Understanding Why You Are Trapped In the Past
Susan just wants to stop thinking about her ex-boyfriend. She thinks about him when she stands idle in the shower, when she drives to work, and when she hears a certain song. They are intrusive memories and thoughts. She feels like she can’t stop them from flashing across her mind. They come with emotional pain. “Why am I stuck in the past?”, she asks herself.
It doesn’t matter whether you are suffering from PTSD from war or you are in the middle of an emotionally uncomfortable breakup. The subconscious mind replaying the memory of distressing events is a common pattern we all have to deal with. Different phrases get thrown around to name this phenomenon, but they all refer to the same thing: grieving. The mind is attempting to process and learn from a past event where it lost something it valued.
Why Am I Remembering the Past?
The question of “Why am I stuck in the past?” can best be answered by explaining a bit about the purpose of the subconscious mind. It’s sort of like this computer in your head that’s processing the external world. The mind is doing this to figure out what you like or don’t like based on your unique values and purposes as a human. It’s using the nervous system to create emotions to signal that there are things you like or don’t like in your present environment. It uses imagination to create images, voices, and thoughts in your head to give context for why you like or don’t like things.
It also does the post-processing of events where something you didn’t like occurred or you lost something you liked. This can be an event where you lost a loved one or friend, lost a job, lost a relationship, were threatened or attacked, or lost social standing by being humiliated. All of these represent different traumatic events of different intensities that the subconscious mind didn’t like. Now, it’s got to process the memories of this event to try and build new neurocircuitry for new emotional responses and behaviors that will prevent it from happening again.
Stuck in the Past Because We Are Fighting Our Subconscious Mind
This post-processing of the event is grieving and it happens automatically for you. There are only two things the conscious mind needs to do to allow it to finish. It needs to make time to allow the nervous system to discharge emotions. This means making time to feel the emotions until they run their course. Then, it needs to be open to integrating the lessons the subconscious mind presents to us as we do this. This means accepting the lessons as true, even if it means you need to do something differently or accept fault.
However, the Western world has not raised us to do this. Our society discourages the value of these kinds of emotional states in favor of being productive and focused on work. The result is an adult population that does anything it can to suppress or repress grieving emotions. They want to stay focused on their goals and careers. This results in the unprocessed traumatic event manifesting as anxiety, depression, panic attacks, insomnia, and nightmares. Thus, the answer to “Why am I stuck in the past?” is that we often keep ourselves there.
Stuck in the Past Because We Need Help
This grieving process between the conscious and subconscious mind is far from perfect. Just like the body can’t always correctly heal a broken bone, the mind can’t always correctly grieve. Sometimes the emotional intensity is too intense and it overwhelms the conscious mind, preventing it from being able to process the lessons. Other times people have secondary gains or other subconscious beliefs preventing them from integrating a lesson. These have to be uncovered, unpacked, and integrated to move forward.
Just like people go to a doctor for help with healing a broken bone, clients come to me as a hypnotherapist to help them unstuck. Hypnosis is a state of theta brain waves. It’s the state of memory retrieval, emotional release, and integration of new ideas. As a hypnotist, I can guide people into this state at will. I then use powerful, advanced hypnotherapy techniques to rapidly and effortlessly complete the grieving of the unresolved event.
The result of this is the reduction or elimination of the anxiety, depression, insomnia, nightmares, and panic attacks the unresolved event was creating.
If you found this post on ‘Why am I stuck in the past?’ to be useful, you might enjoy these posts on anger issues, panic attacks while driving, and crying while sleeping.
