Lots of people feel like they’ve messed their life up. For most people they get to mid-life and they will feel like they’ve made some mistakes in life. Many people will have lost a job, had a marriage breakup or battled an addiction.

But for a lot of people, they’ve experienced several events or traumas and they feel regretful about the life they’ve led, decisions they’ve made and things they’ve done. These feelings can spiral and leave you thinking about them almost constantly.

This creates a well worn track in your mind to negative thoughts and feelings, making it easy for you to feel that way often. When I ask people who feel this way how much time they spend thinking about this, the results are from 1-4 hours a day. And when I ask them how big the feeling is, it is usually all around them. That means they are feeling really bad for a big chunk of every day.

The thing is you will be feeling really bad about something that is gone, done, in the past. Every single day is a fresh chance to start again. Even the cells in our body replace themselves so are always repairing, healing and recharging. And your life can be the same.

Stop looking back

While it’s great to have memories, many people living with regret replay parts of their lives over and over. Wishing it had been different, that they had been different and the outcome had been different. This really is the equivalent of having a wound and keep picking the scab off revealing the wound over and over without allowing it the chance to heal.

Take the lessons

Every life situation will teach us something. Even if its that we never want that to happen again that is an opportunity to work on ourselves and learn from every person and every situation. If you take the lessons you might even be able to spot patterns in your choices and behaviour and you can adapt accordingly to get different outcomes in the future,

Take comfort that you did the best you could do at the time, with the resources available to you

In NLP this is a well used term because it’s easy to look back and think ‘oh, why didn’t I do x,y,z’. But we don’t always have the right answers or the right tools when the situation occurs. Or sometimes we are not in the right mindset to take the right action at a particular time.  We are particularly hard on ourselves when it comes to personal relationships but these are the most complex of all situations and the needs of each person will be different at each time making it very difficult to fulfill needs of others if you have needs of your own that are not being met. Sort of like having one car and needing to go in 2 different directions at the same time.

Make your peace

Now this isn’t always easy but if you don’t make your peace with the past, what are your other options? Carry it with you for the rest of your life? Keep that pain/sorrow/regret and it’s associated heaviness? Did you know that every cell in your body feels your emotions?

Not making peace with your past can actually make you heal. If you’ve never seen it watch Dr Emote’s video about the love hate experiment and the effect it has on a jar of rice it’s quite amazing.

How intention, thoughts and words can have real effect on something. So if that’s you thinking about things from the past, this is not good for you. Stop.

Appreciate your one precious life

It’s cheesy but true. You have one life. Never to be repeated. If you didn’t make mistakes you wouldn’t be human. Share your experiences with others and you will find everyone has a story to tell. There is a saying that if everyone chucked their problems in the middle you would soon grab yours back.

Building are knocked down and rebuilt. Storms destroy towns and villages and they repair the damage. Flowers die and grow back bigger and better. You will make mistakes in your life but you don’t have to regret and carry those mistakes forever.

Get help getting over the past

Hypnotherapy is fantastic for clearing up your feelings from the past. This is because your true feelings about each experience and the more complex details of your human self like values and identity are held in your unconcious mind. Hypnotherapy and NLP access your unconcious mind and release issues from the past so you can move into the future feeling much lighter and better about things.  Free to live your life in the present and the future.

 I can hep you heal the past and look forward to the future. Please book a free consultation.