How Overcoming Your Past Helps Shape Your Future

By Heather Cherry—

Your past does not define your future, but it certainly helps shape it, whether consciously or subconsciously. This is because we often get hung up on the things that didn’t come to fruition, happened precisely as intended, or missed opportunities.

Brianna Wiest, author of The Mountain is You says what isn’t right for you will never remain in your life. “There is no job, person, or city that you can force to be right for you if it is not, even though you can pretend for a while,” says Wiest. “You can say you’ll try just a little longer, and you can make excuses for why things aren’t working out right now. But what is right will come to you, stay with you, and won’t stray from you for long.”

And trying to make something work that isn’t exactly right doesn’t benefit you. “When you try to force things that aren’t right, you get split—breeding an internal conflict you can’t resolve,” Wiest says. “It intensifies—in many cases this is mistaken for passion.”

Here’s how overcoming your past helps shape your future.

Stress Process

For many, making mistakes feels terrible—it evokes stress. But when you make mistakes, it creates an opportunity for your brain to adjust and learn. A fundamental brain function known as error processing, enables you to detect errors and improve based on the error.

Error processing plays a vital role in cognitive and behavioral control. When you perceive a situation as stressful, the hypothalamus region of your brain reacts, triggering other actions throughout your body.

Neurologically we process stress in three parts of the brain: amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. There are two types of stress we process.

• Eustress: Positive stress like nerves before a big presentation.
• Distress: Negative stress experienced either short-term (acute) or long-term (chronic).

It is possible to adapt to stress levels over time, but unresolved negative stress takes a toll on your brain and body systems—increasing your chances of developing other health issues. In fact, the stress process theory suggests chronic stress diminishes a person’s sense of mastery, leaving them at risk for subsequent outcomes like depression.

And unresolved emotional trauma can make it more difficult to process stress. This is because emotional trauma impacts the brain’s ability to process memory. Specifically, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can leave memory fragments and contribute to feelings of disassociation. “With trauma, we become stifled and stuck, have trouble planning for the future, and our self-development and actualization halt,” Wiest says.

Inner Child Work

Overcoming your past may leave you feeling defeated. You may even get bogged down in over-analyzing it—hoping it will provide a roadmap to better decision-making. While the past can inform the future, it’s not an end-all-be-all, especially if you don’t overcome it.

Robert Jackman, psychotherapist, and author of Healing Your Lost Inner Child, says healing your past is an important way to shape your future. “Most people don’t realize how much unresolved emotional pain they carry, and they wonder why they keep making the same self-sabotaging impulsive decisions,” Jackman says. “These patterns often stem from their lost inner child, which carries a false narrative that has been on repeat since childhood.”

To overcome your past, psychologists often use a popular tool in psychotherapy called inner child work—the process of imagining and reconnecting with your younger self. “Inner child work focuses on addressing unmet needs by reparenting ourselves. This self-discovery helps you understand your behaviors, triggers wants, and needs,” says Jeremy Sutton, Ph.D. “When you begin healing your inner child, you tap into a part of yourself that is vulnerable and impressionable.”

Common signs you may benefit from inner child work.

• Big reactions to unmet needs
• Challenges with setting boundaries or expressing needs
• Childish outbursts, like tantrums or saying things you don’t mean
• Complaining you don’t feel understood or heard
• Difficulty explaining your feelings when upset
• Fear of abandonment or commitment issues
• Patterns of self-sabotage or a harsh inner critic

Experts advise while this work is highly beneficial, it can be challenging. “Healing your inner child requires you to take an honest inventory of your grudges and aggressions and the wells of longing and fear you’ve been ignoring all this time,” Wiest says. “It requires you to be completely honest about how you feel and actually to feel it.”

The benefits of inner child work are plentiful, including:

• developing healthy coping mechanisms;
• feeling empowered and in control;
• improving emotional regulation;
• increasing self-esteem, self-compassion, and compassion for others;
• reconnecting your passions, dream, and talents; and
• understanding how your past affects your present.

Here’s how you can get started with inner child work.

• Listen: When you’re upset, pay attention to the things that triggered you and connect them to childhood experiences. How does your younger self feel about what is happening to you currently?
• Identify: What caused the experience during your childhood and how do you feel about it now. “You store emotions, energies, and patterns at a cellular level,” Wiest says. “Our bodies are hardened to protect us, and healing trauma is not just a matter of psychoanalyzing it, but working through it physically. When you overreact to a stimulus, you will notice your body tense.”
• Visualize: Overcoming what you fear—specifically, what would your life look like without this fear? “You have to restore the severed connection like it was broken. If you are traumatized about relationships, you need to build healthy relationships,” Wiest says.
• Think: Stop taking thoughts and feelings at face value. “You can’t predict what will happen or other people’s intentions or that what you feel and think is absolute truth and reality,” Wiest says. “This kind of thinking takes a triggering feeling and turns it into a defeating spiral.”

You may think difficult past experiences are reserved for more damaged people—but that’s not true. Everyone has traumatic experiences in one way or another, but how you respond, grow, and develop self-mastery helps shape your future.

Heather Cherry is a freelance health and wellness writer and content marketing coach. She helps businesses create strategic, creative, and conversational messages as well build effective content teams. She has been published in Sleepopolis, SELF, Insider, and author of Market Your A$$ Off.