The Answer to Your Wellbeing is NOT in the Past

Does it feel like your experience of wellbeing is only available by resolving things in the past? Have you been encouraged to poke and prod around looking for the answers there? What if you have been looking in the wrong direction?

Join Clare for this 3 Principles based talk which will guide you to see that accessing wellbeing is not a process involving the past and that experiencing feelings of calm may be much simpler than you think.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the CalmCast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out head teacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying,

And I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The CalmCast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music,

With an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

So today I'm probably going to say some things that loads of people are going to disagree with but I'm past caring to be honest.

Because today I'm going to tell you that the answer to your wellbeing is not in the past.

It never has been in the past.

There's nothing there.

And what I'm seeing often on sessions that I do,

Group sessions and individual sessions is that the need to talk about the past is all encompassing.

And I really want to sort of feel through why that might be today in this session.

Why have we become so obsessed with looking at the past in order to resolve what's going on for us in the present moment?

And I've got a few stories along the way to help with that.

I'm talking about this from completely personal experience.

So I did a lot of looking at the past therapy.

I did a lot of traditional counselling,

Analysing my past,

Looking at my past relationships,

Looking at my childhood.

And even as I'm saying that,

I'm just thinking how,

How on earth do we think that we can look at our childhood?

Apart from to give us an overarching feel for things.

But that was not what I was involved with.

I was involved in trying to go,

Not me personally doing it,

But when I wasn't well,

I was involved in counselling to look into the past to try and find the specific problem.

And I'm not really sure then do what with it.

Talk about it endlessly until the pain of it wasn't so painful anymore.

And it just doesn't make sense.

Now,

I'm not saying you can't get a general feel for your ways of thinking about the world,

Definitely have come from your previous experience.

And I had a very funny conversation with my mum the other day because I said something about trying to get over my need to be right.

Because that's significant for me is,

You know,

Claire's right and everybody should live life Claire's way.

I'm saying this,

You know,

Wryly as it is now,

But still in the moment I can really get lost in being right.

And as I was saying something about that to my mum,

She started to laugh and I went,

Yes,

And you do know where I learned it from,

Don't you?

And she absolutely had the awareness that it was from her.

So,

You know,

And I still,

I love that when people around us are our mirrors.

So when I notice her being very right about things,

I know it's time to look inside to where I think I'm right often.

So that is,

There's definitely a sense of that,

That we learn how to be in the present moment from our past.

And I have another couple of stories about,

I mean,

The first one is like what is really happening when therapy says,

Let's go into the past,

Let's explore.

So the first example is I worked with a young lady who had been involved in the Manchester bombings years and years ago.

And she had,

The therapy that she'd been involved with had involved her retelling the story on numerous occasions during therapy and then writing it out and telling it again and again and again and being encouraged to read it again and again and again.

And this kind of therapy,

I think is akin to exposure therapy,

Which is what some people do when somebody is afraid of a spider,

For example.

So they gradually,

You know,

Here's a picture of a spider.

Now there's a spider in the room and now there's a spider a bit closer.

And now eventually you've got a spider in your hand and you're fine.

You know,

It's that kind of,

With the sense that if we repeatedly look at something awful in our lives,

That eventually we'll just become immune to looking at it and thinking about it.

But that was not what this young lady was experiencing at all.

And then the other one that,

So I did a lot of conscious chatting about the past with counselling.

And I then also did hypnotherapy where I went into the past in a child work and regression and things like that.

And there was one time that I went back to a memory.

I'm going to put that in inverted commas,

A memory.

And all of my poking around in the past there was about me not feeling good enough.

So I,

My brother was born when I was three.

The story was that I had felt pushed out by that,

Then felt not good enough,

Then procrastinate,

Then self-sabotaging by procrastinating in the present moment.

That was the whole story wrapped around it.

And in one of these sessions,

I went back to a memory again in inverted commas of me,

Of my brother and my granddad and me all being out in the garden and my granddad really concentrating on my brother,

Giving him attention.

Obviously it was a baby,

So he needed more attention,

But at three,

Don't really understand that,

Do you?

So the memory was that my granddad was giving my brother too much attention.

A three-year-old me didn't like that.

And I told my mum about it and she said it never happened.

And I said,

What do you mean it never happened?

She said,

Well,

Your granddad died before your brother was born.

So there's no way that happened.

It just didn't happen.

And this is the thing with asking about the past is that if you ask your mind,

Why,

If you ask your brain,

Why,

Why am I like this?

Why do I feel this way?

Why am I not being the way?

Why am I not revealing my full potential?

Why do I not feel well mentally?

Then your brain will find an answer.

And if you kind of point your brain towards the past,

It will go into the past and it will try to find an answer there.

Even to the point,

Like you've just heard in that story,

Of making something up to fit,

Making something up to make things make sense.

Because your brain is a sense-making machine,

When you ask it why,

It doesn't like to admit that it doesn't know.

It just goes off and tries to find the answer.

It's looking for meaning.

That's what the human brain wants to do all the time.

And it doesn't stop just because there isn't an answer there,

A truthful answer.

It will find one,

Come hell or high water,

Literally.

So,

You know,

I'm not denying that how we are right now is a product of our experiences of the past.

Of course it is.

Why you're thinking the way you're thinking right now is to do with the past.

But when we look at this from a three principles perspective,

We kind of go,

Yeah,

But you can't really remember the past very well,

Just as I've even,

Even under hypnosis,

Your memories of the past are dodgy.

You're going to emphasise things that make what you believe right now to be true,

Make it look more true.

Things that were bad are going to look worse.

Even things that were good are going to look better than they were.

We just can't remember the past properly.

It's a mess back there,

Really.

I mean,

You hear about things where people have been told a memory by a parent or whatever,

Or this is what happened to me,

A child.

And after over a period of time,

The child really thinks they remember that happening and they were a baby.

They don't remember it happening.

It's not true.

So,

And what I'm seeing,

Obviously,

Is that we're not just going to be talking about the past.

We're going to be talking about the future.

So,

And what I'm seeing often in some of the groups or the live sessions I do and things on Insight Timer is I'm seeing that as soon as we start talking about a particular issue,

So recently I was talking about imposter syndrome,

As soon as we started talking about that issue,

People started telling me in the comments,

This happened to me and that's why,

And this happened to me and that's why,

And this happened to me and that's why.

Now,

I'm hoping you can see that if you keep saying,

This happened to me in the past and that's why I'm not okay in the now,

Then,

And you can't do anything about the past because you really can't.

I mean,

I know you can go under hypnosis and scream at a relative who did something horrible to you or whatever,

But you can't really go into the past and you can't really resolve things.

You know,

You might be talking about resolving something with somebody you never see anymore or somebody who's dead or somebody who,

You know,

I don't know,

Just isn't part of your life anymore.

And so,

In your imagination,

You're going back and trying to resolve the situation.

You can't really do that.

But of course,

The past is really a very,

Very clever illusion because when you go into those things and you think about them,

You try to resolve them,

You try to fix them,

You try to undo what was done to you in the past,

Etc.

What actually happens is that you start to feel terrible.

And so,

You associate that terrible feeling with the past and you think,

Well,

The reason why I feel terrible in the now is because of the past.

But it's not.

It's a really subtle difference.

It's because you're thinking about the past.

The past has no hold over you at all.

You are not,

Nothing is trapped from the past inside you,

Other than your,

You know,

That how you present momently react to things is a product of the past,

But it isn't solvable in the past.

So,

The alternative really is present moment exploration and curiosity.

And your system is set up to guide you to do that.

So,

When you feel an uncomfortable feeling,

Rather than thinking,

Oh,

You know,

I feel like this because that's the past,

That's my past,

Oh,

It's awful,

You know,

I'm always going to feel like this,

I'm broken,

All the other things that people tend to think.

In the present moment,

Your uncomfortable feeling is letting you know that you've got uncomfortable thinking right now.

You might be thinking about the past,

You might be thinking,

You might be relating to something in the present moment with your thinking,

Which is a product of the past.

You don't need to go into the past.

You just,

It's just more helpful to relate to that present moment experience in a different way.

And you can do that without needing to go into the past,

Because your body is always telling you,

Hey,

Just need to let you know that your state of mind is off right now.

Your thinking is awry.

You are caught up in thought that is making you feel bad.

There isn't anything else.

Now,

In the moment when you realise that,

There's a tendency to stop that thinking.

It comes with time,

It comes with practice,

It comes with staying in this conversation,

Which of course I'm always encouraging you to do.

It comes with being curious and open.

But when you feel a feeling in the moment,

That's guidance.

That's letting you know that you've gone into a train of thought that is not helpful.

So hopefully that's not been too ranty this morning.

I felt a little bit ranty about it.

I've been on a walk this morning and I felt a little bit ranty about it.

And I was like,

Goodness gracious,

People are being encouraged to poke and prod around in the past and that is not helpful.

So I hope you enjoy your day.

Stay in the moment,

Notice,

Be curious.

It's all about raising awareness and that's all.

Take care.

Lots of love.

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now,

But bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been the Calmcast with Claire Downum,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.

Reviews

Thank you so much for this insight. Every time I hear about doing shadow work or repainting my inner child I cringe. I don’t want to go there but I keep telling myself if you really want to heal, you’ll need to go there. After listening to this episode, I have this incredible feeling of relief. Thank you for simplifying it for me. I’m learning so much from you on the 3 principles which I was introduced to a couple of weeks ago. I know deep inside that they will guide me to peace within.

This is a very freeing concept, thank you! I will say that whether we are aware of it or not, the past influences the present and how we experience and perceive the world. Self awareness into our histories can help us more readily identify our projections and triggered responses. I also feel that addressing the past somatically vs cognitively is particularly helpful in resolving distress in the nervous system from attachment wounding.