Is it Ever "From The Past"?

Someone recently expressed rage over childhood challenges he'd faced.

Another expressed rage for acts of violence against her years ago. Their descriptions of their rage: "It's inside/bottled up/repressed."

Seems reasonable.

However, are they really expressing past rage or perhaps current rage about the past?

Cellular memory is in vogue right now, but I wonder ... could it be a current belief that's causing all the trouble? With sincere respect, I vote for the current belief being the agitator rather than emotions mysteriously contained within memory cells.

I worked with a woman in one of our programs who had been raped. She saw it as a violation of her very soul that had done permanent damage to her spirit. Tears filled her eyes as she sadly described the details of her experience; then she grew angry. As we explored her experience and her feelings about it, she created new insights for herself. She realized, first, that she had had the courage to survive. Then she saw how that courage had become a cornerstone of her career as a social worker and a big factor in her ability to help others. The cloud of pain began to lift. She smiled softly. Did the event suddenly disappear from her memory of her past? Of course not. What did change was her current perspective and her beliefs about that past and its impact on her life.

Were her sadness and anger locked up in her cells as cellular memory or were they an expression of her beliefs in the present, which she now was able to change? I still vote for the latter.

If pain is experienced now, in the present, and the belief fueling the pain is held in the present, then it's not about changing the past, but about changing the present view of our experience of the past.