When I Rethink My Past, Who Do You Become?

On personal change, a shared past, and the power we hold over another person's story

At the end of Ibsen's A Doll's House, a moment before Nora slams the door, she does something to Torvald that is harder than leaving him. She accuses him.

We tend to remember the scene as the moment Nora realizes she must become a person in her own right. But she does not only say: you never knew me. She says something much closer to: you helped make me into a doll. She describes how she passed from her father's hands into Torvald's, how the two of them determined the tastes, the opinions and the very form in which she was supposed to exist. She says she was first a "doll-child" and then a "doll-wife," and she holds her father and her husband responsible for a life of which she could make nothing of her own. Torvald grasps at once how grave this is. He does not only ask why she is leaving. He rises up against the very way she describes their marriage. In Ibsen, Nora says explicitly that her father and Torvald have sinned against her, and that because of them she has made nothing of her life.

If Nora was a doll-wife, Torvald is not merely the man who failed to understand her. He is the man who made her into a doll. Suddenly the word "love" is no longer self-evident. What he remembered as protection can be read as paternalism. What he remembered as care can be read as control. The affection with which he surrounded her can become part of the very mechanism that allowed him not to see her as a separate person.

Her change does not only open a new future for her. It imposes a new past on him. And this may be one of the reasons a change in someone close to us can provoke such fierce resistance: the person who changes is not always telling us only "I am no longer who I was." Sometimes they are saying "and you are not who you thought you were, either."

Sometimes change is an indictment of the past

We like to speak of change as if it belonged to the person who makes it. I change careers, leave the religion I was raised in, end a relationship, stop being the child who always rescues everyone, begin to understand my childhood differently. But our lives take place within relationships. And so when I change the way I understand myself, I also change your role in my story.

A woman says, after twenty years of marriage: "Only now do I understand how alone I was." That says something about her husband as well. If she was alone — where was he? If she says that all those years she made herself smaller so as not to threaten him, he hears inside her sentence a possibility that may never have crossed his mind: I was someone who needed my wife to be smaller than me.

This is what the phrase "resistance to change" misses. Sometimes the other person is not saying: don't change. They are saying: don't turn me into someone I am unable to think I was.

We are built inside other people's stories

A shared past is a strange kind of property. I have the right to say what I felt in my marriage, but my marriage was also yours. I have the right to say what my childhood was like, but if I have siblings, that same family was their childhood too. I can say I felt my father did not see me, but his fatherhood is also part of the story he tells himself about the person he tried to be.

Research on family narratives shows that conversations about a shared past take part in building a sense of self and the family's sense of "we." A study by Bohanek, Marin, Fivush and Duke even distinguished between families that manage to integrate several perspectives on a shared event and families in which a single perspective is imposed on the story.

We are, in effect, living inside one another's biographies. And so a deep change is like one of the actors in a play returning, twenty years on, to the first act and changing the name of their part — and in doing so, changing the names of everyone else's parts as well.

I was "the devoted daughter," and you were "the sick mother who needs me." If I now say I was a girl forced to take care of her mother, you are no longer only a sick mother; you can also become the mother who turned her daughter into her caregiver.

I was "the woman who is always looked after," and you were "the husband who protects me." If I now call that protection control, your role has changed too.

My new identity can be a new accusation against you.

The child who breaks free can make their parents guilty

In an essay on the favored child and the scapegoat (in Hebrew), I wrote about "the retroactive casting of fate": a family gives a child a role, and then reads that child's entire childhood as though the role had only revealed who they had been all along. He "was always difficult," she "was always the responsible one," he "was always selfish," she "was always sensitive."

But the opposite movement can be no less violent. The child grows up, finds another language, and says: I was not a problem child. I was the child onto whom you placed the problems you could not bear. This is no small change of wording. The parents are no longer merely the parents of a difficult child. They become the parents who turned a child into a scapegoat. The sister who was "the good girl" is no longer only the one who did better. She can also become the one who benefited, without choosing to, from a family structure that laid the cost on her brother.

The whole past changes its moral distribution of roles. And that is why families sometimes fight the new story so hard. They are not defending only comfort, hierarchy or equilibrium. They are defending the possibility of going on thinking that they were good people.

"But I loved you"

This may be the sentence that appears, in one form or another, in all of these confrontations: but I loved you, but I did everything for you, but I only wanted to protect you, but I worked my whole life so that you would lack nothing. And this is not necessarily manipulation. Sometimes the person really did love.

Torvald does not walk around his house wondering how to curtail his wife's independence today. On the contrary. He is convinced that he loves her. His patronizing language, his concern, his sense of responsibility, and the fact that he sees himself as knowing better than she does — for him, all of these belong to the same thing, the thing he calls love. And that is exactly what makes Nora's accusation so hard. She does not tell him that the love never existed. She tells him that perhaps the love itself was one of the ways in which he turned her into a doll.

There is no clean choice here between "he loved her" and "he controlled her." Sometimes control is wrapped so deeply in love that the person exercising it cannot tell the two apart. And then, when the one who was on the other side gives the story a new name, they are not only discovering a truth about themselves. They are wrecking the moral story of the life of the person who loved them.

When women's struggle retroactively changed the man who had been "a good man"

On a social scale, feminism did something similar to what Nora does to Torvald. It did not only demand that women have more possibilities in the future. It sent women back to their past with new words: dependence, invisible labor, harassment, marital rape, paternalism, economic control, belittlement. These words did not only open new possibilities for action. They retroactively changed the meaning of events that had already taken place.

A man could have lived for thirty years with the story: I provided for the family. Then his wife says: and that is why I never had money of my own. He remembers: I took responsibility for the big decisions. She remembers: I never really had an equal right to decide. He says: I wanted to look after you. She says: you didn't trust me to know how to look after myself.

The new reading does not only require him to give up power from now on. It changes the meaning of the power he had before. One can give up a privilege and remain a good person. It is much harder to accept that the things you were proud of — the things through which you knew you were a good husband, a good father, a good man — become, for the other person, part of the story of what hurt them.

Research on masculinity threat describes how a perceived decline in the value of traditional masculinity can provoke in men a threat to their status and to their symbolic identity, and can increase resistance to feminist movements. But "status threat" still sounds too external. The sharper threat is: perhaps what I thought was my virtue has become my sin.

Pain wants to cause pain

And here we have to stop cleaning the thing up.

Someone who feels terrible pain sometimes wants the one who caused the pain — to hurt.

Not only to understand. Not only to acknowledge. Not only to say the right words. Something of the wound has to change sides.

If for years I carry what you did to me, and you go on sleeping, loving, raising children and holding on to yourself as a good person, there is something unbearable in that gap. I carry our history in my body, and you carry, at most, a memory. I lost something, and you can say "I didn't mean it." I have to live with what happened, and you can move on.

In this place I do not only want you to understand my wound. I want to take my wound and stab you with it, so that you feel a trace of the pain.

Accusation is one of the ways it can be done.

If I tell you: you were the person who hurt me, I am not only giving you information about the past. I am putting something into your relationship with yourself. I want it so that when you remember what happened, you can no longer feel toward yourself exactly as you felt before. I want my story to sit beside you when you tell yourself "I was a good husband," "I was a good father," "I did the best I could." I want it to get in the way.

This is one of the reasons the word guilt matters. Empathy still allows me to remain whole: I'm sorry you were hurt. Guilt already says: your pain says something about me.

And when the pain is great, sometimes this is exactly what the injured person wants. Not because they have read an article on restorative justice, but because it hurts. If what you did goes on living inside me, I do not want you to come out of it unharmed.

And it is not enough that it hurts you now

Here the demand becomes sharper still. Because your guilt, now, can also come to an end. You will grow old, go on with your life, have new people who love you. You can become a devoted father, a beloved grandfather, a person whose surrounding story no longer includes me.

But I cannot necessarily do the same. What you did to me can carry on into my body, into my relationships, into the way I touch, fear, believe, raise children. Our past can go on exacting a price from me even when, for you, it is already a distant event.

And then a very hard demand arises:

If our past continues into my future, something in your future must call you to account for it.

I want your children to know.

Not just that you tell them you "made mistakes when you were young." I want my story to be there when you tell them who you were. I want them to know that there was another person who lived through the same events differently from you. I want them to see you, if only for a moment, through my eyes as well.

This is no longer only a demand on your conscience. It is a demand on your legacy.

I am claiming a place in the story you will leave to your children.

That your children should see you through my eyes

Perhaps this is one of the deepest forms in which an injured person asks the one who injured them to pay for a past that cannot be returned. It is impossible to return a childhood that was taken, a body that was harmed, a home that was lost, a person who was murdered. Time cannot be turned back. But one can fight over the question of who will tell the past after both sides are dead. This is part of what is needed in facing both collective trauma and personal trauma.

One of the deepest outcomes of the struggle over Holocaust memory in Germany was precisely a refusal to let the crimes of the perpetrator generation be buried with them. Post-war German memory developed in the direction of what memory scholars sometimes call "negative memory": the perpetrators and their deeds are not meant to be removed from national identity so as to allow Germany a clean, positive story; they must remain within it, and be handed down even to generations who did not commit the crimes themselves.

This does not mean that a German child is born guilty of Auschwitz. That is not the point. The point is that his father or grandfather is not automatically entitled to bequeath him a family story cleansed of the people they harmed.

The Israeli psychologist Dan Bar-On interviewed the children of Germans who had been directly involved in the machinery of extermination, and of SS men who served in the places where the atrocities were carried out. He found an almost total silencing of the extermination in the homes and schools of many of them; when some of the children discovered what their father's role had been and understood its moral meaning, they were drawn into a hard emotional and moral confrontation with the figure of the father.

This is the moment when the victim enters the relationship between father and son without being in the room.

The son may remember a father who held him, taught him to ride a bicycle, and loved him. But now there is another gaze inside that memory. A person who was murdered, deported or tortured can say from within the past: the man who was a good father to you was also this man to me.

This is a hard demand. It does not require the son to stop loving his father. It requires something crueler: to love him without being permitted not to know.

If I carry you as a wound, you will carry me as guilt

There is something here to which the word "revenge" also belongs. Not everything that happens here is reconciliation, healing or a search for truth. Sometimes the injured person has a simple, direct wish: you hurt me, and I want you to hurt.

Not in the same way. Perhaps that isn't even possible. But something has to pass over to you.

If I cannot give you back the night I did not sleep, perhaps I want you to have one night in which you do not sleep because of what you did. If I cannot give you back the fear you put into my body, perhaps I want you to be afraid, for a moment, of the person you discover you were. If I have to carry you into my relationships with my children, I want my story to enter your relationships with yours as well.

This is not a theoretical question about "intergenerational responsibility." It is an emotional claim:

You will not get a future clean of the thing from which I have no clean future.

And perhaps this is one of the reasons we build memorials, write testimonies, hold trials, demand apologies, put stories into textbooks. These are not only means of preventing forgetting. Sometimes they are the way the injured party makes sure that the one who injured them cannot close the file while the injured party is still living inside it.

The wound asks for a witness. Then it asks for a judge. And sometimes it asks for heirs as well.

If I carry you with me as a wound, you will carry me with you as guilt. And if you die, I want something of that guilt to remain inside the story they tell about you.

Only now can we ask: who is entitled to speak for the person I was then?

Only after saying all this can we reach the counter-argument. Because the person retelling their past sometimes demands something further, no less difficult: that the self they are today be granted authority to interpret the self they were then.

Torvald can say to Nora: but you were here. You laughed. You took part. You asked me for things. You thought you were happy. You never said it was a doll's house.

And indeed, Nora herself says something disturbing: she thought she was happy, but now she says she was not.

The new story asks us to accept the possibility that a person, in real time, did not hold the final interpretation of their own life. I said I wanted to stay at home, but today I say I did not know what other choice I could have had. I said it was fine, but today I understand that I did not know I was allowed to say no. I was proud of taking care of everyone, and today I say I did not know I had the right not to be the one who takes care.

The self of today is in effect saying to the self of then, and to the people who lived with it: do not use what I said then against me, to decide once and for all who I was then.

This is a necessary part of every deep change. Otherwise every sentence we once spoke becomes a contract with no release: "but you always wanted this," "but back then you said you were happy," "but you chose it yourself."

Yet this demand is dangerous precisely because it is strong. If the self of today is given absolute authority over the self of then, it can turn every love into dependence, every consent into coercion and every choice into illusion. But if the self of then is given absolute authority, a person is never permitted to understand in retrospect something they had, at the time, no language to understand.

There is no way to clean up this problem. The past cannot rule on its own meaning alone, and the present cannot take absolute ownership of it.

And what if you refuse to be the person I say you were?

Here the story becomes a struggle.

I say: you hurt me.

You say: I loved you.

I say: you controlled me.

You say: I protected you.

I say: you made me into a doll.

You say: I gave you everything.

And I may need you to give in. Not only to say "I respect your experience," but to say: yes. I did that to you.

Because as long as you refuse, something of the wound stays, once again, only with me. You hold on to your innocence and I hold on to the pain.

And if you will not give me the verdict I need, I may look for another place where it will be written. I will tell my sister. I will tell the children. I will write. I will testify. I will go to court. I will ask the community, history, the state, the generations to come to carry the version you refuse to carry.

The story is not looking only for an ear.

It is looking for a world in which what happened to me changes who you are allowed to be.

Torvald remains on the other side of the door

We remember the sound of the door slamming at the end of A Doll's House as the sound of Nora's freedom. But it is worth staying in the room for a moment after she goes.

An hour ago Torvald knew who he was. He was a respectable husband — responsible, loving — protecting a slightly childish woman who needed him. Now this woman has told him that her childishness was not only a trait of hers. It was built within her relationship with him. The house in which he thought he was keeping her safe was, for her, a doll's house. The manhood he was proud of was part of what she had to get out of in order to discover whether she was a person of her own at all.

She leaves to find out who she is. But she does not leave him as he was.

She leaves him guilt, and doubt about himself.

And if one day their children ask why their mother left, the story "Mother abandoned us" will no longer be the only story in the room. Her accusation has remained there too: I left because in this house I was your father's doll.

From that moment Torvald no longer controls, on his own, what his children will be able to know about him. Her gaze can remain between them. The question takes on another form when it comes to changing one's life after trauma (in Hebrew): a person can feel that they have begun to live, while the one who loves them feels they have lost them.

And this may be the hardest thing about a new story of the past. The person who was hurt does not always ask only to be freed from the past. They want the past to do something to the one who hurt them as well.

Terrible pain does not always want to be understood. Sometimes it wants to cause pain.

It says: I cannot pay you back for what you did to me. I cannot put you inside my body, my childhood, the years I lost. But I can take my wound and stab your story with it. I can demand that you see yourself through my eyes. I can demand that your children see you through my eyes as well.

And the last demand is perhaps the simplest and cruelest of all:

You will not get out of this past before I do. If it goes on living in me as pain, I want it to go on living in you as guilt.

How much of my past is in your hands?

But there is also something frightening here, from the other side.

If Nora can, years later, understand her life with Torvald differently — she changes him too. The man who thought he had been a loving husband can become, in retrospect, the man who imprisoned her inside his love. And what is Torvald supposed to do with this possibility? Must he live from now on knowing that there is no final verdict on who he was, because another person can still change — and in changing, change him too?

This is not only Torvald's problem. It is the problem of anyone who has ever loved another person, raised a child, been a friend, a sibling, a teacher, a therapist. In every deep relationship we deposit part of our biography within another person. They become a witness to what we were, but also the one who may one day give what we were a name we did not know.

Should a father know that in thirty years his daughter may call his devotion an intrusion? Should a man know that the masculinity he was proud of may one day be called "toxic"? Can a woman who took care of everyone discover one day that in her children's eyes she was not only the one who held the house together, but also the one who would not let them breathe?

If so, our identity is never entirely in our own hands. It remains open inside the memories of others.

And this may be one heavy price of a shared life: we give the people we love a future power over our past.

But if this power is absolute, the opposite problem arises. Because then every person becomes hostage to the latest interpretation of whoever lived with them. No love can know whether one day it will be called harm, no giving is safe from becoming a debt, and no one can say any longer: I know who I was.

Perhaps that is why the struggle over the past cannot end with the new version defeating the old one. It can wound it, unsettle it, even expose something in it that was hidden — but it does not necessarily gain full ownership of it.

The shared past is exactly this terrible thing: it is mine, and it is also yours, and neither of us holds it alone.