How Old Are You Really?
Time is a curious creature and we all have a weird relationship to it. Here's how to use that to heal.
Hello to you from the melty middle of summer. This last month, I escaped to the Colorado mountains with my family. It was a great gift to bask in beauty and cool mountain breeze again.
I also attended a week long counselor training on EMDR. To those unfamiliar, it’s a sorta-odd therapy technique with not-so-weird science to back it up. Have you ever felt better after thinking through something while walking? Or you know how when you dream your eyes flit back and forth as your brain makes stories out of your unconscious soup? EMDR utilizes this same innate processing technique—bilateral stimulation of the brain’s left and right hemispheres—to help jumpstart our ability to metabolize painful and overwhelming experiences.
While the facts of our stories will never change, the meaning of our stories is very available to be worked with and profoundly transformed. We can experience our stories differently. It’s why I have a job.
In honor of this training (and because I was more occupied this last month), I pulled this post out of the archives. It’s one I still think about every day with clients, seeing their lives like those rings of a tree. It’s on the nature of time and our experience of it. It was fun to revisit my writing from years ago and enhance it even more. Some of you were with me back then (thank you!). But most of you are new and I thought you’d appreciate this. It’s one way to re-find lost parts of us.
“You’re not the age you are. You’re all the ages you’ve ever been.” Fred Rogers
“I am cumulative.” Wallace Stegner
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child.” Madelene L’Engle
When my son Westley turned three, we had a moment together that I still think about. In the weeks leading up to his big day, we worked on how to hold up three fingers. That switch from two fingers to three is more difficult than one might think. Getting your thumb to pin your pinky in place takes practice. But soon enough, he got it with smiles and giggles. To help him show off his new finger skills, I asked him, “Okay, how old are you going to be, Westley?” He said, “Two.” I corrected him and said, “No buddy, you’re going to be three.” He shot back real quick. “I’m going to be two AND three!”
Something about that sounded so right. I couldn’t argue with him. Who would want to stop being two anyway?
It drummed up a quote that has been with me for nearly twenty years. Back when Fred Rogers passed, I heard a tribute on NPR where he said, “You’re not just the age you are. You’re all the ages you’ve ever been.” That line disrupted my sense of time. I still remember the grocery store parking lot I sat in when I heard it. It took me out of a linear track of existence and told me that time is a creature I don’t get. Apparently, much more of my past than I know is still with me. And coming from Mr. Rogers, a man who stood for the good of youthful innocence, I felt him fighting for all the young places within us all. Maybe my two year old self is still bopping around inside me somewhere.
Time and our brains
Neuroscience backs up this concept of time. Time to our brains is not simply linear, but cumulative. It becomes embodied, imprinted in our brains, and built upon. Somewhere stored in networks of neurons is the experience of being 6 and 12 and 20. Those ages are with you. Its not that we remember everything that’s happened to us. But we are shaped by all that happens to us. Neuroscience calls this the difference between explicit (what we consciously remember) and implicit memory (the embodied feelings of past experience). As they say, you never forget how to ride a bike though you may not remember the moment you learned. Your body remembers the feel of the ride (through the subcortical brain/body connection).
In other words, our years build up more like rings of a tree than miles on a highway. Experience builds on experience. Time passes in layers.
What does that mean for you and me? Well, some are apt to say that something is in the past and therefore it’s gone. Maybe even, let the past be the past. We may feel that we cannot change the past and so what really is the point of something like counseling or reflecting on our stories and revisiting our pain.
But the past is with us all the time in implicit and embodied ways. Maybe like me, you lived as if your story existed in some disembodied, ethereal data center of consciousness from where we download our memories. In reality, when we recall something, we are actually activating certain neural networks in our heads and reliving the experience enough to talk about it.
Maybe that sounds awful to know the past lives in your head—close enough to haunt you in the night like the ghost of Christmas past.
But try seeing it this way instead: your whole self is still with you. Your whole heart is there to find again. Not one bit of you is lost. Its you that’s with you most. And yes, this remembering may come as flashbacks or pain or grief or anxiety or fear or embarrassment or some other overwhelming experience. That makes for difficult work. And maybe in all those feelings, you don’t yet see the part of you lost in the story. But you can get that self back.
What part of you needs to talk?
Last week in a conversation, my wife said something was lame. I hadn’t heard her call something lame maybe ever and it was a strange comment in the conversation. When I asked her about it, she laughed and said, “Oh, I think that was my 17 year old self. She just needed a chance to speak.” Her matter-of-fact kindness to her younger self was so inviting. I want that way with myself.
Okay, here’s an exercise for you. When you get space, sit for a few minutes in a peaceful place and breathe deep. Then when you feel ready, think of something that’s troubling you right now. It could be a recent conflict or hard conversation. It could be a disappointment or on-going struggle. Notice what that conflict stirs in your body. What does the issue-at-hand feel like? What emotions are there? What sensations? Name them if you can.
Now reflect: Is that feeling familiar? To where or when? Can you remember that story? Or maybe you need to ask: How old do you feel? What do you remember about that age? Stay with it. Don’t minimize it or think its too weird of a connection. These aren’t logical connections per se, but bodily, neurological, heart connections.
What have you done with that story? Can you talk with that part of you?
God’s Commitment to You
“I thought I already dealt with this.” I hear this a lot in counseling—with sighs of frustration or even deep despair. The reality is you may already know the deeper stories being surfaced by your life events. And quite possibly you did deal with them before. But if life happens in layers not miles, then healing also comes in layers too. Healing is iterative. God always invites us to deeper passes at the same stories.
One time, Jesus invited a child to stand among his disciples, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Another time he said, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” Yes, this is a call to childlike innocence. But I cannot hear these invitations anymore as some simple moral call.
I hear Jesus summoning us to stay connected to our earliest selves, those beginning layers of life. And riddled in these words of Jesus I believe is a promise from God: Not only will we find ourselves again—though that would be good in itself. Yet even more so, in doing this work to recover our younger selves, we will meet God.
May those young innocent places within bring you to a fresh experience of God and yourself.
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