Time To Get Off The Hamster Wheel of Past Cycles.
Recently, my thoughts regarding how our past dictates our future became clearer during a casual discussion about friendships, romantic relationships, repeating patterns, and the brain.
Why do we seem to attract exactly the same type of people into our lives (friends/lovers, etc.) who caused us such pain in the past? Psychologists have their own take on all of it, but let’s look at it from a different perspective.
How can we escape the painful impact of the past when we continue to a) surround ourselves with people or memories from that past and b) gravitate towards those who have had similar experiences so that we might bond over or share in our past traumatic experiences?
Science would say that when we constantly live in the past, our “present” body actually believes that we are back there. And why wouldn’t it? All of the physiological markers of that experience, thoughts, anger, sadness, and shame, are still there. The thoughts we replay repeatedly trigger a biochemical and neurochemical response almost exactly the same as what was created when you experienced the actual event. The chemical trigger then replicates that exact emotion you had in the past – anger, sadness, shame. The body does not have the capacity to know that you are not experiencing the situation right now. Your body can only understand and process those steps and conclude, “Oh shit, here we go again.”
So, it makes sense that when we continually ruminate about the past, we are trapping ourselves in the same patterns of emotions and physical reality. How do we move forward when our minds and bodies believe we are in the past?
What if there is an impactful, positive way to approach this cycle we feel doomed to repeat consciously or otherwise? If our mind and body can be “tricked” into believing it/they are in the past, then it most CERTAINLY can be made to believe that it is in the future. If you had the power to choose your future, why wouldn’t you create a bright, happy, successful, and fulfilling one? Well, it turns out we can do exactly that
…stay tuned for how.
