The past can be a wonderful place to revisit, lovely memories of childhood, old friends, and days when everything just went perfectly. But it can also be a sad, lonely, traumatic place, filled with pain.
The thing is our brains don’t know the difference between imagination, and reality. When we think of those lovely memories, we paint a picture that our brain believes, and we get all those wonderful chemical reactions that we got at the time. This is great, because it makes us feel on top of the world.
The same is true when we recall those painful, traumatic memories. Again we paint a picture that our brain believes, and again it releases all the same chemicals it did at the time of the event. Only this time they are stress hormones and cortisol, fully activating our fight flight mode, and filling us with panic, sadness, anger, fear, or a rollercoaster of them all. We can keep retraumatizing ourselves hourly, daily, in the middle of the night, just by thinking about upsetting, unpleasant events.
I spent most of my 20s being miserable, because I kept obsessing over all the sad and painful things that had happened to me up to that point. Now don’t get me wrong, theses events were very unpleasant, but how was it helping me to just keep going over them? Short answer, it was doing the opposiite. It was keeping me stuck. An easy way of looking at it was summed up by a chap I spoke to the other day. He said, ‘repeatedly thinking about bad events in the past is like returning to a blaze that burnt you and throwing more fuel on it’.
I am not for one minute demeaning serious events, or the support which those involved need, Ive been in the very thick of them myself. I am saying don’t stand in your own way by spending all your time looking back. The day I decided I was going to stop looking back was the day my life began changing for the better. It didn’t wave a magic wand, but it began a journey of me getting in contro; of my thoughts. Negative thought patterns are what creates anxiety, and when we are anxious we end up operating in that fight/flight part of the brain. Once we are here we lose our ability to be rational, everything is percieved as a threat, and we don’t cope well.
Once we can start to interrupt those negative thoughts, with better thoughts, we can start to live in the moment more, and enjoy what we have now, The biggest sadness is when I see a client who is surrounded by amazing things, but they are so rooted in their fight/flight brain, that they can’t see or appreciate their fortune.
Thats why I chose to become a Solution Focused Hypnotherapist. Its all about forward movement. Supporting people to become the best version of themselves. Through my Solution Focused journey I have become someone I never thought I would ever mange to be. I thought my anxiety and depression would control the rest of my life. I feel like I’ve been let into a secret club, where people are given the tools to take back control and live again. I will be forever grateful to the path that led me to this knowledge, and the opportunity to share it with others. It has given me my life back.
