You Have Me Confused

That’s Not Me

“When your past controls your present, what does that say for your future?”    

I wrote that quote two years ago.  The inspiration was based on a comment made by someone I was seeing at the time when she popped up and said, “That reminds me of my ex.”  I responded, “That’s not me.”  We will always have certain triggers that can initiate a response based on experience.  Our past helps make us who we are as long as the past stays in the past more than it does the present.  The reason I said it that way, is because, we cannot keep 100% of our past out of the present, but we can chip away at it by becoming more aware when it rears its head.  It is called a conditioned response. 

The way we can change a conditioned response is by becoming aware when the feelings bubble up rather than reacting on those feelings based on triggers from the past. After all, isn’t that the way we originally learned the conditioned response?  Rather than holding on to the old one, start working on a new one.