What if everything you knew about your past was wrong?

Could your understanding of your past be based on falsehoods? Dive into the lies you've internalized and learn to redefine who you are today.

*This is the written version of ‘its not you’ podcast episode #56

What if I told you you could change your past, that whatever happened to you in the past, you could change it and therefore change the trajectory of your present and future?

Would you believe me?

People always say:

• You can't change your past, but you can learn from it.
• You can't change your past, so focus on what you can control today.
• You can't change your past, but you can change how you feel about it.
• You can't change your past, but it doesn't define your future.
• You can't change your past, so let it go and move forward.
• You can't change your past, so stop dwelling on it.
• You can't change your past, but you can rewrite your future.

You CAN change your past

And with the help of hypnotherapy, you can do it much, much faster than you can do it on your own.

And that's because in hypnotherapy, your body as a whole is relaxed, and it's your subconscious mind doing the work.

Whereas when you're consciously trying to go over your past and change it, your emotions are actively engaged, which then engages reactions from your body.

And thus begins a cycle of emotional unrest. Which we've spent years trying to avoid. So, while this is not a pitch for hypnotherapy, I want you to know that there are options, should you choose to want to see your past in a more positive light.
Minus all the emotional turmoil.

I know what you might be thinking.

How? How is it possible? In fact, it's not possible to change my past because this happened. And you can't make it not happen. I was there.

I experienced it. You can't make it just vanish and pretend it didn't happen.
Look, I get it because I thought so, too.

But here's the thing:
Our past is comprised of beliefs.

Beliefs are passed down and shape your current reality

Beliefs that were either passed down by somebody else or created because of somebody else.

So they were passed down, meaning whatever they thought to be true. They, meaning your parents, whoever raised you or whoever you spent your most time with growing up.

Whatever they believed, they did not question, and therefore gave the same beliefs to you.
So you are today living through those beliefs if you have left them unchecked. If you just believed it because your mom and dad said it. Now, this could go into politics and religion.

For instance, if you were raised a Catholic, you might never, ever question it or anything related to the church. And the same goes with politics and sports teams even.

A lot of people choose their politics and sports teams based on choices their parents made and what they witnessed through their childhood.
They witnessed their parents watching or supporting this team. They witnessed their parents voting for this party.

So you form the belief that this must be the good party or the good, the best team.

I have a friend who is my age who recently told me she's always voted conservative because when she was younger, her father said, you vote conservative or else.

Now she's in her fifties and her father's passed away. So that's an example of just carrying these beliefs through without questioning and looking around and challenging and comparing new information.

And with that new information, you might change the meaning of the things that you used to once believe, thus changing your choices and decisions. And that is a prescription for changing your past.

Shift your perspective to free yourself.

When you can look at your past with new information, that new information changes the meaning you gave to the events and situations that happened and gives you a whole new perspective.

And then what happens is your whole story that you've carried around for all these years collapses and falls apart. And not only are you able to be freed from those demons of your past, but you can move forward free of them in your future.

Your entire future from the present moment, will change the trajectory of your life. And that's because you have literally released your past.

And because of all the beliefs from your past and those events from your past, you've been living your life through that lens.

• You've been avoiding certain things because of beliefs from your past.
• You've been playing small because of beliefs from your past.
• You've been pretending to be someone you're not so you can go along to get along because of beliefs from your past.

But when you get that shift in perception, all that drops away, leaving you free to be your true self and without hesitation. Because you're no longer seeing your present or your future through that same lens.

It's similar to not being able to see the true color of vibrant green grass with your sunglasses on. It's not till you take them off that you realize how the glasses distorted reality.

Now, when your mind is mired with all of these pains from your past, I get why this is so hard to believe - that this is possible.

But it is. Okay. The events don't change. So to the valid concern mentioned earlier. And it is valid. You can't change the events of your past.

So no matter how you look at it, the events still happened. Yes, that is true. But once the story behind those events is gone, that changes your past.

You see, the reason we have a story in the first place is because when things happen to us. We make it about us.

I know it happened to us, but what happened wasn't because of us. And we internalize everything that happens, and that's what creates the story.

This happened to me, so there must be something wrong with me.

But when you can reflect and look back and see that in fact, there were different factors in someone's, we'll say, behavior towards you, you will immediately recognize. - it wasn't about you. It happened to you, but it wasn't because of you.

So what do I mean by that? I'm going to use a generalized statement. Even though this generalized statement is fairly accurate. A lot of both men and women have parent issues. Okay?

We all know this. So mother issues or father issues. And when they have gone back in to the past of the parent, they've realized, holy shit, these terrible things happened to them.
So on a conscious level, they understand that it's all the parents knew. They didn't know any better because they were treated so poorly. That behavior and their responses to certain behaviors was ingrained in them.

You've got to remember also, self-help has been on the rise in the last, however many years, but even though self-help is on the rise now, a lot of people don't know that they're doing anything wrong or that they did anything wrong.

They honest to goodness believe they're doing the right thing. Now, that being said, I do have a caveat. Sometimes deep inside, a parent under those circumstances knows they're doing something wrong or doesn't feel good to them, (the way, say, that they're treating their child.)

But... they continue to do it because their subconscious keeps them in fight or flight and fear mode.
So if they were to do something different that is uncomfortable to them, and their subconscious knows what's always worked in the past.

So let's just keep this working and not go into unchartered territories.
In other words, let's not open ourselves up to emotional attack the way I was attacked as a child.

Keeping that in mind, this is the exact reason why a lot of people who consciously understand why their parents did what they did can't let it go, and they continue to harbor that anger and resentment.

It's because they too fear that if they let it go, they're going to open themselves up to be attacked, abused again. And this is another instance or circumstance or situation where hypnotherapy is the perfect thing because it gets to the subconscious and it removes that emotion.

Because we're driven by emotion, your conscious mind knows logically, okay, they didn't do it to me. They did it because it's all they knew how to do. I get that.

But it's your subconscious hanging on to the programs and the emotions of the event.

So hypnotherapy gets you into the emotion to merge the two, the logic, and to neutralize the emotion, thereby changing your past.

When you can look at a situation that happened through eyes of compassion and empathy versus anger and hatred, your life changes.

Everything changes.

• Your relationships change.
• The way you interact with people and in the world changes.
• The way you treat yourself changes.

Everything changes. Oh, and let's not forget about health.

• Your health will get better.
• Your stress will reduce.
• You won't have headaches anymore.
• Your insomnia will dissipate.
• Your eating habits will improve.

And that's only the beginning of it. What we harbor internally has to come out somehow, so it comes out through these areas. Like I said, stress, health, insomnia, headaches.

Again, the list goes on and on.

Unintended rewards from healing your past

When you resolve the root cause of an issue, so many more things clear up. So let's say you came to me for some sessions, and it was exactly this.

You had some issues with your parents, and you want to get to the point where you can look at them with compassion rather than contempt. So you can improve your relationship with them. And that means but it's not limited to being your true self with them.

Yes, that includes speaking truth from your heart, not from your fear of consequence or fear of hurting them. And not only that, but so you can realize that there's nothing wrong with you and that you've been perfect all along.

So we do that, and the added bonus of that is that you can sleep well at night,
is that you have a better relationship with your spouse or your friends or your coworkers.

It is that you suddenly start losing weight because you're not so stressed anymore and you're not eating to hide your inner pain.
There are so many unintended rewards that go along with cleaning up your past that it's impossible to name them all.

And it's different for everybody.

For instance, maybe someone's a smoker, and maybe once they clean up the past, they stop smoking. Well, you're not a smoker, so that doesn't apply to you.

But you see what I'm saying? It's different for everybody. And the rewards go far beyond just changing the story of your past.

When you change the story of your past, your future has to change as well, because you're no longer a victim of your past, you're no longer on that same trajectory.

A whole new path opens up.

Now, I'm going to flip this whole scenario around for a second. Using the smoker. Smoker gets hypnotherapy to quit smoking. That is his main objective.

"I just don't want to smoke any more."

Okay, great. What the smoker uncovers is the reason he started smoking in the first place had everything to do with his past and the stories about his past.
So he comes in to quit smoking.

We uncover his past, his main motivator for starting in the first place. We clean that up, and Smoker has a new perspective on his past.

The stories he once told about his past have now collapsed. And suddenly smoker leaves not just a non-smoker, but:

• he's having better relationships,
• he's saving money,
• he's doing more things that he loves to do.
• he has the energy to do more.

So maybe he's getting fit and healthy. You know, just use your imagination.

All of the benefits of doing this work, this is much, much different than going to the doctor and getting a pill to relieve a symptom. Well, once the symptom is relieved, everything goes back to normal.

And by normal, I mean nothing changes. Aside from your symptoms being suppressed for the time being, you continue doing the same things you've always done.

Versus when you change your past through hypnotherapy, you get all of these unintended rewards which just make for a beautiful life.
Now, as we get near the end of the episode, I'm going to share an example to help put all of this into perspective.

Now, the truth is, I've put this on pause for a while, trying to come up with or decide on the most relatable example, and this one isn't it. But it was the one that kept nudging and nudging and nudging and wouldn't let me alone.

I actually didn't or don't want to get into this. But you know that constant nudging feeling, naggling feeling, don't you? Where you don't know why, but you've got to do this thing?

Well, I'm gonna go with the assumption that this is the story I'm supposed to tell because somebody is going to gain immense benefit from it.

I was mentally, physically, and emotionally abused my entire childhood. On top of that, I am adopted. And the significance of that is - that adopted people have abandonment issues.

Because when you are taken from your mother's womb, where the environment becomes familiar, meaning your mother's voice and, well, let's put it this way. you are essentially one with your mother.

You are growing inside of her body, so everything she experiences, you experience as well. And so that becomes familiar to you. Never mind the genetic bond and all of that.

That is literally ripped away from you and you're handed to a stranger.
That is most definitely a very vague and condensed summary of the trauma and adopted child experiences. In fact, a lot of adopted people have CPTSD because of it.

Problem is, we don't know we have it. Nor did I. So when things like emotional, mental and physical abuse happen, it's that compounding effect.

Because of abandonment issues caused by being adopted, we're already living thinking there's something wrong with us. The repeated attacks prove that we are, in fact, the problem.

Now, with all the things that happened to me, I was convinced. But nothing solidified that belief like the moment they gave me back.

At 15 years old, my parents gave me back to the Children's Aid Society, which is what it's called in Canada.

So I went to a group home for juvenile delinquents, and from there I went into foster care. I still remember standing in the doorway of this juvenile delinquent home, looking at to me what was chaos and wondering, what have I done so wrong that I'm here?

And I what's the matter with me? Because in my head I'm thinking, I'm not this. I didn't do anything to deserve this.

Oh, but it gets worse. I was given to a couple of different families that didn't want me. So I got shipped back to that home and eventually found a foster home where I stayed for the next year and a half, two years.

So when I tell you I know rejection and abandonment, judgment, fear of losing everything, fear of not being lovable and not being likable. All the things that you're struggling with, I've been through.

So when I say I know how you feel, trust me, I know how you feel.
Now, I shared all that with you because it's a necessary part of the example.

So now that you know the premise and how I grew up, I'm sure you can understand why I had insecurities and didn't have any self love. In fact, I didn't even know what self love was.

And I'm sure you can appreciate how any stories I may have had about those times were true and any anger or resentment I may have had were warranted.

But here's what I ended up uncovering.

My mom had 13 miscarriages, and then her and my dad finally had a little girl who died at three days old.

Now, I knew all this when I was younger, but it didn't hit home until I had my own kids and started this reflection process. With my parents unable to have their own kids, they decided to adopt.

So first they adopted my brother, and then two years later, they got me. I had some issues where I was slowly starving to death. My esophagus was closed in, and I couldn't eat anything. So at a very, very young age, I had to get surgery.

If I am to put myself in my mom's shoes...knowing what I know now about human behavior and why we do the things that we do, rational or irrational, I understand why she or they would try to keep me at a distance.

Now, hear me out. What happened to me was not okay, and it did happen. And I can't change what happened. The events happened.

But now that I see them differently, I am full of love and compassion, certainly forgiveness.
So let me explain. I believe there's a high possibility that had I not been deathly ill and needed a surgery, which also could have been a 50-50 chance, things might have been a lot different.

But I think that looking another daughter's death in the eyes was too much for my parents. So they soured on me. They kept me at a distance. There was some neglect there as well, but it was easier to push me aside than it was to face any possibility of that kind of an emotional turmoil again.

Because that happens a lot, and it happens in many different situations. And I'm not condoning it, but I can't live the rest of my life full of hatred and anger and resentment. I know that some people have looked at me side-eyed when I have said I've forgiven them. And here's why.

Now, again, when I say the 'here's why' I have left a lot out. This is just a short summary of way bigger picture. And part of the healing has to do with being able to step into somebody else's shoes.

And because of all I've been through and all my experiences, all the people I've met along the way, empathy now comes as natural to me as breathing.

But because of the emotions involved, because these are my parents, and because of the anger and resentment that I harbored, I couldn't see anything but the wrongdoing until I had my own kids and was forced to look at my own behaviors.

And in the bigger picture, until I went back on some of the things from my mom's past. Doing so allowed the focus to be off of me and make everything about me, me, me, me and what happened to me.

I was able to see the bigger picture and what happened to her, how she was raised, and that this is all she knew.
Therefore, everything that happened to me wasn't about me. It wasn't because of me. Everything that happened to me was because of her, or I should say, them and in their mind, they weren't doing things intentionally to me.

They were doing things for themselves that ended up being done to me.

Read that part again. Because when you really get this, you will never take things personally again, and you will be able to change your past. Now, was their behavior okay?

No, not at all. I don't condone it, and I never will. But as an adult, I have a choice. I can carry on the rest of my life full of hatred and anger, or I can believe the story I'm telling you and let go and move on while appreciating the good that I got from my parents.

And let's face it, I wouldn't be who I am today had I not gone through all those experiences.

I wouldn't be as empathetic as I am. I wouldn't be able to work with the clients that I work with had I not gone through all of that stuff.

And one final thing.

There are people who will want to attach all kinds of labels to what I just expressed. Spiritual bypassing, she's in denial, blah, blah, blah.

I. Don't. Care. And you shouldn't care either. If you believe something and your belief gives you peace, so be it.

Because the alternative is what? Anger, hatefulness and resentment and a miserable life that infects all those you care about, or a story that brings you peace, compassion and forgiveness.

And if somebody reaches the point of forgiveness, you're not bypassing anything.