Is My Past a Home or a Library? How to stop dwelling on the past.

What’s a home?

A place where you dwell. Where you spend a lot of time. You identify with it. Even if you remodel, a home basically doesn’t change. Walls surround you. That space shapes who you are and how you think about yourself.

Now consider a different kind of space. What is a library?

A library is a source of knowledge and learning. For the curious, a library can be very interesting. Best approached with an open mind or a good question to investigate, the library holds experiences that one can learn from, or put aside. You pick a book off a shelf, read it, think about it, and decide what is worth keeping. Take what you need and leave the rest. You can always go back and revisit.

So what happens when we treat our past experiences more like one of these spaces than the other? How we relate to our past shapes whether we learn from it or just keep living in it.

Why does the home versus library distinction matter?

Our dwelling should be our shelter. Comfortable and safe. A place to rest and recover, to share experiences with others.

By contrast, a library is a place to visit, borrow some knowledge, and leave. We may borrow a book to read at home, but then we return it. Separate from our home. What we learn from the book might be life-changing, and guide us for years to come. Books provide information, and what we learn from them is actually up to us. How we apply that learning in our lives is also up to us.

I think this distinction matters when it comes to our personal experiences. Our life is a collection of experiences. These chapters can be a source of learning, if we choose to think about them from a systems perspective. Are we dwelling in our past, or visiting it to learn?

How can systems thinking help you learn from past experiences?

One core idea in Bowen Family Systems Theory is that the parts of a system all contribute to the function of the system, and the system contributes to the functioning of the part. Each part has some influence on the system, and its experiences shape how the whole system functions.

What I find interesting is that humans have agency. We can make choices. And we have the ability to think about the part we play in a system and work on changing our part. Often this has to do with how we react to the system, and how we think about the system, the stories we create about it.

Murray Bowen described this capacity as differentiation of self, the degree to which a person can distinguish between thinking and feeling, and between their own functioning and the functioning of others. Reactivity is something we have agency over. That might be hard at first, but we are not robots, not operating solely on instinct. We do have the capacity to observe, reflect, analyze, and make choices.

What questions help separate fact from story?

One way to work on this is to approach past experiences with curiosity rather than judgement. Systems thinking asks questions in order to understand. For example, you might ask yourself:

• Can I objectively name the facts of an event, separate from the story I’ve told myself about it?
• Can I understand others’ point of view?
• Do I understand how I might have contributed to this situation?
• How might I be different going forward?
• Am I open to what I can learn from this event?
• Could I write a narrative of what happened, what part I played, and what I’ve learned? Could I include how I want to be different going forward?
• Can I put that narrative into my library, so I can revisit it when I choose?
• Can I leave the narrative in the library, and leave the library?
• Can I go back home a little wiser from the experience?

Asking these kinds of questions moves us from reacting to reflecting. They help us look at our own part in a situation rather than staying focused on what others did.

How can you move from dwelling to learning?

Instead of dwelling with an event, we can put the story on the shelf of our library of lessons learned.

I notice in my own life that the experiences I’ve struggled with most are the ones I kept living in rather than learning from. So the work I try to do is to take those experiences, write a clearer story about them, and place them on a shelf where I can visit them when I choose to. Not to avoid them, but to stop dwelling there.

This is how our past can be a library of learning, and not a home of the past. Learning from past experiences is ongoing work, and it’s not easy. But the more I practise approaching my own experiences with curiosity instead of reactivity, the more I find I can learn from them and move forward.

If you’re curious about this way of thinking, Bowen Family Systems Theory is where it comes from. And if you’d like to explore how it applies to your own relationships and family, that’s the kind of work I do.