Why It Feels Like It’s Happening Again. Episode 2.When The Past Feels Present

A delayed text. A different tone. A silence that lasts a beat too long. Sometimes the smallest shift lands like a warning siren, and we can’t explain why, except for the awful certainty of “I know where this goes.” We talk through that experience with care and precision, because it isn’t random and it isn’t a character flaw.

We explore how the mind holds experience not only as narrative memory, but as patterns that live below words. Using attachment theory, we unpack John Bowlby’s internal working model and how early responsiveness shapes what “connection” feels like in the body. We also draw on transactional analysis and Eric Berne’s idea of life scripts, showing how unconscious expectations about love, safety, and abandonment can organize adult behavior even when the present relationship is stable.

From there, we go deeper into procedural memory and Wilfred Bion’s view of what happens when emotional experience isn’t fully processed or “contained.” That’s when the past returns as a state, psychological time collapses, and we react to an internal template rather than the person in front of us. We connect these dynamics to anxiety, overwhelm, depression, and trauma triggers that resemble PTSD mechanisms, and we close by naming why ambiguity and unexplained disappearing can be so uniquely destructive.

If this resonates, listen and share it with someone who’s been calling themselves “too sensitive,” then subscribe and leave a review so more people can find the series. What’s the smallest change that triggers the biggest reaction for you?

Transcript

When Life Feels Strangely Familiar

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to episode two in this new series from Inside the Consulting Room. And this episode is called The Mind That Remembers Without Words from the series Why It Feels Like It's Happening Again. There are moments in the lives of adults that feel strangely familiar. Not because you can remember them happening before, but because something you already seems to know what they mean. Could be a look, a silence, a delay, and suddenly, without quite understanding why, you find yourself reacting. Not just to what is happening now, but to something deeper, something older. You don't necessarily think this reminds me of something. You feel. I know where this goes. And that is the part that can feel so confusing because there's no clear memory, or at least not in that moment. There's no specific event you can point to. And yet your response is immediate. It becomes organized and convincing, as though your mind has already written the ending. In the last episode, we explored the experience of emotional activation, that moment where something small in the present begins to feel disproportionately significant. So now I want to move one step deeper. Because if we want to understand why this happens, we have to understand something about the way the mind holds experience. Not as stories necessarily, but as patterns. And that's true, but psychologically, some of the most powerful experiences we carry are not stored in that way at all. They're not held as clear narrative memories. They're held as felt templates. And these are ways of anticipating how others respond, what relationships feel like, what happens when something shifts. This idea was first described in some considerable depth by John Bowby, who introduced the concept of the internal working models. Put simply, we develop an internal sense of how relationships work, and we carry that forward into future relationships, not consciously, but implicitly. In the theoretical therapeutic model of transactional analysis, Eric Byrne, the founder, talked about scripts, scripts we live by, things that we have learned and translated into unconscious messages about what to expect and the way that things will be, and the way that we have to be. And the emphasis here is that they both, Bowlby and Byrne, shared the understanding that there were layers beneath consciousness where these things were stored and they become activated in the present regardless of how old they are. They don't get forgotten, or they might in a conscious sense, but the mind doesn't forget the template. And the brain as a structure, once activated, will trigger the same neural pathways that have been formed very early on. So an internal working model is not so much a belief in the usual conscious sense. It's not something you sit and think about. It's something you experience from within, and it is automatic. So it shapes what you expect from others, how you interpret their behavior, how safe or uncertain connection feels. And importantly, it forms early, often in relationships where responsiveness and what was inconsistent, where emotional availability may have shifted unpredictably, and connection felt present and then absent. And when that happens, the mind does something adaptive, it begins to track patterns, not just what is happening now, but what tends to happen next. There's another layer to this, because not all memory is verbal, not all memory is something we can consciously access and communicate. Some memory is what we call procedural, it lives in the body in emotional response and in anticipation. And this is where the work of Wilfred Beon becomes relevant because he spoke about the mind's capacity to process emotional experience. That is to take in something raw and make sense of it. But when experiences are overwhelming, inconsistent, or not adequately contained, they're not fully processed. So they become activated and find expression in the present in a different form. Not so much as understanding, but more like an expectation. So imagine a child in an environment where connection is present but not reliable. Or responses vary. Sometimes they're attuned and connected, sometimes not. Emotional signals are not always understood or met. The child doesn't simply feel confused, they begin to organize themselves around prediction. They learn to scan for change, to detect shifts early, and to anticipate what might follow. And this isn't dysfunction, it is adaptation, and it's a survival mechanism, psychologically, and sometimes in other ways too. And it's the mind trying to stay one step ahead of uncertainty. Now fast forward to adult life. You are now in a relationship that in many ways feels safe and containing. And then something small changes. A delay, a difference in tone, a break in rhythm, and suddenly the system activates. Not because the present is unsafe, but because the pattern is familiar. And here's the crucial part: you're not remembering the past as an event, you are reliving it as a state. That's why it feels so immediate, so convincing. Because psychologically, time collapses. The past is not experienced as then, it is experienced as now. And so the response is not measured, it is organized and ready, just as it learned to be. If the process goes unrecognized, something subtle begins to happen. We start responding not to the person in front of us, but to the internal model we carry. So we may then misinterpret neutral behavior, anticipate withdrawal where none exists, seek reassurance prematurely, or even withdraw ourselves. And over this, over time, this can begin to shape the relationship itself. Not because the relationship is inherently unstable, but because the past has begun to organize the present. But there's another way to understand this, not as an overreaction, not as insecurity in a simplistic sense, but as something more precise. A system that has learned very carefully how to detect change, how to anticipate loss, and how to protect connection. And that deserves a different kind of response, not dismissal, but understanding. Many patients I have worked with get caught in what I think can only be described as an emotionally activated collision where the events of the present collide with the unprocessed experiences of the past, and they can be caught in the most painful state that has its roots in early childhood. Some people then will go on to develop secondary symptoms. Anxiety is the most common, but also heightened stress arousal, which is problematic in its own right, a complete sense of overwhelm. If this happens often enough, it's possible the person may then go on to develop depression. If we think about post-traumatic stress disorder, what we know about that is that unprocessed traumatic events live under the surface, and then seemingly insignificant things in the present that we call triggers create a release of that which doesn't fit the present day. In a way, we're describing a very similar mechanism, and sometimes patients have endured traumatic events and have developed post-traumatic stress reactions later on in life that have been triggered by minor events. At those times, they will maybe withdraw because they're overwhelmed, maybe they'll be incredibly reactive, and the part of them that is unable to recognize the connection in the moment can't do that because it's overwhelmed. It's gone back into survival mode or fear mode. And the confusion that creates is something which in that moment the sufferer can't rationalize. The same kind of mechanisms with things that are to do with more subtle early experiences, but that they were cumulative. And this notion of organizing yourself around something, that's what children do. But the organization is internal. And paradoxically, when it's triggered in adulthood, it is psychological disorganization, and the person is left in a state which can be paralyzing. In the next episode, we're going to look more closely at the specific moments that activate the system, because not all situations trigger it, and not all changes carry the same weight. We're going to explore why ambiguity is so powerful, why small shifts can feel so significant, and how the mind begins to construct meaning in the absence of certainty. I think ambiguity is probably one of the most destructive. When another person behaves towards us in a way which carries no explanation, leaves you wondering, what did I do? Provides doesn't respond to questions. People who leave others are a really good example of this. When one person silently leaves another and doesn't explain their actions for whatever reason, that is incredibly harming. And it will inevitably, regardless of your working model or your internal working model, it's going to be experienced as a cruel event. And people who have had this kind of experience, and it isn't necessarily just those who who disappear, but having said that, you know, there are other kinds of disappearances. The person can still be there in a kind of uh in a physical sense, but in every other sense, they're unavailable. And that has the potential to be very damaging. But for now, the most important thing to hold on to is this. What you are feeling, what you experiencing, is not random. It's not without structure, and it's not without meaning. It's the mind remembering in the only way it knows how. I'll be back shortly with the next episode. Thank you for listening.