Just about everyone will go through difficulty at some point in their life.
Some individuals remain deeply affected by these experiences, and as a result, the rest of their lives are defined by them. In contrast, others acknowledge what they went through, but see these experiences as chapters in their life story that they have finished and moved on from.
If you want to become the latter, here’s how you can own and honor your past without letting it define either who you are now or who you may become in the future.
7 ways to own your past without letting it define you forever:
1. Improve your self-awareness to reinvent yourself.
Self-awareness is one of the most powerful tools we can work with, as it allows us to notice the things we like about ourselves as well as the aspects we aren’t particularly fond of.
And luckily, though self-awareness varies from person to person, it is essentially a skill that anyone can improve through self-reflection, journaling, feedback, and being more mindful in the moment.
With self-awareness, you can identify when you are repeating past cycles, doing things that others did to you, or dwelling in the past, and then make a conscious effort to stop it.
You can begin to have more control over everything you do, determining which behaviors you’d like to keep and what you want to change.
Depending on the budget you have to work with, this can be as small as changing a personal habit or the way you speak, or as significant as moving to an entirely new area and starting all over again.
You can change your name, change your career, and effectively become the person you’ve always dreamed of being.
What you’ve been through has taught you many important lessons, and you didn’t have much choice in how those panned out. Where you do have choice is in how you put those lessons into practice going forward.
2. Acknowledge the past factually rather than emotionally.
When you analyze an experience clinically and factually instead of emotionally, it stops having power over you.
As such, any time you think about what you went through, reduce it to its bare bones and consider all the factors as if you were an outside observer — like a detective who’s piecing together bits of evidence to create the big picture.
You might find it helpful to take pen to paper to do this, since our thoughts can often have a mind of their own.
By doing so, you can become a more detached observer of the situation and become aware of when your emotions are running the show. It can help you to remember that you’re no longer in that difficult situation, so you can make daily, intentional choices to no longer be affected by it.
By removing the emotional connection to it, you can own the story instead of letting it bother you, let alone define you.
3. Consider how your past has informed and empowered you.
While difficult experiences can certainly cause long-lasting trauma and damage, sometimes they can result in immense personal growth and increased self-confidence.
For example, one winter I found myself freezing in a forest cabin, hundreds of miles from the nearest town. The gas generator wouldn’t start, so I couldn’t power the portable heater, and night was falling quickly. Hypothermia was a very real threat, so I knew I had to take action.
I was already shaking from the cold at that point and not thinking straight, but I managed to create a small emergency wood stove (with ventilation, of course), and that was enough to keep me from freezing. The tea I made over that stove was the best I’d ever had, let me tell you.
Experiences like these are definitely challenging at the time, and they have the potential to haunt us, but they also provide us with immense opportunities for learning and personal growth.
If you can identify even one way a difficult experience made you more capable, you can start using that strength deliberately going forward instead of letting the past hold the narrative.
4. Draw parallels with heroes of the past who have gone through similar difficulties.
You can almost guarantee that at some point in history, someone has gone through very similar difficulties as you have.
In fact, some of them might not only have experienced similar challenges, but learned from them and transcended them to do something spectacular with their lives.
When we look at what others are capable of doing and achieving, especially when they’ve faced similar difficulties and setbacks to our own, that can be immensely inspiring.
Quite frankly, since someone else has proven these dreams are attainable, that means we have the potential to make ours come true as well.
For example, one of my greatest inspirations is Joseph Pilates. He overcame severe illness and physical damage through yoga, gymnastics, weight training, and other bodywork, and, if you hadn’t already guessed it, developed the physical training system that’s named after him.
His story has inspired me to keep going with my own training, despite immense setbacks and personal challenges over the years.
Similarly, you can find someone in history (or your own life) whose challenges mirror your own. Let their resilience remind you that past struggles don’t have to define what comes next.
5. Exorcise the ghosts of your past by airing them.
When you air your past, it stops having any power over you. As such, writing your story can be effective at exorcising the ghosts of your past, so you can choose who you wish to become next.
Blogging websites like Substack, Medium, Ghost, and even LiveJournal are excellent because they provide people with the means to tell their own stories, and they can usually be done under a pen name if anonymity is important to you.
As such, they can provide you with an excellent opportunity to release some of the shadows you’ve been carrying around with you.
And if you aren’t a writer, or you prefer different types of creative expression, you can experience something similar by creating art, making music, weaving a tapestry, or working in whatever other medium you feel is best for you.
6. Create the opposite experience that you had with someone you care for.
In the same way that some people provide us with great examples of who we don’t want to be, some experiences show us what we never want to subject another person to.
As such, if you had terrible experiences with people in the past, you can turn those around and do the opposite with those who are in your life now.
For example, if someone was cruel to you about something in the past, you can intentionally show the opposite type of kindness to someone you care about. By doing so, you’ve stopped that particular cycle in its tracks and transformed cruelty into kindness, and suffering into joy.
Not only are you doing something good for someone else — you’re literally rewriting the script of your life and not blindly continuing a path of the same type of mistreatment you were subjected to.
7. Work with a therapist to release what no longer serves you.
If you feel weighed down by your past but you don’t know how to go about releasing it, working with a therapist you feel comfortable with may help you to find out where to start.
A therapist may be able to help you find a path towards a place where you can release the things that no longer serve you, and focus on that which empowers you to feel strong and confident in yourself.
They’ll listen to your stories without judgment, help you determine which aspects of your past you’d like to hold onto and which you want to move on from, and offer you invaluable tools for releasing the things you don’t want to carry anymore.
It can be difficult to navigate a way forward when you’re trying to map your way out of an uncomfortable situation, so there’s absolutely no shame in reaching out to someone who can help you do this.
Final thoughts…
Only you get to decide who you are and who you want to be.
Like sifting through belongings when you move into a new home, you can pick and choose which parts of your past you’d like to hold onto and incorporate into your life, and which to let go of.
And when the ghosts of your past make themselves known again, as they inevitably will, you can learn to acknowledge them with a nod and a smile, and then send them on their way.
There’s no need to invite them in to stay and live with you; they’ve already outstayed their welcome for long enough.
