Everyone has things in their past they aren’t fond of. We all experience negative events at some point in our lives and some of us overcome them, whereas others relive the bad memories for years. This article was written to help the latter move on and create happier futures for themselves.

Scroll to the bottom of this page, if you’d like to watch the related video that explains how people get themselves in this mess and how we all have the solution built in, if we’re willing to uncover it.

Our beliefs can get in the way of our innate coping mechanisms. Some of them can get us stuck in the negativity and keep us from letting it go. Beliefs like:

• “Life’s unfair to me.”
• “It’s their responsibility to make this better, because it’s their fault.”
• “I’m being punished, because I’m a bad person.”
• “If I let it go, I might as well be approving what they did.”
• “I’m justified in staying upset, because I was wronged.”
• “What happened was so bad that it’s impossible for me to heal.”
• “I need an apology before I can move on.”

But I’m here to support you in stopping this dead-end course once and for all. You just need to understand a few important points. When you try to get over negative past events, your goal is NOT to:

• relive the past – It’s impossible to change what happened, no matter how much you replay it in your mind. All you can do is change how you view it and how you respond.
• avoid, ignore, diminish or suppress your feelings – This would create more and maybe worse issues to replace or add onto the old ones.
• make yourself forget about the past – Unless you have a Men-In-Black-style neuralyzer, that’s not gonna happen.
• wait for someone to apologize for or acknowledge what happened – This puts the power in someone else’s hands, when it’s entirely in your own control.
• wait for time to heal your wounds – Time alone is not enough. You need to be a lot more proactive than that.
• wallow in self-pity, anger, doubt, etc. – Acknowledging and accepting your emotions and allowing yourself to feel them wholly is not the same as dwelling on them with no end in sight.

If you do think one or more of the above, don’t panic. I will explain how to make things better in a minute. Now is your chance to change it all. And I know it’s scary. It’s definitely easier to just continue doing what you’ve always done, but it won’t improve your situation. Do you want life to be easy, or do you want it to be happy? You can’t have both. If you’re here reading this, I’m guessing a part of you understands that, and you’re at least willing to listen and take my points into consideration. So sit back, give yourself a moment to take in what you’re about to learn and take the necessary steps to change your life forever.

So here we go. Here are my top 10 suggestions that will help you overcome a negative past:

I know what you’re thinking: “What a load of hippie nonsense! Telling myself I’m luckier than others doesn’t make my life any better.” And in a sense, you’re right. Just because children are starving in Africa and dying of dehydration, that doesn’t mean your loved one’s death hurts any less. You are still suffering. You still went through a terrible ordeal and carry the trauma around with you. So how does being grateful for what you have help you? Well, remember the phrase: “The grass is always greener on the other side”? I’d like to change it a little: “The grass is only green where you water it”.

Yes, other people didn’t have to go through what you did, and they seem happier as a result. But you don’t know their story. You don’t know how much they watered that grass when you weren’t looking to make it so green. You always have to put in work to gain happiness. I explained that more in this video. The thing is, sometimes we don’t realize we’re putting in the effort. We don’t notice the little things contributing to our happiness. And developing a daily gratitude practice can help you cultivate that awareness. Not only does it show you that you do have things to be happy about despite your problems, but it also helps you recognize ways you can build on these little blessings to make your life better.

I often preach that mindfulness, living entirely in the present moment, is a cure-all for negative states. I tout it as the one sure-fire way to achieve happiness and so it keeps coming up in all my articles and videos. If you’d like to watch the original mindfulness video and read the article, click here.

Being present takes your mind off whatever bad things happen, but it also allows you to have the clarity you need to better handle them when they occur. What you’re struggling with isn’t really the past. When you look at it with mindful awareness, you’ll realize that there’s no actual thing called the past. Everything that happens happens in the present. Memories of traumatic events are thoughts occurring in the present. Anger or sadness about the past is happening right now inside of you. Your present moment experience is what creates the past and lets it haunt you.

What’s magical about this understanding is that it proves that the way out of suffering is always right here, right now. You can change your perspective by focusing on something different. You can change how you feel by noticing your emotions as they are right now. If you want to heal, put your attention on your present experience. Notice how absorbed you are by the stories that appear in your mind.

Just for the moment, let yourself disassociate from these stories and see them as though they are happening to someone else. Notice the pattern of physical sensations going through your body at the moment – is it tension, burning, wetness? Now notice that you are aware and these sensations are appearing in your awareness. They come and go and change as you notice and stop noticing them. But you remain the same. You are here, in the present and most likely, at this moment, you are safe and have no reason to be feeling these emotions.

Allow these emotions to exist without attaching meaning to them. Don’t let them take you on a roller coaster of memories, thoughts and emotions in your head. Don’t suppress them. Don’t ignore them. Let them be. When you’re not caught up in them anymore, you can notice them and ponder them more clearly. Now notice as you ponder, are you currently suffering? No, you are simply experiencing sensation as awareness of thought. Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate actual suffering from the memory of suffering and the two get jumbled to the point where it’s hard to escape the pain. But doing this practise in the form of daily meditation can seriously help you become mentally and emotionally stronger to the point that you can escape this maze.

This is another reason why it’s important to develop mindful awareness of your emotions. When you can notice yourself feel things, you can more easily learn to recognize the signs that indicate something is wrong. It’s like the regular check-ups that can help you diagnose an illness while it’s still early enough to treat it. By spending a few minutes a day to stop and notice the little warning signals your body is giving you, you can tackle the issue when it’s small. You won’t be as stressed about it and you can stay calm and think clearly.  

You may not be able to see how practising meditation can help you learn to tell when you’re stressed and why, but it’s amazing how well your body can scan for errors when it’s running properly. By spending some quiet time with yourself you will get to know yourself better; learn what scares you, what excites you and what triggers you.

The biggest reason why it’s important to identify your triggers is because your automatic response to triggers can recreate the very past you’re trying to overcome. This can create a self-fulfilling prophesy, if you’re not careful. Everyone who’s been traumatized has triggers and trigger-responses. Get to know yours and you will be better prepared for the future. If you don’t know what to expect, then you can’t equip yourself against it.

Power questions are just that; powerful. We all ask ourselves questions in our heads when something goes wrong, because our brain is trying to solve the problem. If you don’t like how you handle things, it’s time to take a closer look at the questions you ask your brain and make a conscious effort to make them more empowering. Because your brain will try to find an answer to every question you ask, and if it’s a trick question that forces it into a negative state, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

“Why is this happening for me?” is a way more powerful question than “Why is this happening to me?” and your brain will come up with very different answers to each. The first question implies that there is something good in this problem and it’s all happening to benefit you in some way. Asking it will force your brain to find that benefit. The second question implies that you are a victim and have no control over this situation, which is being inflicted upon you. It also implies that you are to blame somehow, which forces your brain to figure out what you did to deserve it. Don’t do this to yourself, when the solution is so simple.

There’s a common misconception that everything happens for a reason that is predetermined. I believe that things do happen for a reason, but that it’s up to us to determine that reason. There can be many explanations and depending on which one you choose, your life can turn out very different.

It’s completely in your control to find a meaning that suits you. Think about what this event has taught you, how it’s made you stronger, kinder or wiser. Whatever happened to you is not the problem. Right now it’s simply a memory and memories are just thoughts. They have no power or meaning, unless you give them some. You have millions of thoughts and memories about things that happened in your past that cause no problems for you. The ones that do cause issues do so because you have given them a troublesome meaning that doesn’t serve you. Getting sick could mean you’re unlucky and God doesn’t care about you, or it could mean you can now appreciate the smaller pleasures in life and focus on what really matters. It’s 100% up to you. Which do you prefer?

Look for life lessons everywhere and you will never have trouble seeing the silver lining in every dark cloud. Just like finding meaning in events is up to you, it’s also up to you to find the lessons your past negative experiences have to teach you. The lessons are sometimes related to the meaning, however, so be careful with one because it affects the other.

Like I said in #3 above, you have triggers and you have trigger-responses. Most people respond to traumatic experiences by reacting to the present as though the imagined future is going to play out exactly like the past. So it’s important to know what your reactions tend to be, so you can consciously change them ahead of time.

Remember that your brain is not designed to make you happy. It’s there to help you survive. It’s always looking for what’s wrong in any given situation and has a 'fight, flight or freeze' response to keep you safe. Happiness is not something you can expect your automatic responses to help you with. It’s something you need to actively work towards. If your response is flight or freeze, it likely means you avoid or ignore your problems. Maybe you run away or self-medicate. Maybe you developed attachment issues or an addiction as a result.

Sometimes the best way is to fight. But not with anger or physical retaliation. By fight I mean don’t take the easy way out. Learn. Grow. Make the difficult decisions, because the way you react reinforces that neural network in your brain and makes you more likely to take that same path in the future. So every time you make a choice to go against what you used to do, you’re forging a new path that will eventually become powerful enough to become a major highway that your brain uses instead of the old worn trail.

Make sure you always have a goal to look forward to, to keep you focused and divert your energy away from your past. When you have no future prospects, it’s easy to get lost in the past ones. Having a goal to look forward to not only builds positive momentum, but also gives you an opportunity for future successes that will reinforce the idea that life can and will be better.

But not just any goal will do. It’s important that your goals are SMART and purposeful, in line with your personal core values, interests and callings. Click here for more in depth instructions regarding creating SMART goals or here for information about how to find your purpose based on your values. There is also a test I have developed here that can help you figure out what your values are.

Remove old chronic sources of stress, so you’ll be better equipped to handle new ones. This can be done by taking stock of your life (using #2 above) and seriously contemplating what serves you (based on #8) and what is merely cluttering your life by giving you extra things to do that don’t add to your happiness.

We all have responsibilities that we can’t avoid, and I’m not encouraging you to ditch your obligations. I’m just pointing out that we all get carried away sometimes and end up doing, buying or being things that don’t align with who we are. Maybe they did once, but we’ve grown out of them, or perhaps they’re an old relic of the past, left over from a time when peer pressure or societal norms compelled us to go in a direction we’ve since wandered from.

Decision fatigue can seriously stop you from making good choices, so try to simplify your life as much as you can and make it so you don’t have to make too many decisions that don’t ultimately matter that much. Whether you’ll have Thai or Chinese for dinner isn’t going to alter your destiny, so don’t waste your mental energy figuring it out. Deciding ahead of time that when given a choice between two places to eat you will always choose the first will seriously unload a major amount of decisions you have to make in your life, leaving that energy free for your mental faculties to use in more serious situations.

Respect your emotional world as much as your physical world. Yes, it’s important to stay in shape and be healthy physically, but it’s just as important to stay healthy emotionally and mentally. So find healthy outlets for the stresses you can’t get rid of and get rid of those you can.

Get a mentor or sponsor. Getting support from people who have been there is invaluable. That’s why 12 step programs like AA encourage it. But you don’t have to be an addict to benefit from the power of having a strong support system. When you have someone to help you, you will learn how to do things faster than trying to learn them alone from trial and error.

Have positive people around you, people who love and care for you. Mentors, colleagues, friends and family can all play a role, so don’t let pride get in the way of accepting help from those who offer it. They all play a part in keeping you healthy and happy. They help you when times are tough and remind you that they have been better and can be better in the future.

If you’re attuned to the needs of those around you, not only will they return the favour, but you will end up creating a network of compassion that will change everyone’s life for the better. Sometimes this means you have to remove the negative people from your life, or try to help them become more positive. Teaching is the best way to learn, so you can support each other on this journey to make the weight easier to bear.

It’s scary to stop viewing yourself through the lens you have been viewing it for years. But it’s worth going through this fear and making this effort. It seems like a big risk, that things might get worse if you change even the smallest thing about your life. But trust me when I say it can only get better when you take these steps. Because even if it does get worse for a little bit, you still retain the right and ability to change it again until it’s better. Things will always go up and down. Sometimes they’ll be good and sometimes they’ll be bad. If you give up trying when they go bad, then you rob yourself of the ability to make them good again later. It’s counterintuitive, so take the plunge.

If you need help and don’t have anyone to support you, I’m here for you. Book a complimentary breakthrough session and we can talk about it. I know you can do this. Together we can try systematic desensitization, exposure therapy and other solution based techniques that have been proven to help. So don’t give up. Stand up, stand strong and try again.

Alternatively, you can ask any of your questions in the comments below or send me a message. I’ll try my best to help you out.

If you haven’t watched the video that comes with this article, here it is below. It explains all the reasons why people let negative past events control their present and their future.