When the nights are long and you can't sleep for all the sadness of a past left unresolved; when you cannot grasp the future squarely, move on and do the right thing for the future; when the past haunts both your waking hours and your dreams... it's likely that you're in the grip of anxiety and inertia. There will always come a point at which you must cease to stay stuck in the past or it will define you and mark every step you take from now on.
This problem can be for any aspect in life. Be it from bad experiences in businesses or investing in the financial markets or even in past relationships. It could be anything. It's undeniable that many pasts can be extremely ugly and scary but allowing it to haunt or control you and your thoughts currently and in future, makes it totally unfair not only for the people you probably are or may be with in current or future state but also to your own goodself. Having said that, it doesn't mean that you totally shove it aside as if nothing happened because in any past, it is a lesson and we as a normal sane human being, learn from mistakes/lessons. If you continue to ignore these life lessons/mistakes, you will never progress currently or in future. As Robert Kiyosaki said, "Your choices decide your fate. Take the time to make the right ones. If you make a mistake, that's fine; learn from it & don't make it again".
Some may say that it's tough to forget the past (normally referred to bad pasts), but hell, our brain isn't a computer that you can just delete everything. Hence, it stays there. But the good news is, there is a way to overcome it and it has worked for me through out my life and maybe it can help those who are stuck in the past and always doubting the present and future:
1) Accept that you cannot change what happened.
But, still remember you CAN change your past. You can't change it physically, but you can change it mentally. It is not possible to rewrite the facts of what you experienced and went through. But it is possible to rewrite the way you perceive it and handle it from now onward. If you don't, your hurt self will carry over this emotional pain into all new experiences and relationships, possibly poisoning them and dooming them to failure without any conscious desire on your behalf. For example; Imagine, just because of numerous bad pasts you become utterly defensive, negative and in a way cold, and at present or in future you meet someone that is truly in love and is giving you his/her 100% or more, but because you let the past haunt you, you treat him/her with that defensive, negative and cold way is utterly unfair to him/her as that current or future person you're with or going to be with is the one true one for you but you destroyed it because you're unable to accept the past and learn from it.
2) Don't believe anything someone said to hurt you
Abusers, from the mildest situational bully like an obnoxious supervisor to a bone-breaking abusive parent or even an ex-boyfreind/girlfriend, do not want you to think well of yourself or question their unjust authority. Basically it's simple. They can't achieve something by themselves or not able to get you to be their relationship partner, the next best thing is to get all other people around him/her to gang up and go against you or even say hurting comments about you just to bring you down to his/her level. Now, if you ALLOW it to sink into you, then you've lost and that person won. Their main objective is to make you feel irritated or frustrated by all means in hope to bring you down to his/her level. If they say you're too independent, that's because they wanted you to be dependent of their opinion over your own. For example; If they say you're too sensitive, it means you still have the capacity to feel if it's true or enough self respect to reject an insult. If they say you're too cold, it's because you're not gullible enough to fall for their excuses. Compare their insults to the people who loves and care about you on what they say about you. When both groups agree, it's probably true about you but that doesn't always make it bad. You may find that practically all of their insults from the abusers/bullies group are just flat lies. It's common for bullies and abusers to lie to keep people emotionally dependent on their good opinion.
3) Let Go
Acknowledge that you're living in real time carrying the baggage of old time. And then let go of it. Are you playing out a past habit in a current relationship? Does your fear of anger, loss, raised voices, silence etc. now set the tone for how you relate to others? This requires careful consideration to untwist the tendrils of who you really are and what experiences from childhood onward shaped how you react to situations. Most of us feel a deep inner core of who we are at our best. And we are all capable of separating the emotional triggers from the solid core of self if we sit still long enough to tease apart that what triggers our habitual behavior and seek that which is truly what we believe ourselves capable of being.
4) Remove the past from your future
This simply means that you must learn to stop letting past experiences control you. This happens when you have a bad experience and you let it continue. In this case, instead of thinking positively and remembering the means by which you ultimately overcame prior negative challenges, your immediate habitual reaction is to transfer the bad outcomes from that former experience to a current situation, assuming the worse case scenario for your current experience, with full-blown expectations that things will only be bad. And with that comes the habitual reactions, on cue, rather than a series of chosen proactive actions defined by you as the person you are now. Which means here is that if you had bad experiences, and instead of switching your mindset to think positively and progress positively at your current of future times, you will definitely bring over the "bad experiences" thoughts and actions and label or detriment the current or future experiences in full-force. Hence, removing "bad experiences" is a must not only for others, but for your own good self.
5) Create A Positive Future
Combine the knowledge that you cannot change the past with the knowledge that you cannot predict the future but you can make sure that the person you are right now is strong, whole and healthy emotionally, so that any future negative scenarios are something the person you are now can definitely cope with, no matter what gets thrown at you. This is really about taking responsibility for yourself and how you react. Once you have faced the challenges from your past and accept that while you cannot change the past, you can cease to let it be role-played out every time a new challenge arises, you are beginning to remove the fear of more bad things happening as directed by your past experiences. Instead, you now learn to embrace the reality that the future is as yet unwritten and if you want it to be a positive and strong experience, the power lies within you to achieve this.
6) Avoid Making Rash Decisions
While you're going through the healing process to strengthen your ability to deal with the past in a reasoned and distanced manner, keep aware of the triggers that will send you back to past habits. Actively aim to put a hold on habitual reactions and challenge yourself to do things differently, while at the same time accepting why you need to do this. This also means avoiding making decisions in haste that you may regret later. You do care about tomorrow, hence, do not screw it up by making and doing wrong actions based on rash decisions. For example; just because of extremely bad experiences in the past, and you allow it to "haunt" you, you convoluted everything and make a rash decision of the current and future experiences to be the same as the past experiences. That, is seriously a dangerous rash decision one can ever make.
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