26/02/2020
The Power of the Past
Have you ever had a problem - an emotion you don’t like experiencing, thoughts that are unhelpful and make you feel like rubbish, or find yourself doing things compulsively that you wish you weren’t doing - and you can’t work out why?
When dealing with problems such as these we are many times these days asked to focus on the present moment - for example in CBT related approaches, and especially in mindfulness and meditation. Notice triggers. Record moods and patterns of behaviour. Stay mindful. And it certainly is important (and very useful) to be able to be present in our lives.
However, oftentimes, difficult problems in our present life originated from a moment earlier on in our life - sometimes much, much earlier.
I’ve worked with a whole bunch of people who, when we actually spend the time to focus on an issue, we begin to see how it is a familiar pattern, that has occurred in - not always identical of a form - but with noticeable similarity in the past. In fact, people will often have ‘aha’ moments when they say things like ‘oh my goodness, this is the same feeling I was having when … ‘. Sometimes this ‘when’ is just a few years ago, sometimes it’s much further back.
This makes sense, when we really think about it.
Our mind likes to make judgments and decisions, and when it does, those ‘decisions’ sometimes stick around as thoughts and feelings well beyond their sell by date.
Like the person I worked with who broke up with his first love, and because that break up was so difficult and undesirable to him at the time, that in every relationship after that, there was an underlying fear that she would break it off with him. So he’d find a way to do it first, so he didn’t have to experience that feeling of abandonment again.
Some thought and feeling patterns come from the recent past, some from our teen years (especially relationship related thoughts and feelings) and some from even earlier. And these thought and feeling patterns can sometimes run through our lives like a series of roots, tunneling in and under our lives, only to push up through the soil and affect us when we least expect it, undermining our plans and actions.
So, that’s the bad news, if you like. Things we are stuck with now sometimes have deep roots in past experiences.
There’s good news though.
Because everything we feel or think about an event is based on our perspective of it at the time, this means that, when we look at those same events from a different perspective, then we have the chance to develop different thoughts and feelings about that event. There’s a knack to doing this, but it is definitely possible.
And when we do this, suddenly we find there is valuable learning to be had from these events.
Every time an event causes us difficulty, it has learning in it which, when we find it, allows us to move forwards even more freely in our life. It’s like the learning got ‘frozen’ in there when we felt disempowered by it instead. When we free that learning, ‘unfreeze’ that event, then everything we were thinking or feeling (and acting) based on that event and that type of event begins to loosen up, and we begin to gain control over our lives again.
I see this time and time again with people I coach and see for therapy.
I’ve been using this principle myself over the last few weeks.
I have a book I am writing (about NLP). But this is the first full length book I’ve ever written. I’ve written a vast amount of pages and material over the years, but never a book. So as soon as I sat down to start outlining my book, all the expected doubts of someone starting out writing began to enter my head: will it be good enough, can I do this, can I finish this, what if people don’t like it etc etc.
But I knew this was likely to happen, so I already had a plan to deal with it. I began to take each thought of self-doubt, and apply the techniques I use when working with clients.
And, of course, each of these ‘thought viruses’ had begun some years ago. Several, it turned out, started when I gave up on a novel I was writing in the early 2000’s. A couple dated back to my degree and essay writing. And one has gone back to very early childhood.
And because with each doubt I’ve been able to trace it to an event, I have been able to re-evaluate that event with all I know now - all my wisdom and years of life experience, and all I know now in life. With each event I have been able to change my perspective, and understanding, of that event, and with that, the feelings and thoughts about the event change and the doubts drop away.
Interestingly, as I have been doing this, I have found myself spontaneously generating ideas for my book, putting the structure together, adjusting the way I am writing it based on what I am learning about myself, and writing, from these perspective shifts.
As each doubt has dropped away, my optimism, energy and focus on the book has grown steadily stronger.
The past can have great power over us.
But it also has the power to set us free.
