Dealing With Your Past (Part 1)

Dealing With Your Past (Part 1)

I do not have a degree in psychology, but with my stroke I suffered intense brain trauma. I have studied for hours the effects of all aspects of environment that we face in life which can affect the brain, our thought patterns, and muscle memory that we take for granted. When you loose functions of your body, that you've used for most of your life and have to relearn them, is an eye-opening experience that I do not wish on anybody. Yet, if it happens you seek every bit of information you can to re-educate yourself with those common functions.

It's been over 3 years now and I have recouped many of these functions, but I still have some physical and emotional issues I have to deal with daily. So I spend a lot of hours researching areas that I feel can speed up my progress. I have learned much about how our brain is effected by processes we don't even recognize on a daily basis. Thus, it lead me to discover this research on ACE.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) increase the risk for many difficulties later in life according to many studies. One of the most-studied adult outcomes in the context of ACEs is depression. ACEs make adult depression twice as likely, and more often likely to recur. ACEs are also associated with a longer time to recover from depression. Childhood adversity raises the risk for depression whether in the form of sexual abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, or neglect.

Childhood issues not only effect our emotional health, but our physical health as well. A study showed that the family environment at age 4 predicted whether a person would have persistent back pain in his or her late 60s. Similarly, lower socio-economic status at age 4 was associated with a substantially greater risk of back problems six decades later.

As a pastor, I tended to focus on a member's present situation and challenges when they would come to me for advice or prayer. At the same time, it became helpful to begin to understand where some of their long term patterns come from. Simply recognizing the links from their childhood to the problems they were facing as adults was an important part of helping people deal with a personal crisis. That knowledge alone was usually not sufficient, but it did often provide crucial info that promoted their healing process. 

Most people I dealt with wondered why they're still struggling with things from so many years ago. They often battled self-criticism, telling themselves they "should be over this by now" and felt reluctant to discuss certain aspects of their childhood and upbringing. In reality, I found out, time alone is no guarantee that the effects of our early experiences will fade. 

Our personalities are developed from the consistent ways we think, act, and feel in response to our surroundings, and findings from a new study underscore the effects of our family experiences on our personalities and relationships. The study revealed that the quality of our relationships in our family of origin was a significant predictor of our current relationship satisfaction even with our significant other.

The study went on to explore how those early relationships affected our current ones, which is where personality came in. Individuals with a worse family of origin experiences scored higher on the tendency to experience negative emotions. These higher levels, in turn, led to a poorer relationship quality with their partner.

So, our earliest relationships can direct the formation of our personalities, which then affect our later experiences. A significant portion of personality differences are explained by genetic differences, so families can affect us through both nature and nurture. While our society argues that God makes mistakes in the formation of male and female genders, people are caught in lifestyles and desires that cause personal and public disaster. So these verses of scripture matter more today than ever before:

Ephesians 6:1-4 

 "Children,obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honor thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."