The Relational Soul: Moving from False Self to Deep Connection by Richard Plass

Author:Richard Plass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2014-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

Our Story Is Our Identity

Our story gives rise to our identity. When people meet someone for the first time and try to get to know each other, they don’t say, “I’m a mixture of compulsive defenses seeking to compensate for my inability to trust at a deep level.” While all those things may be true, that is not where we begin. In order to give another a glimpse into our identity we tell a bit of our story—where we were born, where we’ve lived, what we do and so forth.

But many people don’t really know their story. Here is one reason why. Our story is composed of three things—events, emotions (surrounding the events we experienced) and interpretations (what we think we learned from the events and emotions of our lives). Events and emotions don’t become a story without an interpretation. Our interpretation is the script of our lives. It becomes my identity, and I become my interpretation. For example, if I suffered a great deal of significant losses in my life (events) and felt a lot of sadness over those losses (emotion), it could be easy to decide, I’m not going to ever get too close to anyone or anything (interpretation). My identity would be that of an aloof person.

Our explicit and implicit memory holds our story. The events (and often emotions) are registered in explicit memory. We can recall things that happened to us. We cannot change what we explicitly remember (that is, what happened to us and what we felt about that). Thankfully, we don’t have to change them. God takes all of what we have experienced and draws it into our true self.

But our story is also held in our implicit memory. Specifically, our interpretation of our life is always relational at its core, and the core of our relational wiring is in our implicit world. The events and emotions of our lives are interpreted primarily in terms of how we relate to others. This is why getting to the implicit realities of our story is foundational to soulful relationships. We have developed interpretations that affect our relationships. Without seeing what they are and why they are the way they are, we cannot move any deeper in our connections with God and others. We must get to both the conscious and unconscious realities of our story. We must do so because whatever we do not own will eventually own us. Our interpretation will dictate how we engage relationally.

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