Do I Have to Talk About My Past in Therapy? It Depends on This…

No, you don’t always have to talk about the past in therapy. Many therapy methods, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), solution-focused therapy, and Gestalt therapy, are more concerned with the present. They examine your current thoughts and beliefs, your future goals, and how you experience and respond to the present moment.

Even when you get other kinds of therapy, it’s not always necessary to do a deep dive into your past. Not all the issues that might bring you to therapy are rooted in things that happened long ago. For example, you may be suffering from the effects of a recent traumatic event, like a car accident, or chronic work stress that’s stretching your capacity to cope.

And not all issues that began in the past require you to revisit it to fix them. For example, you might have learned some coping methods early on in life that aren’t so helpful now but that aren’t rooted in deeply painful childhood wounds. Picking apart the cognitive distortions they cause in the present moment might be all you need to do to update them to something that works better.

Relationship issues in the present might reflect a larger pattern that started many relationships ago. Anxiety and depression can be caused by your current life circumstances, but they can also come from ways you learned to think and feel about yourself when you were young.

Fortunately, there are signs that can help you tell when something painful in the present is connected to an unresolved issue from your past.

One of the things a therapist is trained to do is to figure out when an issue you’re experiencing in the present is connected to something that happened in the past. Figuring this out often takes time, and it can be hard to do on your own. So, we recommend enlisting a therapist to help you.

However, there are some ways you can start this process on your own. You can look for signs that suggest the problem you’re struggling with now isn’t a new issue in your life and that you’ll need to break a long-standing pattern to resolve it.

So many problems start early in life. When you’re developing, emotional pain can have a huge impact and become part of your permanent record. You can learn “lessons” that damage and limit you. You can be forced to survive in ways that warp your sense of how the world works.

It’s not just your parents who can hurt you when you’re little, either. So can your peers, other family members, and local or global events. And your childhood isn’t the only time you’re vulnerable.

Adolescence and the transition to adulthood push you to take on risks and challenges that can lead to embarrassing failures, losses, and dents in your sense of self. These can then turn into harsh beliefs about yourself or the world. You may still be carrying some of those beliefs now.

Then there are the ways you drift away from your youthful dreams and ideals as the real world batters you in your 20s and 30s. This can leave you feeling disillusioned and lost whenever the pace of your life eases up a bit and you start reflecting on how you got to where you are now.

If the events you’re struggling to integrate weren’t particularly traumatic, dealing with them might be something you can do in just a few therapy sessions. For example, you may just want to update some false beliefs your younger self developed about the world.

It might seem like talking about the past wouldn’t accomplish anything—you can’t change what happened, after all.

But somehow, even though you can’t change what happened, talking about it makes it better. It sheds light on what is hidden deep in your psyche and helps you release what is trapped there. Consider the following examples:

• Trauma can cause you to feel unsafe long after the danger is over. Processing trauma by talking about it with a therapist can help you release the fear and hurt connected to the memories so you can feel safe again.
• Things others said or did that made you feel ashamed or self-conscious as a child can affect how you feel about yourself well into adulthood. They can become part of your core sense of self and form the basis of adult depression or anxiety. To change these hidden, false beliefs about yourself, you first have to uncover and explore them.
• A humiliating memory from college or from your first job can become an important part of your personal narrative, causing you to doubt yourself whenever you want to try something new. Talking about it in therapy can help you process and release the emotion associated with the memory. You can then edit your narrative so this one mistake no longer makes you feel like a perpetual failure.

Anything that sticks in your psyche—anything that leaves emotional residue or informs your core beliefs—is worth talking about, because talking about it is how you let it go. It’s how you lessen its emotional power and free yourself to feel, believe, and live differently.

Talking about the past doesn’t always help. There is such a thing as wallowing in the past, even in therapy.

Sometimes, talking about something that happened long ago can reinforce negative beliefs instead of helping you shed them. It can lead you to a stuck place you can’t get past.

It can also elevate your stress level at a time you may need to do the opposite. It can occupy your thoughts when you really need to focus on what’s right in front of you.

One of the ways talking about the past doesn’t help is when it becomes a hunt for who’s to blame. While it’s important to hold people who hurt you accountable—and while expressing anger toward them can be therapeutic and a necessary part of the healing process—blame can also become a defense that keeps you from going any deeper in your healing.

Spending session after session venting anger about the people you blame, rightly or wrongly, for your struggles, can prevent you from processing grief. It can further entrench harmful or limiting defenses and even put new ones in place.

Putting a lot of emotional energy into blaming others can be draining. It can back you into a guarded, defensive stance. Anger toward the people you blame can become a shield you use to protect yourself from feeling or expressing vulnerable emotions or from getting close to others.

For all these reasons and more, therapists actually aren’t interested in blaming your parents for your problems. What they really want is to help you acknowledge and express the thoughts and feelings you had toward your parents but repressed and didn’t let yourself feel.

Why? When you release these emotional blocks that formed in your childhood, and the limiting beliefs connected to them, you’re free to see yourself differently. You’re free to be different, feel different, and to make different choices. That inner freedom is the real goal of therapy.

Once you find that freedom, there’s no need to stay focused on what held you back before you found it. The best outcome in therapy is when you can make peace with what happened in the past and move on.

Talking about your past in therapy can give you clarity and insight. It can help you see which of the beliefs and attitudes you hold are authentically yours and which are ways of thinking you unconsciously picked up from your parents (and can choose to release if you don’t want to carry them anymore).

The healing process in therapy is primarily an emotional one. In other words, you can only heal as much as you can feel.

So, after you have an intellectual insight about why you feel the way you do, the next step is to feel how you feel. This includes letting yourself fully experience your reaction to this new insight as well as the emotions you didn’t let yourself feel in the past.

This is exactly what a therapist is trained to help you do. A caring therapist helps you feel safe enough to get really vulnerable and think, say, and feel things you’ve never been able to before. The emotional connection you form with them helps you connect to and express long-forgotten parts of yourself.

If you never really think about the past, you may not feel like it affects you much now, but it does. The past leaves an unconscious residue that colors your emotional reactions. Therapy helps you clear out those rusted old emotions and give your inner life a new coat of paint.

Think of your psyche as a house. A strange house. There are many locked rooms in it that no one has gone into in years. No one has replaced the furniture, dusted or vacuumed, or updated the décor in them since you were young. You’ve been stuck with sleeping on a faded, stained old couch and making all your meals in the microwave because the stove doesn’t work.

Going to therapy is like finally unlocking all those doors, throwing the windows open, and taking care of that old house. It’s not just that you can dust and vacuum away a lot of debris and breathe a little more easily. You can also toss out all the uncomfortable old furniture and replace it with stuff you actually like and want. You can let go of all those secondhand goods and move in new stuff that feels like you.

The past formed your sense of self, and it continues to inform it based on how you think—and feel—about your past in the present.

You may even have formed a “false self” as a way to cope. And you may never have examined or updated it, even though you’re living in very different circumstances now.

You might be surprised by how many of the ways you think, react, and feel were unconsciously adopted in unthinking imitation of the people you trusted to teach you how to live. You might be surprised by how much the way you learned to respond to the world came from survival instincts that limited you in order to keep you safe.

Going to therapy helps you figure out who you really are. It helps you connect to your true self. It does this by revealing ways of thinking, feeling, and being that you didn’t consciously choose but can choose to change now. It empowers you to decide whether to keep them or let them go. It gives you the keys you need to unlock all the doors of your house so you can make the place where you’re going to spend the rest of your life truly your own.

You don’t always have to talk about the past in therapy, but it usually helps. So much of who you are and how you feel reaches back into it.

While trauma (which can include adverse childhood events you wouldn’t necessarily think of as trauma) has a huge impact, and is always worth addressing, you can benefit from exploring your past even when you haven’t had any. For example, you may just want to find new ways to experience yourself and the world. Therapy can help you do that, too.

Sometimes, things that seem deep are pretty simple. Something you might think is deeply rooted might not require delving into your past at all to address. On the other hand, some things that seem simple might actually reach pretty far back.

For example, you might get stuck every time you try to work on one particular goal. Maybe that block comes from something you internalized in your childhood—and maybe finding out the reason for your block can do more than just help you get past it. It might help you succeed in ways you never imagined were possible.

Talking about the past doesn’t always help. It’s possible to wallow or get stuck there, even in therapy. Focusing on the past can become especially toxic if you devote a lot of energy to blaming someone or something from your past for how you feel in the present.

It’s important to hold those who hurt you accountable, but it’s also important to work through the anger and hurt you feel instead of staying stuck there forever.

By dealing with the past instead of dwelling on it, you can free yourself to live more fully in the present. You can find joy and become a brighter, more authentic version of yourself, unburdened by what came before and free now to pursue your biggest, boldest dreams.