Healing Through Reflection: 4 Ways to Learn from the Past

Fond or not, we all have memories that can teach us something.

Unfortunately, though, as the human mind skews towards negative bias, we can often find ourselves “stuck” on less than positive experiences in our lives. This can lead to rumination and overthinking, something that has the potential to snowball out of control. All of this ultimately destroys your inner peace.

To help out, here are 4 ways that can help you learn from your past and build a better and more pleasurable future.

4 Ways To Learn From The Past

1. Bring Awareness To Your Catastrophizing Mind

A very inventive (and rather destructive) way our minds like to prepare us for the worst to come is to catastrophize. If you haven’t heard of catastrophizing, it’s a way of thinking termed ‘cognitive distortion’.

Someone who catastrophizes pictures in their mind’s eye a future event that has an unfavorable or disastrous outcome. This kind of thinking can lead to worry and anxiety, something that affects clear thinking and decision-making. This is where our past can help out.

If you find yourself catastrophizing, think back to a time when you had a similar, but positive, experience to the one you are worried about. Maybe even then, before the past experience, you were worrying about it like you are now.

Remind yourself the outcome was nowhere near as bad as your mind had foretold. In fact, it was quite the opposite, the past experience worked out well and all your worrying was for nothing. In doing so, you will soon realize that catastrophizing thoughts are not real nor are they logical. 

It is very, very unlikely that a future scenario is going to turn out for the worst.

2. Learn To See Your Past Failures Or Mistakes As A Learning Experience

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is free from less than favorable outcomes, we’ve all failed, made a bad decision, or taken a wrong turn at some point. Although, what sets someone who is at peace with their past and those that aren’t is they see their past mistakes as a learning experience.

They have not let their past stop them from moving forward. Instead, they reframe their past failures or mistakes and taken the opportunity for growth.

As difficult as they can be, it’s important that you do the same. See your past failures as a stepping stone to success. A necessary yet relatively small hiccup that doesn’t have to be your downfall but instead a chance for growth.

With this change in mindset, learning from your past moves away from being a painful experience and towards becoming one of your greatest strengths.

3. Nurture Self-Compassion

We tend to expect a lot from ourselves and when things don’t go to plan there’s a tendency to be rather self-critical. And although self-criticism can be healthy in small doses, there is a tendency to put yourself on trial too often. And this, unfortunately, can lead to self-loathy a lack of self-confidence.

To ensure self-criticism doesn’t become a tool for self-destruction, be sure to offer an olive branch to yourself every once in and a while. 

Self-compassion can go a long way.

Possibly the best way to do this is to treat yourself as a friend. Listen to your inner voice and question whether you’d speak to someone else in the way you are speaking to yourself.

If the answer is no, then perhaps it’s time to let off a bit. 

Rather than criticizing yourself when something doesn’t go to plan, try instead to pat yourself on the back when something does. Create a habit of this over time, so when you look back at past ways you’ve dealt with adversity you’ll find a backlog of good memories rather than a smear of self-criticism.

4. Rediscover Positive Experiences

A tendency to harbor negative experiences is only natural, but that’s not to say it’s necessary. Think about how many amazing events you have witnessed and experienced throughout your life, I bet there are some incredible ones. 

Why then only obsess over the negative ones? Why not instead start shifting your focus towards memories that fill you with feelings of gratitude and pleasure.

By doing this - slowly but surely - you’ll start to shift your default ruminations and negative bias towards a more pleasant state of mind. No more dreading or wishing you’d done this or that and no more tendencies to overthink past circumstances that are no longer in your control. Instead, just appreciation and thankfulness for the life you’ve lived and thankfulness for the positive future experiences that are yet to come.

Final Thoughts

As much as it hurts, we are all going to come against adversities. But rather than allowing them to rule our thoughts and feelings why not instead focus on how great your life is right now.

Take a moment to learn from the past so your present and future can be more positive and fruitful.

To summarize, I’ll leave you with a quote from William Wordsworth: “Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.”