Your Past – does it still control you?

Where exactly is the line between the past and the present? Who draws it and when?

Could it be that every human is, in fact, nothing else but a sophisticated collection of past thoughts, behaviours and experiences? Could it be that who we are today is a direct outcome of everything that we had ever been in the past?

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When Barry walked into my therapy room, I knew he was ready. I knew that he was not in denial, that he was ready to face whatever was there, hiding in the corners of his past. As he sat down, he told me that for years he used to play the ‘blaming game’ as he called it, blaming his wife for the distance she created in their relationship, blaming his siblings and parents for not being there for him. The list of people he blamed went on and on.

‘Today’, he said, ‘I feel I have enough of pointing fingers. I am ready for the truth!’

As we started the session, the minute he closed his eyes, the tears and emotions started to flood in. ‘I do not know what is happening, but the emotions seem stronger than me, I feel so scarred, I feel so dirty, so ashamed, I want him to stop, tell him to stop hurting me…’.

The images started pouring in, and he began describing one of the experiences of abuse he went through as a young child. When the session was over and the trauma healed, Barry sat up and said ‘How could I have been in denial that this stuff affected me all these years? I remember how those memories used to haunt me! And I remember so well the day when I have decided to no longer remember it all. Look at me, I have managed to convince myself that it did not happen, or at least not to me! It feels like I have been living with a monster inside of me! It controlled everything I did all these years.’

Some weeks after Barry rang me and said that he was amazed how the relationship between him and his wife has improved. They seemed closer to each other than ever before. He wondered what has changed in her. But she has not changed a bit, it was Barry who stopped projecting the distance between them two. He had been doing it all these years without realising it.

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Mary’s case was different. She felt trapped in her life. She could not pinpoint what exactly was wrong. She had no recollection of her childhood. She believed that the reason for it was that ‘nothing interesting had really happened in it.’ Mary’s main focus in life was to be in a loving relationship, she had a problem with ‘finding the right man’ though.

She also felt that a part of her was missing. During the session she spontaneously went back to the time when she was still in her mother’s womb. She was shocked to discover that she was not alone there, she had a twin brother who died in hospital during birth. He was never talked about, never acknowledged. He turned out to be that ‘missing part’ that she has been searching for all her life. She realised that all this time in all the men she met, she has been searching for her brother.

Having healed that aspect of her past, she was able to move on with her life and have a stable relationship. She told me some time after, ‘It feels like I am not chasing shadows any more! It’s great!’

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Patricia, for the past ten years, has been suffering from anxiety attacks. She has tried all the possible mainstream and alternative methods, but even if the symptoms have temporarily lessened with some of them, they have always eventually returned again. She had enough of the anxiety controlling her, she wanted to be the one in control of her life. She said to me ‘You have no idea how much courage it has taken me to come here and tell you that I am ready to face it’.

During the session, Patricia regressed to find out that her issue with anxiety has its roots in her teenage years. She has watched first her grandmother, then grandfather and aunt slowly get ill and then die. She loved all three dearly and found it hard to let them go. Her anxiety did not surface however until the time when a similar event happened ten years ago. Her beloved father got seriously ill and even though his condition was not life threatening, it was enough to kick start the anxiety around illness, death, and the loneliness that she experienced after each loss. The pattern has been established in her teenage years, her father’s illness simply amplified it, resulting in her anxiety attacks.

She was hugely relieved having discovered the reasons for them. She told me she felt as if just knowing why they have been appearing and how they have started has put her in a position of control. A year since I have seen her last, she is still anxiety free.

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Why is it that our past experiences have such a dramatic and powerful control over our lives?

Every human being represents a sacred combination of body, mind, and soul. Each part of that combination is like a different dimension, a different aspect of us. They each register every single experience that we go through. No thought, emotion, or action passes unnoticed. The mind will register experiences in a different way, compared to the body or the soul. Greater understanding of that phenomenon will in turn result in greater understanding of the inner forces that are driving our lives.  

Our past consists of layers, just like layers of an onion. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it - we have been gathering all those experiences one by one over a period of time. Every day something new happens, with time new layers are being created. Some of those layers will be of greater importance (they have a greater impact on us), some will be of lesser. Each of those layers will represent both positive and negative experience that we have been through. For the purpose of this article, we will focus on the negatives one only.

Those layers might be active or not. The active ones represent the experiences we have not yet dealt with, even if they go decades back into the past. They are the ones causing us a lot of damage.

The inactive ones represent the lessons classified as ‘learned’ and fall into the category of neutral memories with no negative charge attached to them.

Our goal should be to turn all the negatively charged layers of experiences into neutral memories by dealing with them, healing them, and understanding their essence.

Let us now look more in detail at how the human mind, body, and soul register various experiences.

The Human Mind

We are often of the opinion that certain memories are lost to us. Some of us would have their earliest memory going as far as the age of ten, some three others five. Some of us would have great difficulties remembering anything at all. In reality, no memory is ever lost. Our attitude to human memory comes from our lack of understanding it. There is no limit as to what we can remember, and under the right circumstances, we all have the ability to recall every single moment from our past, including our current lives, past lives, lives between lives. No moment, no memory ever escapes us. We store them all.

People new to this phenomenon are often amazed at their ability, while guided, to go back to the time when they were in the mother’s womb, with amazing perfection being able to recall the conversations that were going on around them at the time, their ability to remember the mother’s words, feelings or even go further, into a past life.

However, remembering it all, every aspect, every detail of it, our entire soul’s history, would be too overwhelming. That is why we have been equipped with what is commonly referred to as Conscious and Sub-Conscious (or unconscious) Mind. The job of the conscious mind is to initially register all that we go through, in time transferring it into the sub-conscious division. The capacity of the conscious mind is limited, it provides us with a system of temporal filing, whereas the sub-conscious mind’s capacity has no limits. It is like having a current and a saving account in our memory bank. The first one we access regularly, the second one only on special occasions and usually there are certain conditions that need to be met, before we can get access to the memories stored there.

The mistake that we often make is in the fact that we are trying to find the reasons for the problems in our current life in the conscious mind. But they are rarely there. Most of the time, by the time we realise that we have a problem; its cause would have already been moved to long-term storage, the sub-conscious mind.

By gaining access to it, we simply allow for the reason(s) to emerge.

Often what we ‘think’ is the problem is only a symptom of something not logically related to it at all. In fact, logic has very little to do with our problems; emotions and memories on the other hand usually hold the key to the right door.

Just like the human body under proper conditions has the ability to heal itself, the human mind works in a similar way. Allowing it to heal rather than telling it what is wrong with it is the key. With guidance the gates to what the sub-conscious mind stores become wide open and the reasons and solutions keep flooding in.

Once a person has gained the understanding of what is the root cause of their problems, how and when it began, healed the situation on the mental level, the balance is restored. The understanding of why something has happened in the first place provides a huge release of tension and resistance that a person might have felt in the past.

The Physical Body

The physical body deals with traumatic events in a very unique way.

During the moment of trauma, the physical body often wants to react in some way to the situation it finds itself in. On some occasions, the body might want to defend itself, on others its desire might be to run to safety. Different parts of the body will be trying to express themselves in different ways – for example if the body is trying to defend itself, the throat might want to scream for help, the legs might want to kick the perpetrator and the legs to push him/her away. If the body is trying to run away from the danger, the legs might want to run, but the fear the body experiences is such, that it is unable to act in any way at all.

As the body freezes, the traumatic memory is embedded deep in the cellular memory of each cell, organ, and body part. The scream that the throat wanted to express remains frozen, together with all the other unexpressed actions. It is as if somebody has pressed the ‘pause’ button on a TV right in the middle of an important scene and has forgotten to release it.

The actual posture the body found itself in, in the moment of trauma, remains frozen within the body’s memory as well. Of course, it does not mean that the body is no longer able to function, it is, but its ability to function is from now on hampered by the negative experience. If a body is exposed to repeated incidents of trauma, the damage within it is even deeper and if undealt with, it might result in the manifestation of a physical illness at some stage in a person’s life.

It is very important to involve the body in the healing process, by allowing it to express all the unreleased desires it had in the moment of trauma. The body is a physical being, therefore talking, reasoning does not work with it. A physical action is required, which often means reconstructing the events that have emerged from the sub-conscious mind and asking the body to show what it wanted to do but could not do, at the time of trauma. Each significant part of the body needs to be addressed and allowed to release what it has been storing in relation to the trauma.

The amount of release experienced by the body is always astonishing. It often feels as if it has been waiting for such a long time for somebody who finally can speak its language to come and offer help.

In some cases despite the fact that one part of the body has a strong desire to express itself, the fear that has been embedded in the body is such, that on the first attempt the person is not able to do more than just lift that part an inch or so from the ground. In extreme cases, it might take several attempts to completely release the tension stored.

The Soul

The third part of the sacred trio is the human soul – the most advanced, the all-knowing part of us. Excluding the soul from the healing experience does not allow for it to be complete. The wisdom that can be gained from that higher source that we all have available to us helps us to see any negative experiences in a greater perspective. We see our current life events in the light of the journey that the soul is on. We enter a world, a dimension, of unconditional love and unlimited possibilities. In that world, everything is possible.

This higher aspect of us gives us access to the wisdom of our Guides and Angels. This is the place where links between past and current lives can be found, analysed and healed.

It also provides us with a platform to heal ourselves and resolve any difficulties on a much deeper level. The conversations that we have on this plane with the souls of other people often result in profound changes within our relationships with them on the physical level.

Here we can safely meet our perpetrators, talk to the loved ones that have gone before us, identify which of the key characters from our past lives are present in our current life. One always brings a sense of peace and inner tranquillity from this aspect of healing.

When we consider the fact that every one of us goes through and registers each experience on the level of body, mind and soul it starts to make sense that unless all the levels are addressed during the healing process, the healing cannot be complete.

Past Lives

It is not possible to talk about the influence that our past experiences have on our lives without mentioning the area of past lives.

None of us, at any given stage of this life has ever been a tabula rasa, a white board, with nothing written on it. Even at the time of birth, we have already had imprints of certain lessons and experiences that we have chosen for ourselves present within us. Even at that point, we have already been a combination of everything that we have ever been before.

Some people are fascinated with past lives, while others have a fear of them. Sometimes the access to anything else behind this life is denied and in that case usually the client is being shown that there are other more pressing issues in the current life that need to be addressed first.

At other times the key to understanding and healing an issue is so deeply rooted in a particular past life that without the client re-visiting it, he or she will not be able to heal completely. It all varies depending on the person and the issue that they are currently dealing with.

What is important however is that if a past life is required the client regresses into it himself/herself. No amount of information coming from outside the client (the therapist for example) will be able to create the awakening that the body, mind and soul are a part of when the client goes through the experience himself. It is as if some transformation was taking place within the three aspects of one person, the body responds in its own way, the mind perceives it in its own language, the soul responds accordingly. A connection takes place on a level beyond our understanding.

On and from that level the healing occurs.

Another important aspect in healing the past is the realisation that even when we are aware of the exact causes of our problems, viewing them from the perspective of time takes away the depth of that experience. When an adult person talks about the memory of waking up as young child in the middle of the night terrified, calling for his mother, this memory is not as vivid and raw as the actual experience he went trough as a child. That person today knows that the reason why mother could not come and comfort him was that she was not well. What he does not know is that that very same terrified child is still a part of some of those layers that he has gathered around him during his life. As adults we can often justify the actions of others, we have a broader perspective and understanding of why and how events happen in life. It is not the adult however that needs the healing, but the child within.

When that person is brought back to that particular event, the true impact of it can be appreciated. Suddenly the same fear emerges. Please note – re-emerges – rather than appears. It has been there, in the long-term storage of his mind, all these years.

Trauma

We often think that in order for an event to leave a negative imprint on us, it requires a lot of trauma associated with it. It is not always true however. As adults we often have a tendency to compare one person’s trauma with another’s.

But trauma is something so subjective and personal, that it cannot be compared or evaluated as ‘big’ or ‘small’ in some general terms. What is very traumatic for one person can be quite a bearable experience for another, but it does not change the fact that it was traumatic to the person who has gone through it. Sometimes relatively ‘mild’ trauma might produce powerful negative consequences.

Denial-free State of Mind

For as long as a person is in denial of their issues and problems, the healing cannot take place. That denial can take various forms – some deny the impact that the events from the past had on them, others are not willing to even consider looking at the past, finally others are in denial that they have any issues at all.

The denial that some people experience is like a shield around a person. It makes no difference how obvious their issues are to the rest of the world. Until that person moves into a space within them where they are ready to work on their lives, no other force in the Universe has the power or ability to help them

In case of extreme resistance and denial, patience and love usually give the best results. Sooner or later something will happen in their life that will cause them to drop their defences and face their real issues. And in that moment, they will be ready, they will have the understanding that the only change that can make a difference in their lives needs to come from within.

A healthy process of growing up is one where we recognise lessons in everything that happens in our lives, we learn from them and release them. This is the ultimate model of life that we all should be adopting. Unfortunately by the time we learn that truth, we have usually gathered quite a few thick layers of unresolved experiences, became masters of avoidance and denial. But even then, it is not too late for us.

We are never meant to forget our past, we are meant to make it an empowering part of our own make up. But in order to do that, we must watch and experience it done in the world around us. Imagine what a wonderful world it could be, when everybody finally views everything that happens to them as an opportunity for self-development, taking full responsibility for their lives and actions?!

Instead, most of us follow a tendency to swiftly shift any unpleasant memory into the long-term storage department, as dealing with it often seems more than we can handle. With time we tend to forget what exactly we have placed there in the first place. The problem is, that storing the issues away from our conscious mind does not really make them go away, and because they are still active (not yet dealt with) they keep influencing us from behind the scenes.

We all need to understand that the greatest challenges that we face in life present the greatest opportunities for change. We just need to choose not to resist them. Then it becomes obvious to us that Happiness, not suffering is the most natural state of our being.

Most of us do not have a problem with our present life, we have a problem with our past instead.

The past that we have not yet resolved. Resolving the past means removing the blockages stopping us from moving forward, from enjoying and making the most of our lives. Facing our own shadows can be a very scary process, but it is also the most freeing one as well. It is truly worth our time and effort.