Bringing the Past into the Future

This is how life goes. We have an exchange in the present time with someone we know, work with or love. That exchange produces a reaction in our mind that causes us to blurt out some often angry words that make one feel more comfortable, but that creates upset in ones partner, friend, family member or colleague. Now you have a created conflict. The problem is that the person you are mad at when this occurs, is simply not in the room. In fact, they may be someone from your distant past. How does this work?

This is how you build your reactive mind. You have an experience, usually early in life, typically as you gain language, when you first hear the word “No!” What we as human beings do next, is that we make up a story about what happened. Note that. There is what happened, and then there is the story about what happened. For me, that formative experience was being beaten by my mother. I was 3-years old when she took a cane to me to beat me for whatever crime I had committed in her eyes. She was judge, jury and executioner. To my simple 3-year old mind, the story I made up about being beaten was, “My mother does not love me!” I spent my life experiencing various iterations of that beating, and as time passed, the story evolved slightly. As human beings, we collect evidence along the way to validate our interpretation of our experience. Whether it was being disciplined by teachers, or the principle, (corporal punishment was permitted in those days,) or if was my sibling or a friend who stimulated that same feeling internally, my story evolved from “My mother does not love me,” into, “I am not loveable.” Period.

There are two other particularly formative times when this occurs as far as we know. WHen your friends abandon you in middle school, and then when you figure out you are all alone as an adult. My middle school experience occurred when I had a breakdown with a friend at a party, and that group of friends abandoned me, reinforcing that I was indeed not lovable. When I left home after I finished college and realized I was on all my own, that was the third most important time when I updated my story about being unlovable. What complicated it for me at the time, was that coincidentally I asked a girl to marry me and she said “No!” I had absolute proof!

That accumulation of stories all reinforcing each other, created a reactive mind response to present time situations in my mind. So, for example, when my ex-wife would say, “I love you,” my internal response would be “Sure, but here, let me show you all the evidence I have collected over time that proves that you absolutely don’t.” She really had no chance in the face of my reactive mind.

As humans, we do this all the time. We accumulate stories and we collect evidence of those stories and we operate like the story we made up is the truth. The impact of that through life is that we create and live into an almost certain probable future. In short, we bring the past into the future. It’s the very nature of being human. Until I resolved this, every relationship I had between age 3 and 55 ran headlong into this reactive mind state of mine.

I talk about how in relationship, you need “your demons to play well with their demons”. These are the demons I am referring to. How in a moment, your reactive mind brings the past into the present moment creating a conflict with someone you love. It’s a tough one to navigate.

One minute you are having a great conversation with your true love, the next minute, you are grouped with all villians from their past, not because you did anything wrong, but because their reactive mind assigned you the same culpability as all the past versions of whatever the villainy was.

So, how can you prevent this from happening again and again and again?

First, you have to do the work yourself. Your demons are your problem to solve. You have to address the impacts of each iteration of the villainy from the past. It’s more complicated than that in practice, but in effect, that is the pathway to getting complete with things. We call it “getting flat”. What I mean about that is that you can speak about the villainy and have literally no emotional response about it. None, That is being flat.

We bring the past into the future by rote. It’s never intentional. It’s often embarrassing. It may create upset and conflict, but, the reason that it happens is that the stories we made up are so strong, it seems as if you are committed to the story. Usually, there is a payoff for being attached to the story. Perhaps it justifies your self-assessment. Perhaps it gets you attention. Whatever the payoff, you keep the story alive for a reason. In my case, it was perfect justification for why I could not find love. I remember dealing with this when as a middle aged adult, I confronted my story about my mother beating me. I was incredibly tearful about it as I told and retold the story, and I could not speak about it without breaking down. Till I could. Then I was flat. Now I can speak about it with no emotion whatever.

The way you get there is that you keep looking at the past to find earlier iterations of the event and you deal with the emotion in each one. Little by little you will get to the earliest iteration you can recall, and once you are flat about it, and the emotional energy has been discharged. You are complete.

Here is a tip to help discharge the energy that comes with some of those old stories. Imagine you are plugged into the person around whom the energy revolves belly button to belly button. The trick is to unplug yourself from them, and plug your end of the cable into the earth. Let them take energy from the earth rather than from you. You might have to do this 1,000 a day at first, but its a quick mental exercise to do in an instant, and over time, the number of times that person will be on your mind will be fewer and fewer till eventually, you don’t think about them at all.

Another thing to think about is that as you go through life and encounter challenges, think of them like boulders that need breaking up. Sometimes they are like small boulders in the road that you can break up with a ball pein hammer. Sometimes the issues (boulders) are bigger and you need a sledgehammer to break them up. Then, you still need the ball pein hammer to finish the job. But every once in a while, you run across something that requires dynamite to break up. That is the nature of life.

Feel free to reach out to discuss challenges you are having, we are hear to help.