Your Past Shouldn’t Determine Your Future

There are certain freedoms in life we have to protect or they simply slip away. The ability to actively and effectively determine our own present and future is one of them. How so?

You see, your past is extremely, and I mean extremely, persuasive. We human beings like to learn things once and keep doing what we’ve learned uninterrupted for as long as possible. You might think of this as a conservation of energy move on our parts. But, it can and does get us into trouble. How?

The answer is, we could end up making the same mistakes over and over again simply because we are not challenging the errors in what we’ve learned and taking the time and energy to unlearn what doesn’t work while learning something new and more effective.

By the way, the past is like a hypnotic trance. While under its spell we are not thinking, re-evaluating, questioning, confronting, challenging, etc. Think of sleep-walking. Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do my measly 100 years on this planet earth mostly asleep. No sir. I’m into being awake when my eyes are open as much as humanly possible.

The good news is, we human have the capacity for awareness. Problem with that mental function is, awareness can and will make us uncomfortable from time to time especially if we are invested in not acknowledging something that is going on in our lives. Every time we “human up” and challenge what we’ve learned in the past, we have an opportunity to be free enough to determine what goes on in our present and future lives.

It’s basically saying NO to the conditioning, preprogramming that the past or someone or something else is determining. As a sovereign individual and owner and operator of YOU, you are capable and able to make the choices necessary to operate your own life here and now, and in your immediate and long-term future.

Concerning love life experiences, the major focus of this blog, plenty of stuff goes on in our adult love lives driven and controlled by what we’ve learned about love in the past. The problem occurs when what we’ve learned is basically unhealthy. Too often we can grow up in circumstances that teach us lots of things about love that are better left back in the past as distant memories we want nothing to do with.

I’m sure you can thing of all kinds of experiences too many of us go through earlier in life that teach us unhealthy lessons about love. I’ll give you a hint…think in terms of things like abuse, neglect, abandonment, etc. These experiences teach us unhealthy lessons about love and then end up predicting and controlling our adult love lives because we have a tendency to repeat what we’ve learned over and over again in our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

As soon as you seriously and sincerely allow yourself to ask yourself what did I learn about love growing up and is it helping or hurting my love life? You’ve begun getting your freedom back.

Comments? Welcome. Dr. Tom Jordan