Past Perception

The past is not going anywhere. That is the first thing you may wish to accept if you want any chance of being free of it.

Whatever happened to you happened. The childhood that shaped you, the relationships that broke you, the years you lost to survival or addiction or silence or somebody else's chaos. None of it can be undone. There is no amount of therapy, no breathwork, no journal entry, no middle of the night revelation that will reach back through time and make it not have happened. The facts are the facts that exist. They are done. (sorry to be so blunt) But - the story you tell yourself about those facts? That is still being written. Every single day.

The difference between what happened and what it meant

We tend to collapse these two things into one. The event and the meaning become so fused that we can't see where one ends and the other begins. Something happened, and in the same breath, we decided what it meant. About us, about the world, about what we deserved and about what was possible.

"I felt neglected, so I am not worth caring for"., "I was betrayed, so people cannot be trusted",. "I failed, so I am a failure.", "I was not protected, so the world is not safe.",

These conclusions feel like truth. They feel as solid and inarguable as the events themselves. But they are not events. They are interpretations. They are the stories of a child, or a traumatised adult, or a person in crisis who told themselves it in order to make sense of something that didn't make sense. And at the time, those stories served a purpose. They were of pure intent and they were needed for survival. They were the mind doing it's best to create order out of something very unbearable.

But survival stories are not the same as true stories. And the fact that a belief kept you alive does not mean it should keep running your life.

The story you never chose

Most of us are living inside a narrative we didn't consciously sign off on or author. It was assembled in real time, under duress, by a version of ourselves that didn't have the language, the perspective, or the safety to do it any differently.

A five year old who watches her parents fall apart does not sit down and conduct a rational analysis of what went wrong. She feels the fear and she absorbs the tension. She draws a conclusion, fast and instinctive and usually wrong, “this is my fault”  Or “love is dangerous” or, “if I am good enough, I can fix this”.

That conclusion then goes underground and it doesn't announce itself. It simply becomes the operating system. It runs quietly in the background for years, shaping every relationship, every risk taken or avoided, every moment of joy cut short by a feeling she cannot name but knows so intimately. And she calls it personality. She calls it just who I am. She doesn't realise it's a story. Because nobody told her she was telling one.

You cannot unknow what happened. But you can re-know it.

This is the work. Not rewriting history and not pretending. Not pasting a trite positive spin onto something that was genuinely terrible. The toxic positivity approach of "everything happens for a reason" is not what this is about. Some things happened for no good reason at all, and you're allowed to be angry about that.

But there is a space between denial and defeat that most people never find. A place where you can hold what happened in one hand and hold what it means in the other, and realise they are not the same thing.

You can look back and see, clearly, that you were failed in certain areas, and you can also see that the misguided conclusion you drew from that failure is that you were unworthy of care. But that was a child's logic, not an adult's truth.

You can look at a relationship that destroyed you and acknowledge every bit of damage it caused. And you can also begin to separate the damage from the identity. What was done to you is not who you are. What you survived does not define your capacity. The wound and the person carrying it are not the same thing.

This is not minimising and it's is not letting anyone off the hook. This is looking at the full picture with the eyes you have now, not the ones you had then.

The stories that need updating

There are stories most of us carry that were true once upon a time and are not true any more. And there are stories that were never true but felt true because we had no other explanation.

“I am too much.” - That was someone else's inability to hold you, not evidence of your excess.

“I am not enough” -  That was a system that failed you, not a reflection of your worth.

“I cannot cope” -  That was a moment in time when your resources were genuinely overwhelmed. It is not a permanent diagnosis.

“I do not deserve good things” - That was shame doing what shame does, disguising itself as realism.

These stories don't update themselves and they also don't just expire. They'll run on a loop for the rest of your life unless you actively, deliberately, sometimes painfully, intervene. Not by arguing with them. Not by shouting manic affirmations over the top of them. But by doing the slower, harder work of understanding where they came from, what they were protecting, and whether they still have any business being in charge.

Meaning is not fixed

The most liberating thing I have learned, both in my own life and in sitting with clients as they navigate theirs, is that meaning is not fixed. It feels fixed. It feels as immovable as the events it's attached to. But it's not fixed.

The same life, the same set of facts, the same painful history, can mean something entirely different depending on who is doing the interpreting and when. The story you told yourself at fifteen is not the story you need to be telling yourself at forty. The meaning you made in the middle of the crisis is not the meaning you have to carry into the rest of your life.

This isn't about finding a silver lining. Some experiences don’t have one, and pretending they do is just another form of avoidance. This is about recognising that you are no longer the person who first made sense of what happened to you. You have more information now and another perspective. More capacity that you can use.

You're allowed to look at your past and say: that is what happened, and this is what I made it mean, and I am choosing to make it mean something different now. Not because the pain was not real. But because the conclusion I drew from it no longer serves the life I am trying to build.

The past stays. The understanding moves.

You can't go back. You can't undo, unsay, unlive any of it. But you can stand where you are now, with everything you know and everything you have survived, and look at it again. Not to relive it. Not to reopen it. But to see it with the clarity that only distance and growth can provide.

The past isn't the only sticking point. It's the unexamined story about the past that keeps you trapped. Change the understanding and you change your relationship to everything that happened. Not the facts. The meaning. And meaning, unlike history, is yours to rewrite as many times as you need to.

That isn't denial. or delusion. It's the most honest, courageous thing a person can do.

Look at what happened. Tell the truth about it and then ask yourself: “Is the story I built around this still the one I want to live inside?”

If it isn't, you're allowed to build a different one.