The Past
For better or worse, your past shapes you into who you are today and how you navigate life. What you've experienced influences your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and how you show up in relationships. If you allow it, your past will control your present and tell you what's possible for your future. How well you integrate the lessons of your past directly impacts the quality of life you experience today and in the future.
Before I dive into why this is all true, I'd like to pause and geek out about the neuroscience of it all. Our brains are very complex computers, taking in about 11 million bits of unconscious sensory information each second. We are only consciously aware of 40-50 bits of that information, which is why it's so important to become aware of our unconscious programming and how it's overwhelmingly running the show. Our unconscious programming chooses what's important to bring to our awareness, controls how we respond or react, informs us on how we should feel, is what motivates us (especially when pleasure seeking), and is where repressed thoughts and memories are stored. Your unconscious mind is all the mental content outside your consciousness that heavily influences your every thought, behavior, emotion, and experience.
Your unconscious mind is made up of:
Repressed memories and traumatic experiences that are too painful to confront consciously.
Instincts (such as sexual or aggressive impulses) against societal norms.
Suppressed emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, or love that weren't processed or expressed.
Core beliefs and assumptions about yourself and the world that were formed during early childhood.
The shadow self is the repressed or suppressed traits within you that were disowned to be accepted and loved by others.
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious proposed by Jung of universal symbols and patterns of behavior.
Preverbal memories and early attachment experiences that shaped your unconscious emotional responses.
Defense mechanisms like denial, repression, and rejection that self-protect against psychological pain.
Unconscious learning and habits that have been solidified through repetition.
Forgotten and suppressed creativity and unexpressed creative impulses (unrealized or unobtained purpose).
You may explore and uncover your unconscious mind through the following practices:
Journaling (Stream-of-Consciousness Writing): Write three pages of your unfiltered thoughts first thing in the morning (if possible) to help bring unconscious thoughts and emotions to the surface.
Dream Analysis and Recording: Your dreams often reflect your hidden emotions, fears, and desires. By analyzing and keeping a record of your dreams it can offer you insights into your subconscious mind.
Free Association: Similar to journaling, free association is where you speak freely about whatever pops into your mind without judgment or censoring yourself. This exercise helps you uncover hidden thoughts and repressed memories that influence your conscious behavior and choices.
Guided Meditations and Hypnotherapy (QHHT): Both of these visualization techniques help you to access deeper layers of the mind by bypassing the ego (conscious defenses) to reveal suppressed emotions and memories. QHHT (Quantum Healthy Hypnosis Technique) helps you tap into your soul's consciousness uncovering even deeper layers of your psyche where past life trauma, generational trauma, and the collective unconscious reside.
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: In safe and therapeutic environments only, the use of psychedelics such as psilocybin, MDMA, and Ayahuasca can aid in accessing and processing deeply repressed memories and traumas that can lead to profound emotional healing.
Until you bring light to the unconscious, you'll be completely unaware of the motivations behind your choices, thoughts, feelings, and actions. As a result, you'll continually bring about the same experiences with similar outcomes, only deepening your ego's belief that nothing will ever change or be different. It isn't until you begin making conscious changes and choices that you'll be allowed to experience a new outcome. But bringing awareness to what's unconscious almost always requires a catalyst, willingness to change, and open-mindedness to create new thought patterns and beliefs - which are all a lot easier said than done. One of the reasons why reprogramming your unconscious mind is so hard is your ego's need to be right and validated, even if it's the opposite of what you desire, so your ego will fight you every step of the way. There are also unconscious points of attraction to people, places, and experiences that keep you stuck in repetitive cycles that need to be discovered, unraveled, and reintegrated to change your point of attraction.
There are several ways that your past molds you into the person you are today. Here are some of the reasons why your past matters:
Forms Your Identity + Sense of Safety: Your past shapes how you view yourself and the world around you, thus defining your values, beliefs, needs, and self-perception. Everything you go through in life is categorized by your brain as either a positive experience or a negative one, and whichever end of the spectrum the majority of your life experiences overwhelmingly fall defines if you view the world as safe or unsafe. This also influences how open you are to new experiences. Your family, culture, and early experiences all have a profound impact on your identity and how confident, secure, and safe you feel as an adult.
Emotional Patterns: All of your experiences, especially those from childhood, create the blueprint for your emotional availability, maturity, and quotient. Your nervous system isn't fully developed until age 25 (sometimes later) and is heavily influenced by environmental factors. As a child, you borrow much of your nervous system processing from your primary caregivers until around ages 10-12 which is why your attachment style is so heavily influenced by your primary caregivers and how generational patterns/cycles/trauma are perpetuated - it's literally in your DNA. How well you cope with stress, respond to conflict, deal with negative emotions, show up in relationships, and what you are naturally attracted to are all influenced greatly by the environment you grew up in and the emotional maturity and availability of your parents (or primary caregivers). Growing up in a chaotic environment attunes your nervous system to feel comfortable and at home in chaos. Until your current environment, person, or situation rises above your natural pain threshold, you won't feel unsafe or see how the person or situation is negatively impacting your well-being. In general, how well you react and respond to stress is also directly influenced by what environment you experienced as a child. If you grew up in a highly combative or high-conflict home, you might be hypervigilant or overly reactive to stress (even in situations that don't warrant a stress response) as an adult. Regardless of your upbringing and past, any unresolved trauma (realized or not) will cause you to self-sabotage healthy opportunities, lead to difficulties in forming close relationships and trusting others, and cause you unnecessary fear, worry, and anxiety. Additionally, if abuse or addiction were present in your childhood, you're more likely to accept pain and toxicity as a natural part of loving relationships.
Shapes Your Relationships: How well your parents nurtured and responded to your emotional and physical needs as a child directly impacts how you show up in relationships as an adult. If you had healthy relationships modeled to you as a child from parents with a secure attachment style, you're likelier to find relationships to be a safe haven which makes it easy for you to form healthy, secure, and trusting relationships with others. If you grew up in a home with immature, insecure, emotionally unavailable, and chaotic caregivers, you're more likely to find it difficult to trust new people, struggle with intimacy, be emotionally unavailable to some degree, be anxious or clingy in relationships, and are likely to fear abandonment. Your childhood also lays the blueprint for what the role of a partner or parent should look like. This is why as you transition into new phases or experiences throughout your life, you tend to begin taking on the traits of your caregiver in that role and end up replaying a similar dynamic with your romantic partner and/or children until you consciously choose differently.
Influences Your Decisions: While it's wise to learn from your past to avoid repeating painful experiences, sometimes your past can keep you from moving forward healthily. How well you've handled success, failure, and setbacks all influence your willingness to take risks and shape how you navigate similar life experiences in the future. How your family influenced your decisions growing up and how supported you felt regarding them all combine to create your ability to feel confident in the decisions you're making today and how well you trust yourself with the unknown. If you grew up in an environment where setbacks and failures were accepted as a normal part of learning, it's highly likely that you have no problem taking risks and have complete faith in your ability to pivot if something doesn't pan out as desired or something unexpected happens. However, if you grew up in a home where failures and setbacks weren't accepted or were punished for being less than perfect as a child, you're likely an adult who seeks safety and is highly risk-averse. The unknown is likely very intimidating and you probably beat yourself up if you don't show up perfectly in every area of your life all the time. This can keep you living a life smaller than you desire and prevent you from reaching your highest potential. This is one of the roots of settling. Whether it's in your career or whom you choose for a romantic partner, being afraid to go after what you truly desire will always leave you feeling unsatisfied and wanting more. This can lead to void-filling behaviors such as addictions and unhealthy coping mechanisms if you choose to stay in those situations. This can also keep us clinging to unhealthy people or situations long past their expiration date in the hopes that the situation will improve or the person will change - which they rarely ever do.
Creates Biases, Presumptions, Assumptions, and Expectations: Your expectations of life and what's possible are all shaped by your past experiences, successes, and failures. How optimistic or pessimistic you are stems from your past because it'll try to inform you of what's possible in the present and future based on the sum of your experiences. If your experiences have been overwhelmingly positive then you'll move about life with more optimism and expect the best out of people and situations. If your past experiences were overwhelmingly negative then you'll assume the worst in all new situations and people. For example, if you've experienced one failed relationship after another, the presumption or expectation that might develop is "all relationships are doomed to fail" which may cause you to avoid being in another relationship altogether unless you're willing to change your belief. If you were betrayed in a relationship this may cause you to be untrusting or believe others to be unreliable in all relationships moving forward which causes unnecessary chaos and distortion in connections. Confirmation bias happens when a core belief or presumption formed from your past is confirmed in the present. For example, if you were rejected romantically in the past you may look for signs that you're being rejected by a new partner or prospective partners, even if that's not what's happening. This behavior can lead to sabotaging perfectly healthy relationships or opportunities due to your fear of repeating a past painful experience.
Trauma + Triggers: What happened to you matters, but more importantly, what you don't heal will continue to haunt you. The trauma you experience in your life, be it a Big T Trauma like a near-death experience or a small t trauma like repeated rejection, the painful experiences of the past do create emotional wounds that require healing and sensitivity. Depending upon the severity of the experience and when it happened in your nervous system development, the trigger that activates that emotional wound will vary. If the experience happened before age three, any of your five senses could be the activation point because that is the only area of your brain developed at that time. This might be the reason why there's a personal aversion to certain smells or physical features without any conscious memory as to why you get triggered.
One thing that I find absolutely fascinating about humans is that we are all walking around perceiving reality differently. We each see life through our unique lens of perspective that is shaped by our level of awareness, experiences, knowledge, beliefs, values, biases, mindset, emotional state, and so much more. Every time that you learn something new, overcome a fear or challenge, or achieve personal growth you widen your lens of perspective and thus see reality more clearly. Having people around you with different perspectives and experiences is very beneficial because it helps to bring awareness to new thoughts and ideas outside of your current bias.
Your past can profoundly distort your current reality by creating presumptions and biases as a normal part of the brain's natural process of learning, association, and memory. Every time you have an experience, your brain creates a mental shortcut, assigns an emotional imprint, applies cultural conditioning, and creates cognitive schemas. All this natural brain processing and categorizing heavily influences how you interpret and respond to new situations, experiences, and people. While this is a great way for the brain to conserve energy and help you navigate the world mostly on autopilot, your personal biases also distort your perception and judgment which almost always leads to inaccurate and unfair assumptions or presumptions. Becoming more aware of how your past has shaped your present thinking allows you to reduce the impact your unconscious brain has, allowing you to remain more curious and open to making more objective and informed decisions.
Here are some helpful tools to help you identify your biases and unconscious thought patterns and steps on how to overcome them:
Self-Awareness: Self-reflective exercises and journaling are great tools to help bring awareness to your thoughts, behaviors, and natural reactions to different situations. With consistent journaling, you can see the patterns in your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs as they pertain to specific life events along with how you've grown or shifted perspectives over time. Asking for feedback from others close to you can also be helpful because sometimes they're able to see things that you aren't consciously aware of. Just be sure to be open and don't become defensive of the feedback provided. Exercise: To identify biases, think about a recent interaction and ask yourself the following questions:
What was my first reaction or thought?
Was I emotionally triggered by this person, topic, or event? If so, why?
Did I make any assumptions or presumptions about this person or situation? If so, what were they? Were they based in fact or a product of my past?
Did I remain open and curious or jump to conclusions, closing myself off and ending the interaction? How might the situation be different had I chosen a different action or response?
Did I give someone the benefit of the doubt, or did I judge them prematurely?
How might someone else perceive this situation or person? How does that differ from my perspective?
Is my reaction influenced by a past experience or relationship?
Am I projecting my past hurts, fears, or negative experiences onto this person or situation?
How would I feel if someone else was treating me this way? Would I feel it was justified or unfair? Why?
Am I seeking information or validation to confirm what I already feel is true about a person or experience?
Am I ignoring or excluding any facts or information that opposes my viewpoint?
What emotion is driving my decision right now? How is that serving me? How is that harming me? Was this emotion rooted in the past?
Is my reaction in alignment with the reality of the situation or am I overreacting? What could be the cause of my disproportionate response?
Where did I learn the belief or assumption driving my behavior or decision? What is an example of how the belief or assumption was modeled to me in the past? How many times has this been modeled and by whom?
Is this a reoccurring thought pattern or belief? Is it serving me or causing me harm? How exactly is this thought or belief impacting me and my relationships?
What am I willing to learn from this situation?
How can I challenge myself to grow? What do I have to gain from this growth?
Expose Yourself to New Experiences and People: One of the most effective ways to overcome bias is to engage with people who are different from you or to experience something new. When you engage with people from different backgrounds, cultures, or viewpoints, it can widen your perspective and help you realize assumptions or biases. Trying new restaurants or foods, exploring new cities, or trying something new that might even scare you helps keep your brain and nervous system open to exploring new experiences.
Active Listening: Most people tend to listen to respond rather than listen to understand. When you are curious and open to allowing others to share fully and authentically, you have the opportunity to learn so much more about that person, their perspective, and it helps to build healthy relationships. The practice of active listening (and yes it's a practice) gifts you an opportunity to see something from another person's perspective without jumping to any conclusions, thus making for better overall communication and understanding in the relationship.
Mindfulness and Emotional Awareness: Mindfulness is the art of paying attention to your thoughts and feelings as they arise in the moment, whereas emotional awareness is the ability to be conscious of your emotional state and understand your emotional reactions. Your biases and beliefs are often responsible for triggering a highly emotional response so understanding how to manage these emotions to respond thoughtfully and not react impulsively can help you avoid unnecessary conflict in relationships. Breathing exercises, meditation, and grounding techniques can help you remain calm when triggered.
Self-Development: Working with a therapist, life coach, attending workshops or trainings, and diving into self-development material are all helpful in expanding your perspective. By understanding yourself on a deeper level you're able to understand others on a deeper level too. Keep in mind that only so much self-development work may be done in solitude, so working with trained professionals is absolutely necessary to step outside of your ego and fully integrate the concepts you learn on your own. No one can truly grow in isolation, you only grow to the point of your awareness that your ego allows.
Understanding how your experiences have shaped you into the person you are today on a deeper level brings forward the opportunity to choose how your past influences your present. While you cannot change what has happened, you do have the power to choose how you allow your past to impact your present and future. Unresolved past pain keeps you chained to people, places, and experiences until you resolve it. The added emotional weight of the past can feel like a dark cloud constantly looming over you, a general feeling of emptiness, heaviness in the chest, or a sense that something is missing. This can lead to general sadness or melancholy, anxiety, fear, hypervigilance, emotional reactivity, irritability, avoidance or numbing behaviors, physical pain, fatigue, feeling "stuck", feeling empty or dead inside, difficulty opening up or being vulnerable, feeling a lack of trust for yourself and others, and having an overall negative self-perception.
In my opinion, there are very few things in life that are worse than allowing the painful experiences of the past to continue to inflict pain in the present. When you release yourself from your past you can more fully feel the present. All of the opportunities become more visible and your head is clearer. Making decisions and exploring new opportunities is filled with excitement and not fear, and life in general feels lighter and more carefree.
Is your past still influencing your present and what you believe is possible for your future? Are you ready to release the hold your past has on you to more fully embrace and enjoy the present moment? Trust me when I say you'll be so grateful you did!
