Your Past is Present.

For the last few years I've been digging deep into my own past, mostly as a way of understanding why I do some of the things I do. I'm not talking about the past as a general concept -- who raised me, where, how and in what environment. Those factors make up part of who I am, but they don't tell the whole story of how I view the world and how I react to it.

I've been reading a lot about about how the brain processes events in life, particularly in early childhood. There is a great deal of research out there on the impact of caregiving on the autonomic nervous system and how it creates styles of attachment with people in your life. It turns out that fundamental pathways of how you interact with the world -- particularly in relationships -- are coded very early in life, and depend very heavily on the way you were cared for as a child, even before you had the capacity for language.

This may seem hard to believe at first glance; how can the first 18-24 months of life dictate so much of who you are as an adult? It's all in the brain and how our nervous system adapts to stress to keep us safe. Our neural pathways become wired in a way that enables us to survive when faced with fear, anxiety, and trauma. We develop behaviors to manage these threats, and often they become hardwired into us at a subconscious level. I grew up in a family that was chaotic and often violent, and I my caregivers often failed to protect me in a healthy way. They had their own childhood traumas -- and I don't blame them -- but in the end I developed a very fearful strategy in relationships that made it difficult to trust others. In many ways I attribute why I became an entrepreneur to my fear of being trapped -- of taking a job in a company where I had no control and had to trust the actions of others.

The reality for me is that my childhood experiences laid down some very powerful pathways in my brain that I've always experienced as physical sensations. The fear, the "fight or flight" feeling, the triggered reactions to events in my relationships, were visceral feelings I would have that were very often disconnected from my conscious reality. I often felt hijacked by reactions that I didn't understand, and this often led me to act out in ways that were foreign to me and didn't reflect who I am as a person.

It turns out this is well-understood in science. In his great book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk describes how the part of the brain that stores our traumatic experiences is outside of our rational brain and is particularly immune to talk therapy and other types of cognitive solutions:

While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These post-traumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.

This really rings true for me. And years of talk therapy did nothing to solve any of it. I had to turn to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) to work on turning off some of these neural pathways that had been created during childhood. EMDR works in a mysterious way that is not fully understood, but it had really helped me and many others that I know. Over the past few years I've been able to reduce some triggers and become much more mindful of my reactions to the world around me.

I divulge all of this to let people know that it's not a sign of weakness to face your past. It takes courage to do so, because it's hard work to revisit past memories and rewrite your childhood. But that's what EMDR and other techniques in trauma treatment are doing -- it's rewriting certain memories in the brain and making them less powerful, which in turn makes you less reactive to them.

Your past is important. But it doesn't have to be in charge.

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Ken Davenport is an entrepreneur and the author of two novels, The Two Gates, an alternative history of the early 1960s, and The Bug Hunter, a futuristic sci fi thriller.