Life, Among Other Things

Why reflecting on our past can change the way we see ourselves.

We sometimes like to dwell on the idea that our past experiences, good and bad, have shaped who we are today. So we hold on tight to every memory and every little detail, despite how deceiving and inaccurate they could be. We develop a strong attachment to our memories as if they were the only accurate representation of our history. But along this history, we forget something very important. Reflecting.

Reflecting upon our experiences allows us to analyze not only what the lesson was or what it taught us, but most importantly, what it taught us about ourselves. And how accurate of an image are we adopting into our inner consciousness about the type of person we are?

Difficult situations in our lives sometimes require us to behave in a not-so-favorable way, especially when our actions don’t align with the values we hold. After making a not-so-good judgment call, we tend to develop a bad impression of ourselves. We take the experience as a whole without analyzing the circumstances surrounding it.

Feelings of guilt and shame haunt us without us even knowing why. Because somewhere along the way, we have adopted a solid belief that during a certain experience, we were “bad.” We didn’t behave authentically, we didn’t make the right decision, or perhaps we didn’t recognize ourselves in the way we responded.

And so those feelings remain.

Until we have that moment of truly and critically reflecting on what actually happened, without making any prejudgments toward ourselves or the experience.

Are our memories really that accurate?

Interestingly, psychology tells us that our memories are not necessarily the accurate recordings of our lives that we believe them to be.

Research on autobiographical memory suggests that remembering is a reconstructive process. Our memories are influenced by our emotions, beliefs, and the way we understand ourselves. This means that while an experience might remain the same, the meaning we attach to it can change over time.

And that makes me wonder how many of our beliefs about ourselves are based on experiences we have never truly taken the time to understand.

How many times have we convinced ourselves that we were selfish, unkind, weak, or simply bad because of the way we responded to a particular situation?

And how many times have we revisited that same experience without ever questioning whether our judgment of ourselves was actually fair?

Reflection versus reliving

There is a difference between reflecting on an experience and repeatedly reliving it.

Psychologists Ethan Kross and Özlem Ayduk have studied how examining negative experiences from a psychologically distanced perspective can help people make sense of them without becoming trapped in the same emotional reactions.

In other words, reflection isn’t necessarily about returning to the past and experiencing the same guilt, anger, or shame all over again. It’s about giving ourselves the opportunity to examine what happened from a different perspective.

When we separate ourselves from our immediate emotional response and examine a situation with empathy, we may come to recognize that at a particular time in our lives, we had very few options, limited knowledge, or simply lacked the emotional capacity to respond the way we wish we had.

Perhaps today, with everything we have learned, we would have made an entirely different decision. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we had the same understanding or resources back then.

Think about a toddler throwing a fit at the most inconvenient time. As adults, we might perceive that behavior as unreasonable or inappropriate. But when we consider the child’s developmental stage, their limited ability to regulate emotions, and their inability to communicate exactly what they need, we begin to understand their behavior differently.

The situation hasn’t changed. Our understanding of it has.

Of course, adults have greater responsibilities and more developed emotional capacities than toddlers. But even as adults, our responses are influenced by fear, stress, our environment, and the emotional resources available to us at that particular moment.

We can acknowledge that we could have handled something differently without convincing ourselves that the way we handled it defines our entire character.

What if we treated ourselves with the same empathy?

We are often capable of showing an extraordinary amount of empathy toward other people. We consider their circumstances, their struggles, and the experiences that may have influenced their decisions.

Yet when it comes to ourselves, we sometimes forget to extend that same understanding.

Research on self-compassion suggests that treating ourselves with kindness when confronting our shortcomings doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding responsibility. In fact, research by Leary and colleagues found that a self-compassionate perspective can help people acknowledge their role in negative experiences without becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions.

I think that’s an important distinction.

We don’t have to convince ourselves that every decision we made was right. We don’t have to justify every mistake or pretend that our actions didn’t have consequences.

But we can acknowledge our mistakes without allowing them to become a permanent description of who we are.

Perhaps we were afraid. Perhaps we didn’t know any better. Perhaps we were dealing with circumstances we weren’t emotionally equipped to handle.

And perhaps the person we were then deserves to be understood rather than continuously judged by the person we have become today.

Making room for something new

One interesting area of memory research is called memory reconsolidation. It explores how previously formed memories can sometimes become susceptible to modification when they are recalled and followed by new learning.

That doesn’t mean we can simply reflect on a painful memory and erase it, nor does it mean that every experience can be transformed into something positive.

But it does raise an interesting question about how our understanding of the past can evolve.

What happens when we revisit an experience we have carried with shame for years and finally allow ourselves to examine it with empathy?

Perhaps we realize that the situation was more complicated than we originally believed. Perhaps we recognize that we were trying to protect ourselves. Or perhaps we acknowledge that we made a mistake, but that the mistake was never the entirety of who we were.

The memory might remain, but the judgment we have attached to it doesn’t necessarily have to.

And maybe that’s how reflecting on our past sometimes allows us to make room for something new. Not by replacing our negative experiences with positive ones, but by developing a more accurate and compassionate understanding of ourselves.

We cannot change the decisions we made or the circumstances we experienced. But we can question the conclusions we drew about ourselves because of them.

And sometimes, that’s enough to begin seeing ourselves differently.

Perhaps the most important lesson our past can teach us isn’t who we were, but how much more there is to us than the person we remember being.

The Science Behind This Article.

• Kross, E., & Ayduk, Ö. (2011). Making meaning out of negative experiences by self-distancing.Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(3), 187–191.
• Leary, M. R., et al. (2007). Self-compassion and reactions to unpleasant self-relevant events: The implications of treating oneself kindly.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 887–904.
• Lee, J. L. C., Nader, K., & Schiller, D. (2017). An update on memory reconsolidation updating.Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(7), 531–545.