“If only he’d never said that!” “I can’t believe what she did!” “I wish I could just take that back!” “Why can’t we go back in time and erase that?”

Does this mind–chatter sound track sound familiar to you?

It does to me! And I know it sounds familiar to my clients, because I hear it so often. People get stuck on what has already happened, even when they declare they want to move on. Even when they say they just want to understand the situation so they don’t repeat it. Even when they say they have moved on.

It’s true that we can learn from events of the past and make different choices in the future. But learning from the past is not the same as trying to adjust the past. As soon as you find yourself thinking or saying, “If only…” or “I just wish I had done…” you have tipped into an unresourceful space.

The thing these thoughts all have in common is that they hold the energy of wishing for a better PAST, in the hope that it will make the present moment happier. Go back and stop that bad thing from happening, your brain reasons, and the pain of thinking about it goes away.

Put like this, it’s easier to see that as strategies go, this one is doomed to fail. The past is past. He really did say that, and she really did do that. It’s over. Done. Finished.

Except, in our brains, in our bodies – it’s not done. We find ourselves imagining circumstances in which he said something else (or we had a better response). We daydream about what it would be like if she never did that – and maybe what it would be like if she wasn’t even born.

We can spend hours a day doing this, if the circumstances we’re trying to change are distressing enough. And we do it for a logical reason. The more the past hurts us, the more we want to shift the hurt out of our awareness. Our linear brains leap to the seemingly logical place of, “It didn’t hurt before she did that.” So the brain keeps searching for the way to make it possible that the hurtful event never happened, or that it happened differently.

Harness the Energy Around You!

If we can change what happened, our brains “reason,” we can go on and be happy.

Except…you can’t change the past. The loop of thinking about how to change the past is doomed to fail. That makes it hurt more, and alerts the brain to work even harder to “fix” the past.

Hoping for a better past just keeps you in the past with the unhappy event. Instead of releasing from pain, it keeps you trapped in the energy of the pain. It prevents you from seeing that in this moment, the event is over, and that on some level, you really are okay in this moment, even though the painful event happened.

Many of the emotional neuroplasticity techniques I work with start with the energy of acknowledging what happened, and then move into the present moment. They help connect the brain/body/spirit dynamic to a new set of brain pathways, so the looped thinking stops.

One technique that I love is called TAT®, or Tapas Acupressure Technique. You can get a free download for how to use TAT® for yourself. In TAT® a client tunes into a troubling event or belief while holding a simple-to-learn hand pose. Then they go through a progression of ideas. The first two are:

This happened.

And

This happened, it’s over,
and I’m okay now.
 

The amount of relief I have experienced – both in using TAT® on myself, and using it with my clients – has been enormous. The looped thinking stops.

Simply acknowledging that you are wishing for a better past can help break energy stuck in the past. Even without the hand pose, you are likely to feel a small shift in your energy right now.

So try it out. Ask yourself to deliver to your conscious mind some piece of the past that you are spending time hoping to change. When you have it, say to yourself (out loud, if you can):

“This happened. It has already happened.”

Let that sink in. If you find your brain rearing up and starting loop like, “No! It can’t have happened that way!” gently repeat the statement, until your mind is able to relax into it.

Now say to yourself, “It happened, it’s over, and I’m okay anyway.” Again, notice if you feel your mind looping into, “You are NOT okay! You can’t be okay until (fill-in-the-blank) changes.” If the loop kicks up again, simply repeat the phrase until you feel a little shift.

In most cases, the pain people feel over past experiences isn’t so much about the past experience as it is about resisting the past experience. It may seem like a minor point – but it has powerful energy.

All we have is the present moment. So ask your subconscious to help you become aware, in the present, when you are behaving as if you can change the past. Then bring yourself into the present, in THIS moment, with the two statements above.

The energy of experiencing a peaceful present is way more pleasant than the energy of wishing for a better past. I hope you find some peaceful present energy today!