Episode 15
Heal the Past
They say you can’t change the past, but maybe that’s not always true. By imagining ourselves in past situations, seeing things from others’ perspectives, and visualizing what we could have done or said in those trying moments, we can heal the past.
Perhaps your family was cruel to you, spanking or scolding, but you know now that they had good intentions, even though they expressed it poorly. What would those situations look like if they had expressed themselves perfectly? How might you have responded?
By using the ABCD model from cognitive behavioural therapy, we can look at the beliefs that cause our emotional reactions, and begin to change our beliefs. Then we can imagine ourselves in the same situation, perhaps with a completely different reaction – changing our view of the past and the direction of our futures.
Hosts & Guests
Kurt Robinson
Resources
Transcript
Welcome travelers, welcome seekers, welcome beautiful thinkers. I’d like to tell you about how you can heal the past.
Once I was sitting in a deep meditation and I started to think about the past about things that had happened maybe thirty years before when I was growing up and my family or people around me might have been quite cruel to me. Or it seemed to me they were cruel.
In their own minds I’m sure they had the best intentions and they were trying to show me love, in the only way they knew how. Sometimes it was poorly communicated because they just didn’t have that self development skills or those communication skills they needed to really show me the love I was craving.
Some shamans and I also think in some psychological circles they say how the subconscious mind doesn’t really perceive time in the same way the conscious mind does. So things that went on in the past are still going on in your unconscious mind.
And of course that means those things can still affect you. Perhaps if you had a trauma in your life somehow that affects your thinking. That also means that you can change those things right now today in this moment you can go back to a time when something troubled you.
Maybe you didn’t know how to express yourself or tell someone “what I really need is tenderness, please care for me.”
You can go back and give that tenderness to yourself and show yourself that love and show yourself that the people around you though they were imperfect were actually trying to do good. They might not have done it in the best way but they were trying.
You always have that opportunity to go back in time. You can rewrite the past in a sense and you can heal the past. Those times in your life when you’ve felt heartbroken or alone or unloved you can show yourself that love and tenderness at any moment.
I’ve also learned that sometimes of course we do awkward things in this life. We don’t express ourselves as clearly as we want to or we get angry or frustrated. It turns out we can go back to those moments and start rewriting them as well and this will effect the future.
I don’t mean that you literally can change the past. It’s not like your memories will change but you can put a different framing on those events and you can think “How could I have done that differently? And imagine it.
So for example if there was a time where you got frustrated and you eventually lost your temper you can put yourself back in that situation and start to imagine “how could I have handled this better? What could I have said? What could I have done to help calm myself down”
Maybe you imagine yourself breathing deeply in those moments to settle your self down. Giving yourself a warm hug so you can relax and express your self more clearly.
Of course there are a lot more techniques to this. I learned the other day a technique from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s called the ABCD technique or formula.
So it starts with A, which is the activating event. Some people call this a trigger but that’s not accurate because trigger would mean you’re some kind of machine and you just enact what happens when somebody steps on you. This is an activating event. It’s something that causes your being beliefs to come into play.
Then your Beliefs and attitudes happen.
Then there’s C which is consequences. Perhaps you get emotional. Your anger comes out. Your frustration and then the final step is D.
Dispute. You can write these down. The activating event, what happened. B, beliefs about the event. C the consequences. And then you set out to think about how you could have acted differently or how you could have had a different belief about that situation. Which is d, the Dispute.
This is a formula for you to transform how you are at the present, help you analyze your believes and change the way that you act in the future.
Even more powerful I think if you go through this exercise in your journal and you later put yourself into that situation using the insight that you’ve gained from self analysis.
You can then transform yourself. Imagine yourself being even better. So through healing the past we also transform our present and our future
Thank you so much for reading. Thank you for being grateful for everything wonderful that’s happening in your life. Thank you for praising the sun and saying good morning sun for shining bright down on you and giving you that wonderful Vitamin D that you need in your life. And thank you for being a beautiful thinker. I’ll talk to you soon.
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