Allowing new ways of viewing the same event can make a dramatic shift in our day to day experiences. I watched psychotherapist Virginia Satire work with a woman who had issues with her mother by joining the woman on a journey through her mother’s life experiences in a social and historical context. The daughter had been experiencing her mother's frequent and repetitive statements of “Eat, eat, you’re too skinny!” as critical attempts to control and denigrate her, and she avoided spending time with her mother as a result. Any positive loving memories of her mom were contaminated by this repetitive interaction that she experienced as hurtful. In the process of reviewing her mom’s history, she came to realize that her mother had been exposed to extreme deprivation and hunger in her youth, and had never learned to express her feelings directly. Virginia's suggestion that her mom’s encouragement to eat might be an expression of loving desire for her daughter to be healthy and satisfied put forward the idea that her mother was a woman who wanted better for her child and didn’t know any other way to communicate. With this interpretation, the woman could then spend time with her mom experiencing her mother’s words as having positive intention instead of as constant criticism, changing the dynamics of their interactions and greatly improving their relationship.
If there is something in your life that isn’t the way you want it, take a look at beliefs and memories that hold it in place. As Mark Twain once wrote, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”