Break the chains of the past by dropping your old stories.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve been stuck in an event from the past, unable to let it go, and unable to move on with your life because of it, you know first-hand that learning how to drop old stories from your thoughts is critically important for peace of mind.
Law of Attraction teaches us that like attracts like, so when we focus on events from the past, we not only remain stuck there, but we actually make it impossible to create any new stories in the future. By rehashing negative events over and over and over again, we keep our vibrational energy in that low zone, and consistently attract more and more into our lives that we can feel negative about. If we want to be able to move forward and create a better future for ourselves, we need to figure out how to drop old stories from our lives, letting them go once-and-for-all, so that we can write the next, and brighter, chapter.
This is especially important where situations from the past may have been such overwhelming, traumatic and life-changing events that letting them go seems impossibly hard; because all too often, when we attach to these negative, life-altering events, we unwittingly allow them to become the defining factors in our personalities, our behaviours, and by extension, our lives. In effect, we start to identify our selves with the negative events of our past.
But we are not our past. And if we ever want to be able to create that brighter future we dream of, free of the bonds of that past, we need to let it go. We need to break those chains, and stop re-reading those old chapters so that we can focus on creating the life we really want. And it all starts, one moment at time, by choosing the better feeling thoughts and letting the old stories go.
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I think that you are absolutely correct. We have to be present and look forward instead of pulling what happened days, months, years ago with us. It doesn’t mean that we can’t feel pain when we think of it, but it can’t define the moment we are living in.
For me, I would love to let my past go. But I have PTSD and that is a giant kick in the crotch. I try hard to not let the fear surpass my rational mind…but damn…sometimes I can’t fight it.
xoxo
Hey you! 🙂 I think the key distinction here is to remember that, while you may have been diagnosed with PTSD, you are not PTSD — PTSD is not the only, or the biggest or even the most important or most interesting thing about you. It is not you. The problem I have with medical diagnoses, especially when it comes to mental health, is that when we get told we have “X”, it becomes such an overwhelmingly huge thing in our minds that we make this X/Self link, and we get so consumed with this diagnosis that we can no longer see ourselves as separate from it. But you are so much more than your PTSD… it’s really just a minor footnote to all the other overwhelming awesomeness that is you. 🙂
Also, a note about fear and your rational mind — it can be really hard to try and control strong emotion with rational thoughts. And from an LOA perspective, trying to fight it can’t work (because by “fighting it” you’re actually focused on “it” which just brings more of whatever “it” is into your life). I don’t have PTSD, but what I do when dealing with anxiety and fear is to try and bypass that internal power struggle completely by tricking myself into thinking about other things. Right now, my favourite distracting thought is to just picture a whole pile of puppies tumbling around and playing with each other. It always makes me smile and immediately distracts me from whatever was bothering me, which makes it easier for me to generate more happy thoughts. But it’s that instant distraction thing that’s key… it disrupts that spiral of anxiety in it’s tracks. If puppies don’t do it for you, find what does and keep that in your back pocket as your “go to” emergency distractor.
Exactly! You are not your illness. According to LOA, it is an indicator if where you are and what you need to focus on instead to be who you really are.
I agree that these things haunt and it is very hard dealing with most if the time as you get stuck there in the pain and can’t easily move past it. You can just let the thought float by and acknowledge the brain in doing its job and focus on something else. You don’t have to react to the bad memory. Be appreciative and thankful that you have a great memory and move on to other splendid things. Have been doing this lately.
I do have a bad memory that keeps popping up, but it does not define me. I don’t have to attach emotion to it. As a matter of fact, being more stoic about it works wonders. So freaking what if that happened? I am so much more than that and the fact that it did not happen the way I planned was that I was not ready. There is a reason for everything and it is a process we just need to look at it that way instead of a series of isolated events that drive a knife through our heart (that’s kind of the feeling). But, I have read enough biographies and memoirs to now know that concentrating on who you really are and what you really want is key. The truly successful do not even talk of setbacks or just look at them as nuisances. They create a bubble around them and focus on themselves, blocking out others and their criticism, etc. this is what I have learned or just reminded myself of. I knew it as a teenager but going out into the world I had forgotten it.
Great topic and looking forward to more!
It’s freakin’ awesome that you are at the point where you can detach from those memories now and just think “so what?” You know now that you weren’t ready for it then, and you’ve accepted that as part of your unique process and path — do you have any idea how huge that is? It means you’re ready to move on now, and build whatever it is you want, and if there are elements of the original dream that still appeal to you, you can start looking for ways to manifest them (and they will!). Yay for you! I am so excited for you, A.! 😀
Funny isn’t it how easily we focus on all the stuff we don’t want. Such a rotten habit. I was having a conversation with someone recently who was totally focused on all that was wrong in their life and I kept saying, okay so what do you want? For two seconds they managed to speak about what they wanted but had to go back to what was wrong. So I kept saying what do you want.
Eventually after asking the same question half a dozen times the penny dropped and we were able to focus on stuff that felt good.
We’re all guilt of it…some of us to a lesser degree because we’ve trained ourselves into a new habit. Just takes a bit of practice.
Nice post Nathalie.
Hello Elle, and thanks so much for dropping by! Your Lao Tzu post today was wonderful… I’m still thinking about that patience quote. I’ll be writing a post based around that one next week, and will link back to you as my inspiration. It’s had that much of an impact on me (so thank you again! :-D)
I think we’ve all been conditioned to focus on the bad stuff over the course of our lives. It becomes an automatic, habitual thing… which turns into a never-ending vicious cycle of stuff we don’t want but can’t seem to break away from. Until we learn about the power our thoughts and feelings actually have. Once we understand our own power in this way, we can change all that — we can deliberately choose to start focusing on what we do want and start looking for all the good that surrounds us. And as soon as we start doing that, we start to shift our reality…
Life really is good, isn’t it? 🙂
Hi Nathalie,
It really is an energy drain when we focus on the pain of the past. As you have said above in the comments, we are not our illness. As with our thoughts it is so important that we don’t identify with them and recognize we are not our thoughts.
One trick that helps me if the thoughts decide that they don’t want to leave me alone is to not fight them as that drains energy to. Instead just let them be, accept that they are there and they eventually leave. The trick is not to engage. If I am having a low energy drain and I am struggling not to engage, I try to look at ‘the story’ as someone else’s, and I ask myself, what advice would I give to the person with this story?
Hi Keith, welcome to Vibe Shifting and thanks so much for dropping by and commenting! I love the idea of distancing yourself from the situation by seeing it as being someone else’s and then asking yourself what advice you would give to that person. I actually just started experimenting with that technique in my own life about a month ago and I’ve had good results with it, too, so thank you for sharing it here! 🙂