We’ve all had the experience of feeling that some particular thing ‘should’ have happened in the past, or that we or someone else ‘should’ have done a certain thing that we didn’t do in an earlier situation, and it’s all too easy to get sucked into reliving these mental movies of the past over and over. You might have particular memories that you keep dwelling on, that cause you anger or sadness, or give you a real sense of frustration that you can’t go back in time and change them.
People sometimes use the phrase ‘unfinished business’, where they feel they lack a sense of completion about past events. It’s as if you were watching a movie that suddenly stopped, half-way through, and you’ve been trying to bring it to a conclusion in your mind. Perhaps you can’t talk to the people who were involved anymore, or perhaps there’s no way to right the wrongs of the past, but you keep on wanting to make sense of those events.
And the mental and emotional effort of rehashing the past over and over can exhaust you and make it hard to fully enjoy your life in the present, as your brain becomes primed with all those unpleasant thoughts, and it starts to feel like you’re tarring everything in your present life with the same brush.
But you can break this habit. Hypnotherapy will help you to deeply relax, and detach yourself from the heightened emotions you’d been attaching to those memories. Because letting go of the past isn’t just about finding rational reasons to move on, it’s about making an emotional shift inside, where you can feel calm enough, and detached enough, to find a healthier perspective on those events.
There might be lessons to learn from that past time, there might be things you could start doing differently in the present. There might be a conversation you need to have with someone to help you take that next step to putting all this behind you. But that will all become much easier when you first deeply relax, calm down those emotions attached to those memories, and from that state of grounded centeredness, then decide where you want to be heading in your life.
And remember, meaningful as those past events may have been to you, human beings are also creatures of habit. If you’ve been spending a lot of your free moments habitually looking back at the past, then in some ways it’s just become a bad mental habit, something you’ve kept on doing automatically because you practiced it so much.
So letting go of the past doesn’t mean you have to resolve every story in your life that didn’t have a proper ending. It means calming down, finding a healthier, more balanced perspective, and literally re-training your mind to break that habit of looking back so often, so that you can pay more attention to what you want for the here and now, and for your future. Hypnosis will help you mentally rehearse these changes and make them second nature to you.