How your past can keep you stuck

I haven’t shared much of my past with you all, but recently I have had quite a few clients going through challenging times and one of the themes that keeps coming up, is how they focus on the past.  

They are being defined by what they have done, what has happened in the past and and are spending a lot of time looking back. Spending huge amounts of energy wishing they had done things differently, feeling helpless and powerless, feeling their past defines their future. 

Many of us have pasts that are filled with pain and negative circumstances. We feel we’ve had many failures, or been through challenging circumstances and when we define ourselves and our future abilities by these past attempts we can become discouraged and filled with regret.

 Over 11 years ago, I was 3 months  pregnant with my first child, when my now ex husband revealed he was having an affair with his boss and wanted to leave our marriage.

For a long time I felt complete shame that my husband cheated. Ashamed and embarrassed that I was a wife who was cheated on. I made it about me, about me not being good enough. 

It took me a long time to tell others, as I always thought it reflected badly on me. I told myself I am not telling them because it didn’t matter. But the truth was I was just so ashamed. I thought that there must be something very wrong with me that my ex would not only cheat, but also choose to leave while I was pregnant with both of our first child.

In those early days after he left I spent a lot of time looking back, thinking what I could have done differently. Wondering if I have loved him more, supported him more, would that have stopped him from doing what he did. 

But the truth was I did love and support him and he still left. And that doesn’t make him bad and me good. It is just, what it is. Maybe he thought I could have loved and supported him more, been what he thought was a better partner. 

Who knows, the point is no amount of time wishing that I could have been different, or blaming myself for his actions, could change what had already happened. 

All the wishing I could have done things differently, and wondering ‘what if’ only served to keep me stuck, it kept me from being able to move on with my life, and it reinforced a belief that I had, which was that I wasn’t good enough. 

Our brain wants certainty and it will look to the past for evidence. If I didn’t hold the belief that I was not good enough, then my brain wouldn’t have made my ex leaving due to me. It would have known it was all about him.  Up until the evening my ex left I had thought we would have a future together. We would have more kids, build a house, travel, we would do all the things we talked about. 

So when that future ended, seemingly overnight, my brain wanted to stay with what it knew, and so it wanted me to look back, as my past was what was familiar. 

I often find that we confuse taking learnings from our past, with trying to change our past or using our past as a way to stay stuck.

 But knowing the past can’t be changed and for me knowing I didn’t want to be stuck, or become a victim to my past, left me with the only other option which was to consider what now? What’s next? 

This was something that was in my control, this was something that was worth putting all of my time and energy thinking about. It didn’t mean that I didn’t have any take ways, but it meant that I was able to move forward, that I didn’t use being stuck in my past as a way to tell myself that I was not good enough. It meant I didn’t use it as a reason not to take steps to create a future for myself and my son.

One exercise I like to do when I find myself, or my clients stuck in the past about something, is to write a letter to my past self, explaining what I am angry about, what I am sad about, what I am sorry about, what I wish for and why I still love them. I do this as a way of letting go of what in my past I have been holding onto.

I then write another letter to myself, but from my future self (the self who is where I would want to be). In this letter I give my current self advice. I write about what I would stop doing, what I would start doing and any other insight I might like to share. 

This practise allows you to bring to the surface what you are holding onto, but also provides insight into what you can do to start moving yourself forward, so that you can let go of the past that no longer serves you and that you cannot change and start deciding what your future looks like, even if it is just one step at a time.

Where in your life do you notice yourself be past focussed? 

What is one thing you could do, to start shifting your focus from the past to the future?