but we leave more room for sons to be more defiant, their testosterone -- then he's just "being a boy". Where you find in so many families, it's the daughter that becomes a care-taker of the parent, whereas the son is expected maybe to chip in financially, but not become emotionally engaged. What also determines whether or not you become compliant or defiant to these traits, is how much in the way of resentment you build up. Resentments are where the anger you've pushed down, trying to be nice, trying to be good, trying to be what your parent expected from you, suddenly start to explode. Suddenly you have these pockets of resentments that show up when your parent presses certain buttons. Say you go home to visit your mom for Mother's Day, and she says things like "How come you're not married?" or "The birth was so painful! I didn't know if I was going to make it." Or your mom says "Oh, life is so miserable, so awful," and you're reminded of how much you had to cope with your mother's depression as a child, either trying to make her happy or trying to get away from it. Or you have her say something very obsessive/compulsive, where she's trying to control everything. Certainly all of us have some resentments that accrue during the process of growing up. There are two kinds of families, dysfunctional and very dysfunctional. Certainly the reason to make peace with your parents is not so much for them, but for you. It's for your peace of mind and the quality of all your relationships, so you don't destroy your own health by holding on to these resentments, which we know can lead to heart disease, diminishing the immune system, and leave us more vulnerable to cancer, arthritis, and other significant illnesses.

column_WebMD: What advice can you give to a young woman who has recently had an abortion and is trying to move on?

Dr. Bloomfield: That's a great thing to respond to. First of all, take some time to do your mourning and grieving. I remember myself, I was in a relationship in my twenties and we decided to have an abortion and I went with her, and the whole thing, and nine months later, unexpectedly, I went into a depression, and I didn't know why. It turned out this would have been roughly the time the child would have been born. So it's very important to give yourself the mission to, after an abortion, you're feeling a bit in shock, you can't believe it happened, and then after the shock, you have to go through healing, deal with feelings of anger, hurt, relief, even those you're ashamed of, and finally, moving towards reconciliation, and towards being able to reconcile yourself for having that abortion. It's good to talk to other women who've had an abortion, and it's very helpful in achieving peace. Also, you can visualize that soul that was about to come into your life, and say to that soul, "I'm sorry this wasn't the right time, or the right circumstance, but there'll be a later time where you can come into my life, if that's our destiny, and I look forward to that." Also, taking a look at, was there someone who let you down with regard to the circumstances that led down to your abortion. Was there someone that didn't wear a condom, or was there a family that said, "If you have a child, we'll throw you out," or was there your own fears that certainly every women has a right to being the master of her own body and life, and if you chose and needed to have that abortion, you need to forgive yourself. It means that you recognize that you may have had some doubts, feelings of guilt, but where you are now choosing to give yourself the peace of forgiveness. Forgiveness means that you let go of the anger you're harboring towards yourself. Gandhi said that "forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." So instead of resisting forgiveness, it's good to perhaps, on one side of the page, say "I forgive myself", and "yeah right"... and "I forgive myself"... "you don't deserve it"... "I forgive myself"... "not after the way I had this abortion"... Then "I forgive myself"... " I feel so ashamed'... " I forgive myself".... " I can't let myself off so easily"... "I forgive myself"... and then you start to perhaps say "I really want to".... "I forgive myself"... " I wish I could let go of my anger"... And finally, " I forgive myself, and I know that this soul forgives me as well." So you cultivate compassion, which we all need. 

To be human is to err, and learning how to forgive from the heart is extremely important. It reminds me of a very transformational story with regard to forgiveness, which I'd love to share. When you forgive your past, only then can you truly turn fully towards the future. As he was being led out of the Robin Island prison, where he spent twenty-seven years of his life, Nelson Mandela had a very profound insight. If he were to go on feeling hatred for those who imprisoned him, he would carry that prison with him. His path to freedom was to forgive, but that didn't extinguish his fierce will to end injustice and free people from oppression. As you heal your anger and resentment, you can transform that energy into a healthy fierceness. You can use that ferocity to prevent a recurrence of past hurts, and create something new and different for your life. This young lady, who looked forward to creating a healthy love relationship and the kind of safety, where someday if she chooses, she can have a child, and a beautiful relationship with that child or children. And where if there were any indignities involved in that abortion, she can serve others to make sure that abortion counseling is available for every women that winds up in similar circumstances.

elanc_MSN: I am not able to tolerate the slightest remark or comment from other people, and get upset very deeply, and it drains my energy. May I know what it is?

Dr. Bloomfield: Great question! It's one of two things I write about. One, a lot of us wind up treating ourselves a heck of a lot worse than our parents ever did. We internalize an inner critic, where if every time someone says something critical, it's like a spear into our heart. It's like an old wound just being ripped open. And what you have to learn to do is recognize the old sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but names will never hurt me. To have a titanium one molecule shield that you have on, that's semi-permeable to let in all the good stuff, and anything that's critical, deal with it as feedback. You don't let it mortify you, or kill you. The second cause of being super sensitive to the criticism of others, is there's a form of depression that is called a "sensitivity," where a sensitivity to rejection is the hallmark of that form of depression. And where every time you feel rejected, it reminds you of the abandonment you experienced by a parent, or in a previous love relationship, or where you were shamed in a previous job that you held. And what you want to do in that case is you want to remind yourself that who you are is much bigger than your thoughts, feelings, and actions, that all of us in life get our share of criticism. And that you can learn how to, number one, stay relaxed under fire. You can picture in your mind's eye, and picture the criticism coming your way, and you're staying relaxed and at peace inside yourself, and where the arrows are just bouncing off of you, or flying right by you. Number two, if an arrow has gotten in there, you can pull it out with some fierceness. Pull it out, and throw it back from whence it came, and allow a picture of healing to take place more quickly. And also learning how to be more receptive and less reactive. All it is, is someone may be expressing anger that they have because they got out of the wrong side of the bed that morning. You don't have to take it personally. Finally, to learn how to be assertive. That means that you're able to say to that person, "I really felt hurt by that comment, and I really wish that in the future, you would talk to me in a more civil manner. Or that you would prepare me ahead of time by saying that there's something that's bothering me and we need to talk." That vulnerability is something you can work on, and it's important to trace those roots of that in your past -- who in your past was very critical of you, or who in your past made you feel ashamed every time you made a mistake, who in your past made you the butt of "jokes" that were really criticizing the way you looked, and the more that you can identify these past rejections, abusive treatments, and do some of the exercises in the book that really do help you to heal those past injuries. It's like injuries in your nervous system that whenever in the present something reminds you of, it's like a scab being pulled off a wound. Learning to reframe that experience so that you don't have to dwell on the criticism and obsess over it, and you don't have to defend yourself and prove how right you are or how wrong the other person is. That can drive the negativity even deeper and strengthen the hold. You are, in fact, giving whatever hurt you the power to start to destroy you. There's great freedom in being able to shift your awareness even slightly from these kinds of destructive, poisonous thoughts, to more constructive thoughts. Even while looking squarely at the painful criticism or rejection, you can see them differently, and what you can learn from the experience. Anytime you become upset, notice you are repeating an old negative thought pattern, and you can stop it by saying to yourself, "I choose peace and let go of my suffering." Then distract your mind by bringing a loving, joyful experience to mind, and just seeing this criticism you've just received in the scheme of things, minor and not worth your attention.

stickerG_WebMD: Once you know you want to make good on something in your past, how do you move on and let it go without forgetting about it? If you're trying to forgive yourself for something, how do you keep the lesson you've learned, without letting it be baggage?

Dr. Bloomfield: First of all, forgiving doesn't mean forgetting. On some level, you'll always remember. The question is whether it remains in your nervous system like a carving in rock, or like a line on water. Part of what I consider enlightenment to be, is the heavies to become lighter. Buddha has a quote. "Hate never yet dispelled hate, only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible." When it comes to having been hurt by other people, the tendency to blame begins in childhood as survival, and can become a pattern throughout our adulthood, where we constantly feel victimized and hate others, but unfortunately, it rarely impacts those people. It mostly impacts your own physiology. The first thing to realize is that the reason to forgive isn't for the other person, it's for you. It doesn't mean you're justifying what was done to you. You're simply choosing to heal your resentments towards a father. You might write down your resentments, that you resent you've always been compared to others and never accepted for who you were. Towards a mother -- "I resent you talked me out of marrying my true love. I resent you badgered daddy so that he had to leave us and divorce you." Or towards an ex-spouse -- "I resent that you always criticized me, and that you refused to see a marriage counselor with me." Or towards a sibling -- " I resent that you didn't lift a finger to help when mom was sick." So you can write a letter, and this is one of the precious writing exercises in the book, Making Peace With Your Past: The 6 Essential Steps to Enjoy a Great Future. There are some very important and valuable writing exercises. There's one I refer to as "writing the wrong," and you compose a letter to the person you harbor resentments, and this is your chance to let it all out. Allow your thoughts and feelings to pour forth, and not worry about mailing it or who's going to read it. You can put down all of your feelings of hatred, your wanting to just do terrible things towards the negative aspects of that person, and you want to give your feelings free-flow, whether it's towards the negative aspects of your father, mother, or the negative aspects of yourself. Then you want to also exorcise the rage. Stream of consciousness writing is a great way to let out anger, but rage may need a more physical release. Whereas anger is a natural response to hurt, rage is an automatic emotional response to severe rejection, abuse, or a threat to your survival. It's characterized by the intention to destroy. You may need to go out and play tennis, where you picture the ball as being the negative aspects of that person, or stomp on a cardboard box, or pound on a pillow and yell expletives and get out that rage to the point where you're exhausted. Taking that opportunity to purge that rage from your system is important. You want to give yourself permission to pound, whale, kick, and punch until you feel totally spent. But you don't need to send this letter. This is getting out all of the feelings that are in the way of forgiveness.  

Trying to forgive before you fully acknowledge your hurt is something that a lot of spiritual folk try to do -- "I forgive you" -- but you have to give yourself an opportunity to literally honor the part of you that's been hurt. And to remember that once you've done that, forgiving literally means "for - giving." Giving to whom? Possibly to the person you're forgiving, who stands to gain relief from guilt, but that's secondary. When you forgive, the one to whom you give the most is you. You are giving back to yourself the vital life energy that's been consumed by bitterness and blame. We all have resistance to forgiving someone that's hurt us. You're not saying that the action was okay. You may never forgive the action, but you work at understanding what happened. It's important to understand, but that doesn't mean you have to excuse what happened. Forgiveness is never meant to embolden a manipulative person to take further advantage of you. You don't have to make excuses for the offender, or reconcile with him. If necessary, it can entail letting go of that person, so you don't get hurt again. And there may be some things that are just unforgivable, where you can still achieve a measure of resolution within yourself, where you can achieve empathy, by putting yourself in the offender's shoes. Your parents had parents, too, and your parents were raised with shame and hostility. That helps you have a modicum of understanding, and to not take personally the way you were treated.  

Finally, forgiving from the heart has been taught, really it's hallmark of all major religions, and we human beings have an awful lot to forgive. Looking at the last century alone, it was the bloodiest one in human century. We killed, tortured, and maimed over 100 million of our own, causing all kinds of horrible suffering and pain. We really have to come to grips with the fact that we've been in -- the past has been primarily one of domination and submission. That characterized all our relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, boss and employee, one country and another, even our relationship with nature. We now have the opportunity to make peace with our collective past, and move into an era of dominion, dominion where we have mutual respect for one another. We remember the lessons of the past, as Santiana said, "Those who fail to remember the past and learn the vital lessons are doomed to repeat it." Where we can heal the collective past that brought so much pain and suffering to each of us, and we can now start anew, but it means making peace with ourselves. As Gandhi said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world," and making peace with your past and with your collective past. In the name of religion and politics, we've been murdering and torturing one another. We must transcend that through a combination of deep, personal growth which some have called "self-realization" and the answer to the eternal question of "who am I?" And the same time through service, and contributing to the well being of those less fortunate.

Making peace with your past is a powerful catalyst for conscious evolution and together, you and I, and all the people in on this chat, we can end the ignorance of the past. And treat ourselves with a greater understanding and dignity. The nightmares that terrified so many of us, and that at times, ashamed us into the depths of unworthiness, also made us seekers. At first with desperation and later with determination and persistence, we embarked on a search for the awareness to change our inner course and outer circumstance. And once our present no longer bleeds into the past, because eighty percent of our life energy is still tied into the past, our consciousness less encumbered, is free to fully grow. Our highest evolutionary past is the one that generates the least resistance and greatest joy. 

We're at a stage in human history, where we can end his story, and begin her story. Her story is one of dominion, where the goddess has dominion as opposed to the chauvinistic model, which was born of domination, including "my god is better than your god." My book is coming out in stores this week, Making Peace With Your Past The 6 Essential Steps to Enjoy A Great Future, and it's available through www.barnesandnoble.com.  It follows two previous bestsellers I've had. As Father's Day comes close, ninety percent of people have unfinished business with their fathers.

Moderator: Doctor Bloomfield, thank you for joining us today. WebMD members, please join us next Monday at 1pm EDT when we will be discussing "Awaken To Superconsciousness: How To Use Meditation for Inner Peace" with J. Donald Walters.

The opinions given by Doctor Bloomfield are his and his alone. If you have specific questions or are concerned about your health, please consult your personal physician. This event is for information purposes only.