What happens when you begin recognising old relational patterns… and start looking back at past relationships differently?
In this week’s Inner Work episode, I reflect on grief, hindsight, growth, emotional memory and the complicated feelings that can emerge when we realise we might make very different choices now than we once did.
We explore:
changing values and priorities
relational growth and self-reflection
compassion for former versions of ourselves
grief for what could have been
emotional reactions to photos, memories and relationships from the past
healing old emotional wounds
how therapy can help memories feel less emotionally jagged
This is a reflective, compassionate episode about growth, hindsight and learning to hold both sadness and fondness at the same time.
My Inner Work series is a space to pause and think more deeply about yourself. I explore where those roles come from… and whether they’re still serving you now.
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Transcripts
Dr Marianne Trent (:
Hi, welcome along to Inner Work. I am Dr. Marianne Trent, a qualified clinical psychologist. Thank you for being here. I had a really wonderful time recording the main podcast episode with Dr. Kate Sherritt. I think it is such a strong episode and if you've listened to it or watched it, I would love your thoughts. What really struck me afterwards is just how amazing it can be for us to reflect and to grow and then to think about these relational patterns and think about setting ourselves up for things to go really well in future. And then that obviously impacts on our future friendships, our future work dynamics, our future relationships if you go on to have new relationships. But then we might kind of almost look back on our previous experiences, maybe with some difficult feelings, maybe with some grief for what we feel we might have missed out on or what others might have missed out on, or what could have been different if we had been aware of our own relational patterns earlier on.
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Maybe you realise that someone you'd previously spent time with was actually a better fit for you than you thought. Maybe you had discounted them as being boring, or maybe the decisions you made reflected the person you were at that time and the priorities, the values, the things that were important to you then. But as you age, as you mature, as you change, as you develop and as you have new experiences, new encounters, ones that you like and ones you didn't so much, you will change. I do think we should all be malleable always. We should always be reflecting to be growing, to be curious. And you might just find that if you are making decisions now, you would make different decisions based on your current values, your current priorities. Hindsight can really feel like twenty twenty vision as they say. And whilst we can't go back and change things or fix things all of the time, you might choose to.
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If you do, come and let me know how you get on. You can also give compassion, send compassion as a bit of a compassionate flow to your younger self for the choices they made and they did make them with the information they had at the time. I always think it's really interesting when you look back at old photos of people who are no longer with us and it's like, oh, what would I have liked to have said to them or could I have warned them in some way? It feels almost voyeuristic looking back on photos of days gone by, people gone by, relationships gone by. And I don't know if you guys have watched the video I did about Lily Allen, even listening to more recent episodes of her and Makita's podcast, I'm still way behind by the way. So I think I'm still in 2024, maybe 2025 now.
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But yeah, hearing about some of the things that she's talking about, it's like, oh, now we have that context for how she's described how things went down in her album West End Girl. Some of what she's talking about on the podcast sort of feels like it makes more sense because we have that context or at least we think we have that context. We don't always have all the information, do we? It can feel a little bit like we're doing that with our own life when we look back on even videos in your phone. It can be a really nice trip down memory lane, but can also be really emotional as well. I remember after my dad died, I found it really, really hard to look at photos of him and my iPhone will kind of automatically store people's faces. If you've got an iPhone, yours will do that too.
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And then you can click to watch a movie, watch a video of that person. And when I was really hurting, I used to make myself watch that video so that it began to knock those edges, knock those barbs off and so that I began to then see the joy in those photos again, which had been previously difficult. Looking at someone that you love, who's smiling, who's very much alive, or looking at photos of you and an ex- partner smiling can feel really complicated. But if we're just seeing the sadness, then we don't necessarily get the joy or the fond reflection. And what we want when we're able to look back on relationships, either people that are still with us or those who are no longer alive, is we want to be able to look back just with the appropriate grief, a little bit of sadness, but not have it be so jagged that we're tripping over it all the time.
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So if you notice that you really can't look at photos or can't kind of connect to fond memories of times gone by, that can be an indication that maybe getting things talked through, worked through, maybe using something like MDR can help things to lay flat and to level up a bit for you. It's kind of related to what I was talking about, but it felt important. It felt like that might be helpful. If you haven't had therapy or if you think you might be ready for a next chapter of therapy, please do bear me in mind as well. I do offer one-to-one therapy, which happens midweek, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursday mornings usually. Thank you again for being a member of Inner Work. I love that you are here. Please do let me know your comments, your feedback, and I will be back along for the next episode next week.
