You are probably an ignorant slave of your past. And following the advice to forget your past is the best way to continue to be one forever.
Humans live a consequential life, which means that the actions you took yesterday influence your current situation. Your present is a consequence of your past, if not all of it, then at least most of it. The more you ignore your past, the less you get to know yourself.
Jungian Explanation of Your Past
As we learned in my essay about Jungian Psychology, there are three parts of an individual’s personality:
the conscious psyche,
the personal unconscious psyche
and the collective unconscious psyche
The conscious psyche includes the parts of your personality that you are aware of firsthand. They are entirely influenced by your life experiences.
The personal unconscious is a consequence of events repressed or ignored by your conscious psyche. These are the aspects of your personality that you cannot explain or understand without analyzing yourself. You don’t have a firsthand awareness of them. Their origins are deep-rooted in your past.
The collective unconscious includes character traits that are not individually acquired but are inherited. Our instincts and primary desires as humans are a part of the collective unconscious. They are entirely biological, and personal experiences have very little influence over them.
After the above discussion, it wouldn’t be crazy to conclude that two-thirds of your personality (approx. 66.67%) is a direct outcome of your past experiences—both traumas and blessings included. This is why it would be foolish to ignore what you have endured in the past.
You And Your Past
Like the foundation of a house, our childhood is the foundation of the adult we turn out to be. Even the events that are a result of pure luck significantly shape our personalities in significant ways. Children are like clay in a potter’s hand. The problem is that it’s not always clear who the potter is, and sometimes it is just random luck.
Birth Order
If you are the first child of your parents, you will turn out to be more responsible. You are more likely to be a good leader when you grow up. You will be a good kid—the one who follows rules and shines academically. However, you are also more likely to be an anxious adult. You will be more sensitive to authority and can be more self-critical.
All of this magnifies if you are the only child of your parents.
Contrarily, the younger children are less responsible and more rebellious. The youngest child gets the most attention from all the family members and relatives. Getting used to having so much attention without much effort can lead them to feel entitled as an adult and angry when they don’t get what they expect.
It is surprising that Birth order—something that is entirely random—can have such a significant effect on the personality of your adult self.1
Your Low Self Esteem!
If you had hard-to-please parents who never appreciated you for anything you did to get their attention, you are more likely to get and stay in toxic relationships. People don’t respect your personal boundaries, and you have no problem with that. You’d let your friends make fun of you, even if gets insulting, just to stay a part of their group. You fear losing people, due to which you are more tolerant toward their disrespectful and toxic behavior.
Your childhood and teenage molds your personality in deeply complex ways. However, once you sit back and take a sincere look at your past, you can better understand yourself.
The Marshmallow Test
If you have read anything about child psychology, you have probably heard about the Marshmallow Test. It was an experiment designed to test a child’s ability to delay gratification.
In this study, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time. A marshmallow now, or two marshmallows after a while.
Children who were able to delay the joy for a bigger reward turned out to be more successful later in their life—both academically and financially. Isn’t that awesome?
Your life is a summation of small journeys. All that you do in your life is to move from point A to point B multiple times. With time those points change. But once you understand where you are, it becomes easier to get where you want to be. To move from point A to point B, it is more important to have a precise understanding of point A than that of point B.
I hope you learned something that will help you get a deeper understanding of the foundations of your personality. The more you know yourself, the more meaningful changes you can bring in yourself.
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In his 1996 book Born to Rebel, Frank Sulloway suggested that birth order had powerful effects on the Big Five personality traits.