3 Signs Your Past is Controlling Your Present
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3 Signs Your Past is Controlling Your Present
and 5 things you can do right now to take charge of it
In my experience, living in the past robs you of your present and blocks you from the blessings of your future, by preventing you from the accountability and responsibility required to learn from the lessons that keep repeating in your life.
The thoughts you allow to manifest into the words you speak, attract the people, places and things that reinforce your physical and emotional addiction to your past.
Read that again.
We have devolved into creatures addicted to comfort and it is crippling our capacity for learning how to do hard and uncomfortable things. I say addicted because our past, good or bad, is familiar and familiar signals comfort and safety within our nervous system. Your nervous system will always place your safety and comfort at the top of its search results until you become aware that you can seek out different results. Think of it like the internet and google of your ancestral, birth and earth stories; the library of who you are.
Learning how to identify how your past is holding your present hostage is the first step of becoming aware of the algorithm of your nervous system. From here you can start decoding the pre-programmed stories that exist within you and begin to observe if their patterns are harming or helping. Simply becoming aware of this can immediately begin to shift your perspective on life and have you seeking different outcomes.
3 signs/observations that your past is ruling your present
#1: You cannot let go.
This can look like holding anger and grudges, sitting in shame, resentment, guilt and judgment or fantasizing about what was or could have been.
“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could be any different”.
- Dr. Gerald G Jampolsky
There are studies that show when you remember a past event, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it, not the event itself.
Essentially you’re playing a game of telephone with your Self.
How accurate is the story you keep replaying and what could shift if you chose to get more curious about the why inside of your emotional response to the event, instead of the event itself?
Thoughts become things. If you keep thinking about your past, you will keep recreating the same outcomes, while failing to learn the lessons and take responsibility and accountability for the physical manifestation of your thoughts.
#2: You can’t stop yourself from talking about “it” with others.
This can be a person, place or thing that has had either a positive or negative impact on your life, that you can’t seem to move on from. You might be recalling the glory days of high school, a past lover or an injustice you experienced. If you are consistently reciting the chapters of your past, how much time are you leaving to create new experiences in the present? Even worse, how are the stories of the past shaping how you show up in the present moment?
Maybe you fear getting hurt again, worry about how your present will be judged against your past or you feel watched by those concerned with how you are choosing to move on and letting it affect your decisions. If you resonate with any of these statements, what do they reveal about your ability to self-validate your own feelings and experiences and express your truth?
How does your inability to self-validate infiltrate and shape your conversations with others? Do you feel pulled to gossip about what was done to you or are you able to take active responsibility for what shows up in your life and choose to learn from the lessons they reveal about you?
“Life does not happen to you or for you, it happens through you”
-Nicole Connor
Words become your world. You attract and repel everything that appears in your reality through the frequency and vibration of the thoughts that you allow to become magnified by your words.
#3: You surround yourself with people, images and sounds that continuously validate and enable the emotions of your past.
Jim Rohn says you are the average of the 5 people you surround yourself with. Let’s switch out the word “people” with “nervous system” and dive into the deep-end of non-verbal communication and the power of frequency and energy. Birds of a feather…amiright?
If you are constantly playing emotional telephone with yourself, reciting its message to others and padding your environment with people, images and sounds that validate and resonate at your level of perceived comfort and safety, it can become almost impossible to shift out of the confining frequency of your past, and into the creative power of your present.
So shall my word be that goeth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.
-Isaiah 55:11
This can look like surrounding yourself with people who allow harmful behavior, listening to music that evokes negative emotions, watching videos that reinforce and diagnose who you believe others to be and identifying with groups that feed into your feelings of scarcity and lack. In other words, are you intentionally feeding the frequency of fear or love? Why?
Your frequency is determined by what you frequently see, hear and feel. Who and what you attract into your life shows you what level you are vibrating at and what you believe you deserve. Are you surrounding yourself with calm or chaos? Positivity or negativity? Fear and pain or love and peace?
Key Take Aways
In order to love who you are, you cannot hold contempt, animosity or hatred towards the stories that shaped you. When we get stuck in the past and allow it to dictate our present moments, we are showing what parts of ourselves require our own comapssion, acceptance and forgiveness.
Reliving the stories of your past is a form of self-harm and self-betrayal and inevitably creates the patterns that personify “if you don’t heal what hurt you, you will bleed on those who didn’t cut you”.
These have been some of the most profound lessons that surfaced throughout my healing journey and it’s important to note that reconciling your past does not require the participation of others. It is something you do for yourself and by yourself, first and foremost. Peace will blanket the earth when we stop outsourcing acceptance and forgiveness and expecting our lives to improve.
Remember, only what you are not giving to yourself, can be lacking in any situation.
5 Tips to Stop Thoughts from Becoming Things:
If you find yourself anticipating outcomes or creating stories in your mind of events that haven’t occurred yet, try:
1. Intentionally connect to your body: Breathe, stretch, walk, shake it off, hug yourself, snap an elastic on your wrist; this recalibrates your nervous system and reminds you that you are safe in this present moment.
2. Assess the thought: Is what I am thinking loving, peaceful, kind and true? Why or why not?
3. Acknowledge there is an emotion creating the thought: "My emotions have a story I need to get curious about. I am open to exploring why I feel this way."
4.. Validate the emotions: "I feel _________ because ______.
5. Thank yourself for becoming aware of your stories: "Thank you for showing me something that requires more of my love and less of my judgment''.
Sharing is Caring
Share this article and/or drop a like or comment below if you have, or are currently releasing past stories. What triggered it, how are you feeling, how are people around you responding to it? I want to know all of the things and your story could also help or empower others.