How To Heal The Emotional Wounds From Your Past - Vienna Pharaon

You say that the past is not the past if it's unresolved. What does that mean?

Mm-hmm. Yes. I've been saying that the unwanted patterns in our adult lives that we can't shake, no matter how much we try, is the irresolution from the past really tugging at our coattails, wanting us to turn back around, and when we don't resolve the things that happened from our past and... Obviously, I take the... You know, my framework is looking at the family of origin, right? The family system in which we grew up. Even though there's obviously plenty of things outside of that that can contribute to pain and wounds and trauma that we might experience through life, looking at the family of origin, looking at our family system is where I like to begin and for so many of us, there's irresolution there. Because as kiddos, when we go through something that's hard, we don't sit down and think at five, "Ah, you know what? It's- it's good for me to grieve," you know, or, "Uh, you know what? I- I ought to witness this," right? It's like we white-knuckle our way through. We survive our way through. We get to the other side generally without actually slowing down to process, to experience, to feel, and so we just move through life and we will wind up in our adult lives, in our adult relationships, repeating patterns. I think a lot of us are guilty of that and can raise a hand to that, um, and we'll be frustrated by it and we won't understand why we can't shake it or why we can't make the change that we want to, that we say we want to, the promises that we make to ourselves. And for me, through the over 25,000 hours of working with individuals and couples and families, what I see over and over again is that it points directly to the irresolution from our past.

How do you describe what family systems is to someone who's not familiar with it?

Yeah. Our family system, it's, it sounds like a fancy term for something that should just be as simple as saying our family, and yet we also know that blood-related folks are not the only people who contribute to our family system. I remember being in conversation with clients of mine many years ago where they were talking about how after school, they would go to the neighbor's home from 3:00 PM until their mother would pick them up around 10:00 PM. She was working a night shift. And, you know, it struck me, right? Is that... Oh, no, y- that's a family system too, right? That is a system in which you are growing up. There's a significant amount of time that is being spent around these humans who are contributing to the framework and the foundation, which we understand how we communicate, how we navigate conflict, what's expected of us, et cetera, et cetera. And so we look to the significant players in our lives. Sometimes that is our blood. Sometimes that's mom and dad. Sometimes that's a stepparent. Sometimes that's someone that mom dated for eight years who played a significant role but who's no longer a part of our lives. It might be distant family members who've moved into our home that didn't necessarily start there. And so we're looking at the big players who contributed to the way in which we really understand the foundation and the framework of how we navigate life, how we relate to other people, how we relate to ourselves. We know, as I was saying before... Of course, coaches, teachers, society, media, religion, all those things will affect us and influence us as well but we really wanna look to these formative years and understand. You know, these humans, oftentimes adults, our siblings, um, who are really shaping our belief system around our own relationship with our sense of worth, our sense of value, our sense of belonging in the world, our sense of, am I a priority to the important people in my life? Can I trust the important people around me? Am I safe and secure here?