Episode 150: How to Let Go of the Past
In today’s episode, I continue looking at the power of our past and how we can face our stories and move through them so they don’t cause more pain.
Your past matters—even though the personal growth industry is obsessed with the future you at the expense of the past you. In that world, the only real change and movement in your life comes from looking forward, setting goals, and just doing it like I talked about in Episode 148.
But I believe that it’s OK to have a past.
It’s OK to be perfectly imperfect.
It’s OK to share stories from your past.
It’s OK to have trauma and pain in your past.
It’s OK to have a joyful past, too.
The bottom line? You cannot ignore your past.
If you do, it will creep up on you in the personification of your Monger as your parents or in the way you talk to your kids or how you interact with your spouse. Your past plays a role in your current life—period.
It’s immensely powerful to face our stories—to look them dead in the face and slowly release their power through patience and compassion for ourselves. That’s how you live happier.
Listen to the full episode to find out:
The first step in the process of not letting your past control your life
Practical ways to move through the stories from your past that are holding you back
Why we often tell our stories like a news bulletin—drama and all—and how we need to focus more on how something made us feel
How you can learn from your past and make peace with it
Resources mentioned:
+ Read the Transcript
Nancy: Imagine your ex partner broke up with you out of the blue, you were caught completely unaware and were stunned by the breakdown. Now, here you are. Years later, you have a new partner who you absolutely adore, but you notice you've constantly feel like you're walking on eggshells, expecting the other shoe to drop.
Oops. Over every little thing. She does checking her phone when she's gone and hyper analyzing everything she says, and you notice you pick fights over the silliest things. This is not the relationship you want to have. And you know, it's because of your past partner and you love to blame her for her. And damaging him so badly, but it isn't hopeless.
You can move past this pain and hurt with a little work and a lot of stuff. Loyalty. You're listening to the happier approach. The show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith. As I mentioned in the last episode, the personal growth industry trend is to tell people that real change and movement comes only from looking forward, setting goals and just do it.
Yes, we do need to set goals, look forward and just do it. And sometimes we need to heal our past first as with any all or nothing thinking we have lost some key components of real and lasting change. Your past matters. Yep. I said it it's okay to have a past. It is okay to share stories from your past. It is okay to have trauma and pain in your past, and it is okay to have a joyful path.
Bottom line, you can't ignore your past. It creeps up on us and the personification of our monger as our parents and the way we talk to our kids or in how we interact with our spouse. Our past plays a role in our current lives period. Let's go back to the example of past relationships. You're letting the show and hurt from that past event.
Impact your thoughts about this new relationship. Now rationally, you can see that your new partner is a different person altogether and should not be treated as if they were the same as your ex. This isn't fair to them. They are a totally different person, but once your monger gets talking well, rationality, it just goes out the window.
The first step in the process of not letting your past control your life is owning the fact that this is even happening and chatting with your new partner about the fact that your past emotions are clouding your current relationship. When you notice it happening, lovingly remind yourself that this is a different person, that learning how to trust again is hard and that she is worth the risk.
The glitches, when we get stuck in the past, when we are living and reliving the past, over and over in our day-to-day lives, we become victims, martyrs, and just plain unhappy people. I assume this getting stuck in the past is what all the only look forward people are talking about, but I believe the message gets skewed and turns into an absolute, rather than the message being healed your past.
So you don't get stuck there. The message becomes ignore your past altogether. In today's episode, I want to share some practical ways. You can start moving through the stories from your past that are holding you back. To start off with share your story. That's right. Share it, bring it out of the closet, dust it off and share your pain, your struggles, the irrational beliefs that you got when you were eight years old, share those stories.
Find someone who loves you and you can trust to just listen without judging. In this day and age, we don't seem to have the patience for each other stories. We get impatient. We give too much advice or we want to share our story too quickly. So choose wisely. As you go through the act of sharing your story, your perspective will change.
You may be able to see the other person's side. You may be able to let go some of that old resentment, or it may just feel really good to say out loud. What has been playing unconsciously all these years? A quick note of caution here. We often tell stories of our past as if we're reporting a news bulletin.
We share the story as we always have. We share the injustice, the unfairness, the righteous indignation we get. So caught up in sharing the drama of the story. We forget to share how the experience made us feel. I mean, really feel, not just the obvious anger or sadness, but that we were dismissed or made to feel less than.
Befriend yourself during this process. It's one thing to have a supportive person who gets it, but we need to be willing to find the compassion for ourselves. I have a shame filled story from my past of cheating on a test in the sixties. Looking back now, it's a funny story because I was literally sitting next to the teacher's desk and a friend was walking up to put her paper on the teacher's desk.
And I asked my friend for the answer, what was I thinking? The teacher gelled. My parents were upset. I was a mess. I can fully remember that moment. And the aftermath talking to my parents feeling consumed by shame. How I felt the shame, the confusion, the fear of not knowing the answer. And today I can say to myself, wow, sweepy that was so hard feeling.
All those things. As a 12 year old, you made a mistake and you aren't good at cheating, but allowing myself to get fully in my body and having the compassion for that little girl. Make sure to befriend yourself through the feelings, allow everything that comes up and just be there. I always say, treat yourself as you would your niece allow yourself to feel the feelings of anger, sorrow, grief, self doubt, and insecurity.
This is often the piece that gets missed. We convince ourselves it isn't important, or it isn't a big enough deal. Well, if it is playing there over and over in your head, It's a big deal. For example, I remember a time when I was shaving my legs as a teenager, and I didn't check the razor before I went over my leg and the razor was damaged and I scraped up my entire leg, blood running everywhere from the numerous scrapes and burns the razor had left.
It was so freaking painful. I immediately went downstairs and showed my mom who said, well, why didn't you check the razor first? That was really stupid. I was mortified. I assumed she would give me more sympathy and understanding, but instead she focused only on my silly mistake as an adult. I've shared this story with my mom who not surprisingly has no recollection looking back.
I'm sure she was tired and stressed and just didn't have the capacity to comfort me when I had done something. So avoidable to myself. I share that story because it is a simple every day non-traumatic story. And yet for years, my monger used that story to remind me that I can't be trusted. I caused my own problems with my patients and not checking things out before I take action.
It is a simple story from my past that kept me. It's an easy story to stay in blame around blaming myself that I'm incompetent blaming my mom for shaming, me and round and round we go. The only way out is to befriend myself through the feelings. I shared that story out loud. I talk with my mom about it.
I gave myself compassion. To not get stuck in the story, you have to allow the discomfort cry for the eight year old, who was told they were stupid and would never succeed, punch a pillow for the anger you feel for not getting that promotion. You deserved grieve for your mother who you lost at age 18.
Just allow it allow the resentment, the bitterness and the anger. Then what can you learn? This is the piece that we lose sight of not saying that we can always learn from past tragedies. Please hear me when I say that. But often when things happen in the past, we are too quick to pull it out as a poor me story.
One of the ways to heal it is to ask yourself, how can I do this different. So you had a parent who puts too much pressure on you and made everything about achievement. What can you learn to notice when you were repeating that pattern in your own life to catch yourself when you overly praise people on their accomplishments to notice when you get caught up in building your own life based on praise.
Now one quick reminder. One of my guiding principles is everyone is doing the best they can with what they have in rising strong Bernay brown talks about how she operates from the assumption that everyone is doing the best they can. But I like to add the phrase with what they have. As a reminder to myself that we're all on different spots in our journeys.
Usually people aren't trying to hurt us by doing something different than we would. They're just doing the best they can, based on their past coping skills, personality traits, life stress, their reaction action probably makes sense. It might not be our reaction or one that feels good to us, but it is a logical reaction based on who the person is.
Like my mom in the razor story, she was doing the best she could with what she had that day, who knows what she had going on. When I walked down with my cut-up legs, we will never know, but living in a state of blame for the fact that she said the wrong thing, won't help either one of us. So by repeating this phrase, it allows me to give them a little room to be who they are and to not take the action quite so personally.
When I was dating my now husband, he would drive me crazy because when the world overwhelmed him, he shut off his cell phone. So you couldn't reach him no matter how hard you tried, he would do this for a few hours or a few days as his girlfriend at the time, I would take that action personally. I mean, he should want to talk to me.
I'm his girlfriend. But in reality, it had nothing to do with me. It was his coping skill. It was him doing the best he can with what he has for him. When he gets overwhelmed, he needs to shut out the outside world. And he does that by turning off his cell phone. It's how he takes back control it. Isn't what I do.
In fact, it's the opposite of what I do. But when I could pause and remember he's doing the best he can with what he has, I could move on without getting hurt or sad. And I knew he would call when he felt like re-engaging with the world. A more serious example. I had a client who was struggling with her sister because her sister had done something that hurt the family and they were having a hard time.
Her family. Hadn't spoken to the sister in a few years and my client was experiencing a lot of grief, frustration and anger when she pulled back and looked at the whole picture and the context of who her sister was, personality traits, family placement, coping skills, et cetera. It wasn't that big of a stretch to see why she had engaged in the negative hurtful behavior.
At the time she was doing the best she could with what she had as was my client. Once my client was able to see this. She began to start the process of healing and moving forward, it didn't change. The fact that my client felt hurt by her sister or take away her sister's responsibility for the behavior, but it did help my client pull back from the emotions to see that her sister's behavior wasn't meant to be intentional so she could move towards forgiveness rather than holding on to all.
We are all just doing the best we can with what we have. Most of us try very hard to be good people and make good decisions. And we are all human. We all make mistakes. We all, at one point or another, have poor coping skills, poor response skills, poor conflict skills or listening skills. But the secret is to have a little curiosity and ask yourself in the context of who this person is, are they doing the best they can with what they have?
These steps are in no way, a quick fix. Each of these steps can take days, weeks, months, or years, depending on the power of the story and how far we have buried the story in our own psyche. It is immensely powerful to face our stories. Look at them dead in the face and slowly release their power bottom line to live happier.
We have to face our past with patience and compassion for ourselves. We have been taught that our deepest needs feelings and desires are scary and we need to protect the world from them. So we hustle to perform, achieve and earn our worthiness. But it's time to be loyal to you to take off the mask, to face your high-functioning anxiety and to become confident in who you are.