How to get rid of unpleasant memories of the past. How to get rid of the memories of the past and start living in the present

Most people spend a lot of time focusing on what happened in their past. Either they remember bad events, or they are immersed in pleasant memories. Be that as it may, all this only distracts you from the life you are already living. And believe me, real life is much more interesting and promising than the one you have already lived.

Get rid of memories of the past, start living in the present. Realize that you no longer need to be afraid of the things that scared you as a child. You don't have to obey your parents the same way you did before you turned 18. You no longer need to feel guilty about something that happened years ago. You are not obligated to remember what happened to you with those people with whom you no longer communicate. You can forgive yourself for the stupid things you have done before. You can throw away things that were once dear to you, but now just clutter your house. The success you have achieved in the past indicates that you can achieve the same or greater success in the future. If you have lost something, you may gain it again, because you already have experience in this acquisition.

How to get rid of the past forever

As you can see, the past is a picture of what you had, what you could do, what you were afraid of, who you communicated with, etc. But now you live in the present, where you no longer need to be afraid, ashamed, or suffer for what has already passed. Get rid of the memories of the past, start living in the present, because now you have become more mature, smarter, stronger and more capable than you were before. Now you can behave differently and live in accordance with your desires, if only you want it and allow it.

What are some other benefits of living in the present rather than the past? Besides the fact that you can no longer carry the burden of what happened to you in the past, you can now concentrate on what you need in the future. What do you expect from your future? What kind of person do you want to be? What success do you want to achieve in your work life? What do you expect from love and love relationships? What kind of family do you want to create? How much money do you want to receive? What property do you want to have? Think about what you want to have in the future. From today you can afford this, because now you are not focusing on the past, which has already passed, but are going to create your future.

By living in the present, you can create the future you dream of. While you live with memories of the past, you again and again remind yourself of your fears, failures, and mistakes. But this has already happened, why should you focus your attention on it? Instead, let go of your past and start thinking about what you can do now for the future you want to live.

Get rid of the memories of the past and you will realize that life in the present is much more interesting

The present time is the platform for your future. If you live in memories, then your future will be a continuation of your past life. But you don't have to. You can forget about what happened to you and start living the life you want. You don't have to wait for something, fix anything, or regret anything. Just from today start living the way you would like to live in the future. Start focusing on what you have now and what you need to do to achieve the future you dream of. Let the past be filled with new colors that you will create in the present in order to move towards a happy future.

They say you can't mend a broken cup, but it gets a lot easier when you know how to do it. The trick is to let go of the past. Easier said than done, but it is entirely possible. By following our instructions, you can let go of your past relationships and move on to the next chapter of your life.

1. Practice

Everything takes practice, and controlling emotions and feelings is no exception. Stop sitting in the backseat of your life, waiting for things to happen on their own. Instead, roll up your sleeves and put in the effort. Over time, you can develop the ability to think coherently and not dwell on what once was, but focus your attention on what is now.

2. Forgive yourself

Nobody is perfect. If you think you didn't do anything wrong in your past relationship, you're crazy. There is a reason why your relationship ended. Something didn't click and it wasn't what you both were looking for. No matter how fractured your world is, it's natural to feel loss, rejection, and failure. Forgive yourself and move on.

3. Focus on the positive

No relationship is completely devoid of good things, so focus on the good times you had together. Don't dwell on how you could have done something better or wonder how you can get it back. Those days are gone, and even if you get back together with this person, it won't be the same as before. In real life there are no second chances. Remember these good times with a smile. This time has passed, but it was happy. Don't let negative emotions about your ex affect your memories.

4. Learn from your mistakes

If you feel guilty, there is no need to bring yourself down. This eye-for-an-eye situation will only affect you, so you will lose. You may not be able to do everything right with this person, but you can analyze your mistakes and avoid them in the future. If you learned something from your experience, then that time was not wasted.

5. Focus on yourself

Don't worry about what your ex thinks, how he feels, what he does, or who he talks to. There is no point in having long imaginary conversations because there is no other person in your head but yourself. You repeat his words or make up answers. Stop worrying about what your ex is doing. You can't control it. Focus only on what you are doing.

It seems obvious, the best way to forget the past is to look to the future. Past relationships are not so bad, because you still have experience, as well as goals to achieve. It's okay to remember the past from time to time, but don't let it hinder you in the present.

7. Don't try to forget

Trying to forget someone is a bad idea. If you force yourself to forget, you will do things you shouldn't do. The time you spend with someone is part of your life. Why do you want to voluntarily give up a part of yourself? Don't set yourself the goal of forgetting something. This will happen anyway, but for completely natural reasons.

8. Accept the impermanence of life

Everything in life is temporary, even life itself. Even if immortality were possible, life would not remain as it is forever. Therefore we need to move on. Accepting the fact that nothing in life is permanent is part of growing up. No matter how hard you work, some things are simply beyond your control. Do what you can with what you have, or you'll soon find yourself broke.

9. "Tear down the Berlin Wall"

Where there used to be relationships is now empty. You must fill it with contacts with other people. You can look for new acquaintances or reunite with family and friends. The main thing is to lower your defenses and allow them to approach you. Otherwise you will only make yourself more unhappy.

10. Do good...

A great way to feel better is to help others. There are many ways you can do this. You don't have to change the world, but you can make the people around you happier. They will return your favor and cheer you on when something happens.

Breakups are very difficult, but we all lose important relationships. Letting go of past relationships is difficult, but you need to move on. If you don't do this, you will end up wasting a lot of time, which you will regret later. With discipline and practice, you can put this relationship out of your mind and move on to a new and happier one.

The ups and downs of life change a person, influencing his views, interests, opinions about himself, often remaining in memory as fragments of events that either cause joy or depress. They say that over time, only good things are remembered, but what to do if negative pictures from the past continually break into your consciousness and prevent you from moving forward! An inextricable connection with the past is a dangerous path. Following it, it is very easy to lose the sense of the present.

The past that pulls you back

Every person has events in his life that he remembers with excitement. They pop up in the subconscious with bright pictures and for some time carry you back to the past days. Positive or negative emotions - they inevitably tear you away from the present. Of course, who can forbid returning to incidents from your life that brought joy, taught you something or allowed you to experience something completely new! On the contrary, sometimes it is useful to look back a little to remember what path you had to go through, for the sake of which you continue to lead your life, dream and make these dreams come true.

The danger lies in the fact that responses from past events begin to replace the current reality and distract from direct solutions to emerging problems. This is serious pressure on psycho-emotional development. Over time, a regular return to the past in one’s thoughts leads a person to the fact that the reality of today begins to be perceived through the prism of situations already experienced. And this happens over and over again until the “You” of the past completely swallows the “You” of the present. At this very moment, emotional development stops. Will, intelligence, and communication skills are at risk - the future is lost in the flow of past feelings and sensations.

Each person is individual, but we can identify such life events that are relevant for everyone and can cause a return to the past:

• parting is this difficult moment of saying goodbye to someone you loved, and without whom it is very difficult to imagine your future life;
• collapse - a major financial loss, deprivation of a home, failure of a business, which completely changed the way of life and worldview;
• betrayal of a relative, friend, lover - not only faith in one’s neighbor is undermined, but one’s view of the truth, relationships, fidelity, honesty;
• a collision with a catastrophe, human pain - a contrasting spot relative to everything that happened to you, and which made you think about your own future with an eye to the past;

• an incurable or severely crippling disease is one of those cases when the whole life is divided into “Before” and “After”, and a person tends to dwell with his thoughts in the first half;
• your own bad deed, contrary to the norms of morality, morality and destroying the inner image that you create for yourself.

Why is it difficult for a person to get rid of the past?

What keeps a person in the past? Oddly enough, it is equally dangerous to focus on both positive and negative emotions experienced at one time. Taking this fact into account, we can conditionally distinguish three states that characterize your attitude towards the past, present and future.

1. Objective perception. It is typical for people who understand that life continues to move, they need to think about what to do for tomorrow, and use the experience gained to their advantage today, now. If you belong to this category, you often say to yourself: “I tripped, I fell, I got up, I went!” You learn to live with what you have.

2. Emotional dependence. Real life is not happy, there are no prospects in the future. Awareness of this makes a person return to those moments when he felt comfortable, good, or vice versa, when he experienced pain and fought hard for something, but his days were filled with events, activity, emotions, as opposed to today. Such dependence prevents you from taking a step forward and changing your own real life for the better. Take note if you fall into this category! The following phrases may often appear in your vocabulary: “well, two years ago everything was different...”, “once upon a time I...”, “everything worked out for me before...” and so on.

3. Hypertrophied development of the instinct of self-preservation, against the background of which psychological and mental conditions such as depression, phobia, and panic attacks before changes often develop. In most cases, this is associated with a nightmare experienced, with something that broke the soul and worldview. This category is characterized by apathy, reluctance to change anything and fear of it. Such people often turn into introverts and even sociopaths, as they consciously isolate themselves from society. This condition can be called the most dangerous!

It is difficult for a person to get rid of the past, because he is inextricably linked with it by the threads of his own perception. Imagine there are several stretched strings in front of you. Each event causes them to vibrate, creating a specific sound that you remember. This means that every moment of your life has its own melody, and the course of your life up to a certain occasion has its own sound, as a whole. As soon as something happens that changes your perception, a knot appears on the string, and your whole life sounds completely different. Relationships with the past are built on these nodes. Some you can untie, but some will remain forever - this is the first thing that is important to realize.

Nodules mean feelings that are familiar to you: resentment, pain, grief, shame, attachment to the person who abandoned you. From the point of view of a psychologist, these are the blocks that prevent you from objectively assessing the present and looking into the future with a positive perspective. For this reason, the process of saying goodbye to the past will involve working on these feelings.

How to get rid of the past and not interfere with your life

Depending on the situation that keeps you in the past, you select your own methods of working through emotions and the ability to control them. However, several main aspects can be identified that will be equally useful to every person who depends on their own memories.

1. Expand your social circle. Close friends, grandmothers, uncles, aunts, cousins ​​- there are many people around you with whom you can start a simple conversation. After this, potential interlocutors can be found in the dancing or swimming sections, and maybe you even risk participating in a team relay race organized by the city for some holiday. Live communication relaxes you and helps you take your mind off things. This is the first step towards finding like-minded people - people who are also fighting for their real lives!

2. Change the situation, break your pattern of behavior. Often people who are fixated on the past act according to the same scenario every day. This drags them even further into the routine of memories! A new movie - instead of a tired series on TV, a walk - instead of sitting in front of the TV, a trip out of town on the weekend - instead of just lying in bed, catching up on sleep. Buy yourself a new jacket, bag, change the wallpaper in your room, say hello to someone you usually passed by in silence. All this destroys your stereotypical behavior. You will be surprised how quickly your life will begin to change after even minor changes.

3. Work on your thoughts and memories. What doesn't let you go? Keep a diary, write down all your experiences regarding this in detail. Let this cause an attack of tears, hysterics - do not stop yourself, release everything that has accumulated in your soul! Write what caused the pain, how it affects you now, how you could fix it - this is an effective independent psychoanalysis.

4. Find a new dream and strive to make it come true! But, remember one important rule - your new goal should be related to the future and not touch the past.

Zinaida Rublevskaya
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There have been periods in every person's life that they would like to erase from their memory. Some, despite all the difficulties, pull themselves together and move to a new level, only occasionally remembering the upheavals that have occurred; others cannot help but constantly think about the past, thereby depriving themselves of the chance to be happy in the present and future. No matter what burden of the past haunts you: parting with a loved one, missed opportunities, death of loved ones, betrayal of friends, guilt... Now is the time to forget the past forever and start living in the present. How to stop living in the past?

Don't think about the past: why doesn't it let us go?

Many people ask the question: why do some people, having experienced very serious shocks and trials, quickly recover and start a new life, while others fall into long-term depression and cannot stop living in the past after the unsuccessful end of a two-month affair?

Psychology can give answers to this; a lot here depends on age, the atmosphere in which a person lived in childhood, on the type of character and personality. And, even if you consider yourself to be a weak type who takes any life trials to heart, it does not mean that you are not able to cope on your own and not think about the past.

Most often, we cannot forget the past and live in the present, because we feel guilty for the current situation, we are tormented by thoughts that we could have acted differently - and thereby change the ending...

...Sometimes the past does not let us forget about itself, because we do not let go of past grievances, we believe that we were treated unfairly.

Our bad memories are like a suitcase with useless junk that we habitually carry with us everywhere... Do you need such a load?

...And sometimes we can’t forget the past and live in the present because we like this state of self-pity, we are not ready to change, grow, we feel comfortable sitting in our shell, cherishing our grief, closing ourselves off from the entire world around us. This is such masochism. How can you change the situation and start enjoying life again?

How to forget the past and start living in the present: 5 steps to a happy life

Healing from old wounds is a complex and often long process, but no matter what lies behind us, each of us can stop living in the past. Here are the steps that will help you get rid of your worries forever:

1. First step- realize that the past is past, that it is thoughts about it that prevent you from living fully in the present and planning the future. Of course, this is not easy to do, but do you really want to breathe deeply again?

2. Step two- Sorry. Now it doesn’t matter who is to blame for what happened in the past, and who caused the offense: you or those who offended you. It is impossible to turn back time, everything has already been done, and your suffering today will not change the accomplished fact. Mentally ask for forgiveness or forgive, you can go to church. If you have offended a person and know how to contact him, you can call and apologize. That's all. Turn the page. People have the right to make mistakes: you and your loved ones are no exception. If you think that what you did earlier is too serious or you have no one to apologize to, switch to caring about others. You can't change what happened, but you can help others and make their lives better. Volunteering in orphanages, nursing homes or homeless animal shelters - think in this direction.

3. Step three– don’t be sorry. Regret about missed opportunities, wasted time, broken relationships is the road to nowhere. Regrets, as well as self-pity, are generally extremely destructive feelings. Try to look at the situation from a different point of view: you have gained experience, you have learned from your mistakes, you will no longer allow this situation to happen in your life. And guess what? By suffering and constantly feeling sorry for yourself, you destroy not only your life, but also the lives of your loved ones, who find it difficult to see you in this state. Don't you feel sorry for them?

4. Step four- reboot. If the pain is still fresh, you are bursting with negative emotions from within, do not try to be strong, allow yourself to scream, cry, break a cup for one day. You can go to the gym and furiously beat the punching bag. Throw out the pain - this will make it easier to forget the past and start living in the present.

5. Step five– replacement rule. Think about how much time and energy you waste on empty things - not letting go of past grievances and feeling sorry for yourself. Instead, you could change for the better. To begin with, you can go to the salon, change your hair color, get a manicure, radically change your image, or finally start searching. Sign up for driving courses, learning a foreign language, and handicrafts. And most importantly, go in for sports. Yoga is great for getting rid of unnecessary thoughts. If you take on new interests and hobbies in your life, there will simply be no room left for regret and thoughts about the burden of the past.

In general, it seems to me that one of the most effective ways to forget the past- clear the physical space around you: , spend (read where p led me), organize little things like books and... Having let go of things from your past life, you physically feel how life is changing!

Getting rid of the burden of the past and letting go of past grievances is much easier than you think now, the main thing is to start acting right now. In just a few days you will be drawn into a new, happy and interesting life.

Many would agree with the statement that we are who we are only because of our past. All our character traits, habits, and preferences were formed under the influence of various situations throughout our lives. Someone can, looking at themselves in the mirror, say “thank you” to their past, but someone literally hates what happened as a result, i.e. myself.

Changing the present self, sooner or later we will have to turn to the events of the past, which shaped not only our character traits, but also largely influenced the events of our lives (some of today's pressing problems are such not in themselves, but due to the fact that they are caused by and are provoked by past negative experiences). There are still battles over how deeply it is possible to work with your past, because working with situations that occurred at a conscious age and are well preserved in memory is one thing, but working with blocked memories or events that occurred in distant childhood or even the perinatal period - this is a complex procedure. But it is in the deep layers of memory that the most fateful decisions and events are stored.

What the past hides

There is not a single person on earth who has not had something tragic happen in their past. If you dive into your memories, each of us can easily find several dozen, or even hundreds of situations in which they were subjected to physical or moral humiliation, felt abandoned, rejected and unloved, or, as a result of the actions of family and friends, came to the conclusion that that they are not beautiful, not smart, and not capable of anything. It is precisely because of the presence of grievances, conflicts, unresolved disputes, humiliations, etc. in the past. Many people decide to do such painstaking work.

When working with the past, it is impossible not to affect relationships with parents, because a difficult past begins with a difficult childhood. Childhood is very important because... It is there that the basic foundation of personality is formed. It is parents and relatives who explain to the child how to behave and how not to behave; they participate in the formation of his character and habits, ways of reacting to the environment (usually unconsciously) and so on, but along with laying the foundation of the personality, the foundation of future problems (those character traits) is also laid. and ways of responding that will ultimately cause problems and even prevent their resolution).

For a child, the family is a projection, a model of the whole world, therefore it is very important for the family to reflect reality (objective reality). The family must prepare the child for the realities of the world. Oddly enough, from this point of view, an ideal family for a child is just as bad in terms of adaptation as a destructive family (being from birth in conditions of love and complete understanding, the child, faced with the outside world, which is quite different from family ways, may be severely traumatized and not ready to accept reality as it is). This is why working with the past is considered very painstaking for a non-specialist: sometimes the reasons for failures, illnesses, complexes can lie in the seemingly positive aspects of upbringing, but out of habit we look for reasons only in the negative.

Features of working with the past

Of course, everything does not end with childhood; many tragedies happen to a person already in adulthood. But the fact is that the very appearance of these tragedies is largely due to what happened in childhood. Many childhood memories are difficult to retrieve - this is another difficulty in working with the past.

Any past has one trick: the past is always subjective (the same situation is seen differently by different people, for one it is a tragedy that ruined his entire future life, and for another it is an insignificant fact).

The past has another interesting feature: it covers its tracks, and in order to restore the chain of events you need to be an experienced “tracker.” For example, people often cannot understand where they got this or that belief that prevents them from living (I should be a good girl, boys don’t cry, etc.) until they “remember” all the moments of the past that helped consolidate these beliefs, until you work with them, the belief will not lose its power. The difficulty of such work is that a completely inconspicuous situation (inconspicuous from your point of view) can form such a belief. If, say, a psychologist were to point it out to you, in 90% of cases you would exclaim: “Well, it can’t be that such nonsense has such an impact on my personality! I was expecting something bigger!” When working with your past, it is difficult to pay attention to these “important little things”; they often go unnoticed and therefore the results do not live up to expectations.

The best strategy for dealing with your past

Most of those who worked on themselves in one way or another (engaged in self-development and solving their problems) eventually came to the conclusion that the roots of most of today's problems lie not only in memories. Sometimes the problem also has an energetic or physiological cause. For example, a hormone level that is outside the normal range may be the root cause or one of the components of a depressed mood or a tendency to hysterics and tears, and due to the desire to “keep track” of a recently deceased loved one and strong feelings about this tragedy, a necrotic attachment may form at the energy level, which can cause lethargy, apathy and reluctance to live. In both examples, it is not always enough to eliminate only the psychological aspect of the problem; you need to work comprehensively on all three levels (physical, energetic, psychological), then the result will most likely be lasting. This is precisely the approach that distinguishes the Baybak System. You can read the details in the book, which is easy to download by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page.

An important point is that the “Baybak” system is intended for already experienced practitioners, those who can handle independent work. It is designed for global changes not only of the entire personality, but also of life. If you are not focused on such a volume of work, you are interested in solving only a few problematic situations that you cannot figure out on your own, I am waiting for you at my consultation.

Ksenia Golitsyna,
Practicing psychologist
2012