Would anything be significant in your life if the past wasn’t its reference point? Interesting question. Would joy be relevant if past joy or sorrow was not used as contrast? These questions are not about existential navel-gazing, but rather, a pointed examination of how relevant the past is to the potential of now. We filter everything thorough our past – until we don’t.
For many, the entirety of life is lived as a referendum on past mistakes, experience, decisions, illusions, joys or trauma. A referendum is loosely defined as the need for a decision based on a consideration. We don’t so much learn from our past as we decide on the significance of its relevance. Hence the existential and fundamental consideration – your past: relevant or not?
As a therapist, I have a unique opportunity to constantly see the relevance of the past on the perception of one’s possibility. The interesting irony is that the very thing that brings people to my office is, in effect, already the answer to that ubiquitous question of past relevancy.
The very desire to not be confined or hindered by past trauma, mis-takes, suffering, limitation or perceived loss of joy is an intuitive knowing in the collective psyche that our past has no relevance to the potential of our now! However, we live as though our past is a law unto our being.
This pseudo law quarantines our possibility and potential. Because of the reluctance to recognize that the past is not law we turn it into romance. Not necessarily in the conventional sense of the idea of romanticizing the past (though that occurs too) but even the insistence that trauma and abuse experience are inextricably defining factors of our identity – is a sort of romance with the idea that trauma impact is intrinsic to identity.
“I’ve been through this, therefore I am.”
To be clear, this is not a case for denial or minimizing the significant repercussions of trauma’s impact (anything that impacts physical, emotional, psychological or experiential well-being is trauma to the psyche’s perception of itself) – it is a case for not assuming that what has happen to you defines what can happen through you.
The entire social agreement permeating our medical, psychological, religious and functional paradigms has accepted this ubiquitous idea – merely because of its ubiquity – that one is what they have been through. Its blind acceptance is what creates the related laws and outcomes unto its nature.
This blindly accepted pseudo law is what unconsciously sets up the agenda that indicates you must suffer through, or settle for, or process what you have been through. And not necessarily process to heal, but process because it is a part of the Universal Coursework that stems from the idea that you are what has happened to you.
Again, I come back to your own yearning to be free of the ties that bind as proof that something in you knows better. That is what renders this treatise above opinion. Everyone has an innate desire to be free of what limits.
But before understanding how to leverage that innate liberation desire into actual liberation, an obscure reveal can neutralize much of the self-blame and indictment blocking access to said leverage. Your past accumulation of layers of conditioning do not stem entirely from your personal experience.
Referenced earlier, the collective psyche is what we owe much of our past accumulation to. You personally did not desire to experience a propensity for high blood pressure or heart disease, diabetes, or arthritis but your cultural indoctrination – from the PAST generational legacy of it – becomes part of your assumed identity.
Additionally, people often wonder how they become afflicted with ailments they may not have even had an awareness of said ailment’s existence – chalk that up to that collective psyche history. You don’t have to have had a personal past connection to experience the consequences of the collective psyche’s past – since “collective” psyche obviously includes you.
So then, “what’s a mother to do?” (Dating myself there [speaking of the past] – that’s a tag line from a vintage TV commercial ;). All is not lost because of the collective unconscious – far from it. As another old cliché goes, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Just your awareness of this condition is enough to empower your release from it.
Do not underestimate the power of enlightenment – it is its own device!
Let’s briefly examine how the relevancy you make of the past informs your living:
Finances – this is seemingly the most intractable past association that cripples as money is the basis of functional living. The mental, circumstantial, emotional pronouncement, “I can’t afford that” is based purely on (in) your past association with money – up to the moments before reading this post. If you release basing your money accommodation on the past you also release your potential to realize and experience more.
Health – how often do you assume your health state is based on what it has been? What is that other than past point of reference? You don’t have to ignore or deny experience to not be tethered to it. Our entire medical paradigm is filtered through historical reference – and hence, to the confinement of it.
Pain – whether physical, emotional, psychological – pain is always rooted in the past. An obvious response might be, “No, I am experiencing my pain now – not in the past!” Oh, contraire mon frère! Your anticipation of pain – and therefore current pain – is due to past pain reference!
Heartache – the pain of relationship disappointment – this association of the past is like money; it becomes an indelible reference in the psyche for all possible and future relationship possibilities. Solution: Love (or be open to it) like you never had a past with love. A likely response to this proposition could be, “But that will leave me vulnerable to hurt again” – that occurs because the unconscious or conscious use of the past, as reference for love, becomes predictive. (This could be its own article by itself – and perhaps it will be if I get enough response interested in it.)
Failure – people don’t take ‘empowered risk’ (which simply means not to assume the unknown will be fraught with struggle) because the past filters and fills perception with fear. What we mistakenly call, “lessons of experience” is really lessons of past accumulation as reference.
Your innate desire to liberate your possibility IS your wherewithal to accomplish said liberation – when the past no longer constricts its potency. Your past becomes relevant because you make it so – not because it inherently is. Make this your constant response as you inevitably (until you don’t) witness your past’s subtle or overt influence: “I forgive the past.” Keep it simple, yet potent. Apply it to everything.
(The more you invoke that statement, and its relevance, the freer you become and feel – guaranteed.)
Snap out of the hypnotism that you are what you’ve been through to release Life’s potential through you. This is not “happy talk” – when the past no longer filters Life’s viability.
