More Lessons Learned: Repetition and Resolution

One time through is not enough.

If you read this statement and thought of memory work, raise your hand.
No, just kidding, you don’t have to – but was memory work the first thing that leapt to mind?

This statement is very definitely true for memory work, and it’s one that I personally have heard (either first-hand or directed at someone else in this system) so many times that it has developed a fingernails-on-a-blackboard effect. Hearing it makes me cringe and want to hit someone, preferably the person making that sound.

But despite having heard it said roughly nine hundred and thirty-seven times in the last five years, the bedrock truth of it never hit me until very recently – and the context of my realization had nothing to do with memory work, at least not in relation to abuse memories.

It was about something completely different – a misunderstanding, actually, between my therapist and myself, years old now and long-since resolved – or resolved, at least, in terms of what was between my therapist and myself. There were, however, some leftover feelings directed toward a third party which had never really died.

But these days, those feelings recur only rarely, and they hardly seem worth the effort of talking about them. The amount of intense discussion required to resolve the original issue with my therapist (where it mattered) quite thoroughly burned me out on the subject. I have therefore been less than enthusiastic since then about engaging in a productive discussion regarding the leftover feelings that remain, even when those leftover feelings raise their ugly heads and begin making noise.

Unfortunately, the unproductive nature of my feelings has made itself apparent. There have been occasional events which aggravated my temper to such a degree that I made some extremely intemperate comments regarding the offending third party at the slightest provocation (or no provocation at all).

My therapist allowed this to pass a number of times, but on the most recent occasion, she laid the subject flat on the table and said we were going to talk about it. I expressed my lack of enthusiasm about reopening the subject in no uncertain terms. I cited the fact that the subject was ages old and well-resolved, at which point I was presented with that grating homily to repetition – “sometimes you have to talk about something more than once before it’s really resolved.”

I’m sure the look I gave her at that point has been seen on the face of many a survivor in similar circumstances. We had already talked about it “more than once” – in fact, if I remember correctly, we pretty much beat the subject into the ground. How could there possibly be anything left to say about it that hadn’t already been hashed through a dozen times?

However, talk about it we did – again – and as the conversation progressed, I realized that she was right. Again.

We had resolved enough of the issue to repair things between us – and that was what had been important right in those tense moments when things could go either way, resolve or explode into a thousand shards, shredding both of us and the relationship between us. All of our mutual energy had gone into that resolution.

But there were certain aspects of the situation that really could only be dealt with from the distance of the years between then and now – most notably, for me, the unconscious and automatic ways that I had shifted things around to make tolerable what I could not immediately resolve. Emotions I didn’t have space to deal with at the time had been removed from the situation and transferred onto something less important, something I could afford to make into the scapegoat – namely, the offending third party.

But unfortunately, unlike the Biblical scapegoat, I couldn’t quite get this scapegoat to take my problems off into the desert and die with them. In fact, I couldn’t get it to go away at all – and therefore, I couldn’t really get the problems to go away either. So in the end, unless I wanted to have this stupid goat showing up periodically and bringing the same old problems back with it every time, I had to take my problems back and figure out something else to do with them.

And how often is this true for survivors, especially dissociative survivors – and in how many different situations? How many scapegoats do we have in our outside world, people we burden down with our problems and then drive away in the hope that they’ll take our problems away with them? And are not all the parts of our systems scapegoats, in a way, for all the events of our childhood which we were not equipped to handle?

It is so much easier to project or divert our troublesome feelings and difficult issues onto someone else, making it all their fault and their problem, and then drive them away from us – because if they’re gone, then the problems are gone too – right?
Well, maybe momentarily… but how often do our problems, internal or external, actually stay away?

We can’t escape from ourselves, or from the other parts of our systems. Our memories can be pushed away, and the members of our systems can be pushed away – but until we actually deal with them, they will always return.

And in this modern day of social networking and online accessibility, can we ever really get away from anyone, even externally? Or do we just keep on tripping over the same old problems because our scapegoats are never really gone?

Sending our problems off to die in the desert on the back of an unlucky goat might have worked in Biblical times, but these days, even the desert has internet service, and scapegoats never die in decent obscurity. They are much more likely to keep turning up, long after we hoped they were dead, to haunt us again, and again, and again, with what we left unaddressed and unresolved.

Their re-emergence is never welcome. We see them as the ghosts of problems we’ve already dealt with, things that have no right to still be hanging on and causing more problems now. We’ve wiped our hands of them – why won’t they just go away?

So nobody can really be enthusiastic about diving back into a problem they thought was already worked through – but if we do revisit the problem, it might become obvious why it’s still hanging around even after we thought it was resolved. Things can look very different the second time through – or the fifth, or the tenth, or the twenty-seventh – or however many times it takes.

If someone disappoints us, or hurts our feelings, or makes us angry, or all of the above, or more – how many times do we need to revisit the subject with them before we can let it go? Is one discussion enough to resolve the emotional responses? Usually not, because the emotional response to such an event (for anyone, not just for trauma survivors) is too complicated to even be fully realized in the first discussion we have about it. We resolve the most obvious layer, and a day or three later, another layer will make itself apparent and need its own resolution – it might take numerous conversations to fully resolve things.

And yet, as complicated as those situations are, they are not nearly as complicated as the traumatic events that happened in each of our lives.

So talking through something once really is never enough. The same event (abusive or non-abusive) can hurt so many different members of the system on so many different levels that the complexity of the pain is staggering – and it does take numerous reviews of the same piece of history in order to resolve it.

But in the process of repetition toward resolution, we need to be careful of the human tendency to believe that scapegoating others, internal or external, and then driving them away or ignoring them or punishing them will actually provide any real resolution to our problems. That might work for a time, but in the end, the problems are still ours. We can’t actually get rid of them by dumping them on someone else, and we can’t resolve them by anything we do to someone else.

Blaming someone else for our anger or hurt and then punishing them for it will not make us less angry or hurt. We can waste years on blaming and hating others for our own problems, looking for ways to avenge ourselves on them; meanwhile, our actual problems will remain untouched, and they will continue to trouble us until we address them directly.

If a problem is still coming up for us – then the resolution lies within us as well. We need to go through the event and the associated feelings again, and again, and again, until we find all the scattered pieces that are still causing us pain and distress and address them – not by pointing fingers and laying blame and acting it all out on other people, but within ourselves.

This is the only way to make emotional peace with an issue – and only when we do that, can we let it go and truly move on.