Ep. 29: Long Term Perspectives
What if you could rewrite your past—would you do it? In this thought-provoking episode, we dive into the complex relationship between our past pain and our present lives. Many of us are haunted by reg...
Episode Transcript
If you could change your past, would you?
If you could go back in time and undo all the mistakes you made, undo the challenges and the suffering you faced when you were younger, would you do it? This is such an important question, because so many of us spend our present thinking about the past - who betrayed us, who we hurt, the mistakes we made, how dumb or stupid we felt, how much the world has hurt us - and we carry all of that into the present moment.
If you can make peace with what's happened to you in the past, you're suddenly so much lighter in the present - you aren't acting through the lens of the past, you aren't reacting from the pain you experienced there. And if you can do that, you're free to make your own decisions without worrying if they're tainted by what you've already been through. Of course, it's a lot easier said than done. We all go through a lot of stuff throughout our lives, and there may be things that still hurt when you think about them, even 20, 30, 40 years later.
That touches on a big misconception I want to address in this episode: that time heals all wounds. The truth is, it doesn't. We'll get into that, but really ask yourself - pick something in your life that wasn't a great experience and still hurts. If your future self showed up right now with a time machine and offered to take you back and fix what happened, what would you say? And what would that mean?
Before you answer, I want to tell you a story.
The woman who just wanted a family
There's a woman whose only real want in life is a family. She doesn't care about career or all the stuff society says you should want - she just wants a nice husband, a few kids, a nice house, a normal kind of lifestyle. But she's never been able to find the right guy. She's gone on plenty of dates, met plenty of guys, and it always turns out wrong, and she has no idea why.
One day she's walking around and a guy comes up to her and says he loves what she's wearing - just something to start a conversation, and it worked. She knew straight away, looked into his eyes and thought, this is something. They went on a date, fell in love, got married. For the first time she's thinking she might actually have exactly what she wants. She's elated, ecstatic.
A few years into the marriage, something changes. She doesn't know what - he just starts acting differently, more distant. She starts to think something's wrong, but she doesn't want to admit it, because she has everything she wants. So she keeps going with the flow, and slowly the questioning and the worrying and the pain build until she can't handle it anymore and has to ask what's going on. The truth is he just isn't in love with her anymore. Something changed, it doesn't matter what, and they break up.
The next few years of her life are absolute hell, because she's lost everything. It wasn't that she did something wrong, or that he did - it just didn't work out. All the memories of her past relationships not working out come flooding back, and she starts to think she's worthless. She goes through four years of this self-torture, this suffering she puts herself through, until one day she says, this is enough, I can't do this anymore.
She starts a company
She starts a company. She thinks, I'm not letting anyone else go through the pain I went through, and she starts it to help women who are exactly in her position, going through that same pain. It's a rocky start, but she gets going and does really well, ending up helping hundreds and hundreds of women in the same boat she was in - helping them reconnect with themselves, become their own best friend, and so on.
Five years into the business, she's helped so many people she can't even count, and made an actual difference in their lives.
Her future self appears with a time machine
Now, just like we discussed - one day it's raining, quite an average day, nothing much happening - suddenly, in her living room, her future self appears in a time machine and says, I'm from the future. If you want, we can go back in time and I can make it so you never met that guy. I can redirect you so he never finds you on the street and starts talking to you. I can undo all the pain you went through, the four years of misery, the wasted "marriage." What do you say?
This is where the question gets complicated. On one hand, this would save her from all that pain. On the other, that pain, that suffering, led to her helping hundreds and hundreds of women. So what does she say?
This is the exact point of this episode. If her future self had appeared while she was still going through the misery - maybe in the first or second year after the breakup, in despair - of course she'd say yes, let's go back, let me go left not right, let me never meet him. That's a natural response. But if you ask the same person that question sixty years down the line, when she has a thriving business built on that pain, one that's helping hundreds of people, the question gets a lot more complicated.
Good and bad aren't binary
The message I want you to take from this is that good and bad aren't binary. Something isn't good or bad, it's a matter of perspective. So I want you to think - is there anything good that's come from what you went through? You don't have to force it, just sit with it for a second, because we tend to always focus on what this did to me, how this ruined my life. But is there also an opposite? Everything comes with its opposite.
Sometimes that requires a longer-term perspective. If you'd asked her in the moment she was going through it, she may not have had the emotional space to see that it would lead to a business helping a bunch of women - she wouldn't have had that space. But five or six years down the line, with more distance between what happened to her and where she is now, she can see it.
So when people say time heals all wounds, they don't really mean time heals all wounds. What they mean is time can give you the emotional space to see things from a different perspective, and therefore not identify so much with that pain - which in turn heals it, because you no longer see that pain as you, or as part of you.
Time isn't the variable - emotional space is
The truth is time doesn't heal all wounds, or at least time isn't the variable. Something can happen to you and ten years can pass, but if you've been thinking about that pain and feeling it every single day for those ten years, you're not going to heal. You have no emotional space, because the body doesn't know the difference between pain from an argument you had yesterday and pain from ten or twenty years ago - it's just the emotion, just the chemical. If you're thinking thoughts every day that are linked to that emotion, and therefore experiencing it every day through the emotion, you're not healing.
Alternatively, you can go through something really traumatic and then, a week later, have some life-changing experience - a near-death experience, whatever - that causes such a profound emotional shift, emotional perspective change, that you no longer identify with the version of you that went through the traumatic experience, even though it was last week. You're no longer identified with the emotions that person had, so you're no longer recreating it in the moment. You let it go.
The only reason people don't let things go is because they still feel like that is them, and why would you want to let go of yourself? That sounds scary, sounds like dying. And the key thing is emotional perspective change, not mental perspective change.
Emotional change versus mental change
You may have gone through something really traumatic, and because you're self-aware, because you know having negative thoughts isn't going to help you, you put in time to think positively - what's the good side of this, how can I turn this around? That's great, and it helps, but you also know how fake it can feel. You know how fake it feels when you're going through emotional despair and suffering while your mind is going, it's okay, don't worry, you'll be fine. This is why normal affirmations don't work on their own - it's a mental perspective change, not an emotional one.
There's a caveat: you can foster that inner positive narrative and then follow it up with something that actually creates an emotional change. If you're just standing in front of a mirror repeating "I'm okay, I'm okay," your mind is going, no you're not. But if you use that and follow up with something that actually creates an emotional shift - dancing around, whatever it is - it doesn't matter what.