Getting Past Your Past

The past is present. What we need to become aware of is whether the responses are appropriate. If not, do they occur in only one area of our lives, or are those unprocessed memories casting a wider net? Once again—is it the climate or the weather?

The automatic reactions that control our emotions come from neural associations within our memory networks that are independent of our higher reasoning power.

EMDR therapy targets the unprocessed memories that contain the negative emotions, sensations and beliefs. By activating the brain’s information processing system (which will be explained in Chapter 2), the old memories can then be “digested.” Meaning what is useful is learned, what’s useless is discarded, and the memory is now stored in a way that

Our brains are constantly making connections that are outside our awareness.

is the disturbing reaction you’re having the most recent example of a long list of similar responses?

These kinds of problems can occur because childhood is a time when we’re vulnerable. We’re small in a land of giants. We don’t have any power. So even in the best of childhoods, we may have experiences that are stored unprocessed with the emotions, physical sensations and beliefs that we had at the time. These experiences stay “hot” regardless of h

when negative reactions and behaviors in the present can be tracked directly back to an earlier memory, we define those memories as “unprocessed”—meaning that they are stored in the brain in a way that still holds the emotions, physical sensations and beliefs that were experienced earlier in life.

We may plan to do something, but our inner life takes over and we become distracted.

Sadly, disturbing experiences, whether major traumas or other kinds of upsetting events, can overwhelm the system. When that happens, the intense emotional and physical disturbance caused by the situation prevents the information processing system from making the internal connections needed to take it to a resolution. Instead, the memory of the sit