Is it possible to forget your past and move on? Or does your past haunt you forever?

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Is it possible to forget your past and move on? Or does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Winston »

I just realized something sad and unfortunate earlier. Which is that no matter how many happy times or good times or romance or fun that you have in angeles or any other place, still the pain and sadness and loneliness you have in childhood is always with you. You always feel it.

So for example, the 20 years of pain and loneliness i experienced between 1982 and 2002 is always there. I can always feel it still. I cant just forget it and move on like everyone, especially Americans, claim you should do.

I wish i could do that and erase my memory and live in the present moment. But like a tree cannot remove its roots, so too one cannot remove their past. Even if one has many happy moments now, still that sadness and pain are still there in the roots of youth and early childhood. Very sad but true huh? Do you ever realize this too?

Why doesnt anyone dare to admit this truth? Instead everyone claims that you can forget your past and move on. Thats a delusion but everyone says it nonetheless. Not true but everyone says it. I hate that. Its a denial of truth.

Dont u hate when everyone says something thats not true. But they say it anyway just to sound hopeful or positive?
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on?

Post by Winston »

My friend alex agrees:

[5/8, 6:26 PM] Alex From Venice: I hate that too
[5/8, 6:27 PM] Alex From Venice: "forget, move on" that's the very common stupid suggestions that everyone is quick to give
[5/8, 6:27 PM] Winston: Do u realize this too that u can never forget the sadness of the past? Even if ur life is happy or pleasurable now.
[5/8, 6:27 PM] Alex From Venice: they actually think it's the way... they think it can be done
[5/8, 6:28 PM] Winston: The feeling of sadness is still there. Especially if its in your youth and lasted years or decades.
[5/8, 6:28 PM] Alex From Venice: like if you are starving... move on, forget it, it's all in your mind
[5/8, 6:29 PM] Alex From Venice: like if someone can force himself to not feel the feeling just for an act of will
[5/8, 6:29 PM] Alex From Venice: do you know that I never had a girlfriend till age of 30 bro?
[5/8, 6:30 PM] Winston: As if u are a computer program that can delete memories with a keyboard. Lol
[5/8, 6:30 PM] Alex From Venice: right, exactly
[5/8, 6:30 PM] Winston: A tree cannot forget its roots. Its a sad truth that no one wants to accept.
[5/8, 6:31 PM] Winston: But there might be ways to reprogram your subconscious mind right?
[5/8, 6:31 PM] Winston: And there are ways to spiritually heal maybe.
[5/8, 6:31 PM] Alex From Venice: Freud even came to the conclusions that human being can't forget anything... they just "hide" the memories
[5/8, 6:32 PM] Winston: But that wont change your roots or the past.
[5/8, 6:33 PM] Alex From Venice: the other stupid statement people says to whom feels lonely is...
[5/8, 6:33 PM] Alex From Venice: you aren't alone... God is with you
[5/8, 6:35 PM] Alex From Venice: gosh, if God's presence was enough to not feel the sadness of the loneliness... why would God had said "it's not good for the man to be alone" and then he made the woman?
[5/8, 6:35 PM] Alex From Venice: even God knows that he's not enough for the man to not feel alone
[5/8, 6:36 PM] Alex From Venice: but the stupid people wants to be more wise than God himself
[5/8, 6:37 PM] Alex From Venice: and where God made the woman to have the man not to be alone, there the silly say, you don't need the woman to not feel alone, there's God
[5/8, 10:37 PM] Winston: Yes u told me before that u didnt have gf until 30. But italy is a far more friendly and soulful country than America. So i cant understand why.
[5/8, 10:37 PM] Winston: It cannot be as hard to date there as in the US.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Yohan »

It is not possible to forget your past, but it is possible to give your priority to your future and to your present situation.
You can set priorities - what is more important for me, the past or my future... something like that.
You cannot change what happened in your past and often you are not even responsible for it in case of bad experiences - but you can learn out of that, can use that experience for how to avoid some certain mistakes in your future.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Winston »

Yohan wrote:
May 30th, 2018, 9:41 am
It is not possible to forget your past, but it is possible to give your priority to your future and to your present situation.
You can set priorities - what is more important for me, the past or my future... something like that.
You cannot change what happened in your past and often you are not even responsible for it in case of bad experiences - but you can learn out of that, can use that experience for how to avoid some certain mistakes in your future.
But how to you move on and focus on the future? Your past is still in your subconscious and continually haunts you, even when you don't realize it. Such as when you sit down and relax or are frustrated about something or anxious.Then bad memories from the past start to come to mind and play in your memory, like you see on TV. Any time you sit down and relax, especially when you're not in a good mood, can trigger bad memories from the past to keep replaying.

The New Age/self help industry never addresses this. They assume you can just forget about the past and move on, as if it's just a simple choice. However, the past is in your root, just like a tree has roots, and a tree cannot forget its roots. So how can you let go or forget your past, or focus on the future only? Even if you focus on the present, the past still periodically comes back to haunt you and make you feel regret and anguish and desire to go back in time and fix it all or prevent it from happening. You see what I mean? It's not as easy as that. So why does everyone make it out to be so easy to just "forget the past and move on"?
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Zambales »

Yes it is possible but you need to have goals to focus on to take your mind off what's happened previously.

I've had long shitty spells as an adult especially before 2004 which included a suicide attempt but that was when I had a different attitude to life.

These days I do briefly think of the past but then I say to myself "What's the point?". You can't control history. It's over. The future however is a different scenario altogether.

In all honesty, I really wish I could start my adult life from scratch again with the wisdom & mentality I now have. Unfortunately that is impossible. It is my biggest regret if you can call it that.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Yohan »

Winston wrote:
May 30th, 2018, 5:53 pm
But how to you move on and focus on the future? Your past is still in your subconscious and continually haunts you, even when you don't realize it. Such as when you sit down and relax or are frustrated about something or anxious.Then bad memories from the past start to come to mind and play in your memory...

-----

Even if you focus on the future, the past still periodically comes back to haunt you and make you feel regret and anguish and desire to go back in time and fix it all or prevent it from happening. You see what I mean? It's not as easy as that. So why does everyone make it out to be so easy to just "forget the past and move on"?
I agree with you, it is not so easy.

However, as I said already, while you cannot forget about your past totally as the most important minutes of your life are recorded in your brain, you can set priorities - future first, past after...

Maybe one very important point is to learn how to remove from your thoughts any form of hate. You are aware what people did to you in the past, but you understand that hate is a way to nowhere and self-destructive.

Another way to go is to remove yourself from an environment which is disturbing you - to move away and to start a life with entire new people.

This is what I did - people who did bad things to me in my past are often even not alive anymore or are living far away from me - and my future is more important than my past...
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Yohan »

Zambales wrote:
May 31st, 2018, 4:48 am
These days I do briefly think of the past but then I say to myself "What's the point?". You can't control history. It's over. The future however is a different scenario altogether.
In all honesty, I really wish I could start my adult life from scratch again with the wisdom & mentality I now have...
Excellent comment, could be written by myself.

If I look back I can see my life was going on and I was working hard to improve it. I am really happy now.

Why should I even waste a single thought about my past, what bad people did to me when I was a helpless child and a young man without any life experience.

As I said in my other comment above, I noticed that HATE is a really strong trigger to recall your past and to feel bad or depressive.
I should hate my mother, members of the catholic church, bad relatives and neighbors at that time, scornful female class mates and co-workers, I should regret keeping contacts to useless friends and making wrong decisions etc. etc....

However as you said 'what's the point'...

Originally coming from an impoverished and violent environment in Europe I managed to get out of it, you cannot change anything what happened in your past.

Sometimes if I unintentionally think about my past, I never try to push it away, but to compare it with my present situation and I feel very satisfied about all and everything. What a big difference...I am happy my past is behind me and will never return.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Wolfeye »

To give a question that might work best like an answer if it's phrased this way: Do you mean like a live tree that can grow new branches or like a petrified tree that can't?

P.S.- I had a pretty extreme mushroom trip about something like this. I had nearly killed myself, actually. The situation was that, in my life, I hadn't wound up "watering the plants" very much or "absorbed much moisture" myself. I felt quite a lot of guilt about this & was bothered by it on its own to a very high degree.

It wasn't a hostily toward this sort of thing, it was mostly situational, but it was still the way things went & had a hell of an impact (even though it was a subtle thing). Without an exact list of criteria, I try toward different things in life.

It might be a good idea for you, too. This site has actually been quite helpful & I found that America isn't the same way as the rest of the world (bare minimum- it's very insular & puritanical). I liked Eastern Europe & the Iberian most, but your results may vary.

I might suggest taking a cruise (travel agents can be called/you get charged double the listed price if it's just you/you might need a suit for dining, but room service might be free at all hours & there might also be buffets where you don't need formal wear/the drinks are probably astronomically expensive, but they actually might have a type of store that has regular bottles of alcohol like at a liquor store which works out to be A LOT cheaper)- that can be it in its own, but I might suggest a destination.

Maybe heading to Spain or Portugal for a couple of months, and seeing where you're at. You can do a lot with $4,000-$5,000 for the whole thing (maybe $2,000 for the cruise), especially in those areas. The food budget can be a lot better if you're in a position to cook for yourself sometimes (hostels tend to have shared kitchen areas & sometimes you can rent individual apartments like you would hotel rooms- this seems to be real common in Hungary for some reason).

The same might be said of Mexico & Brazil, but it seems riskier & you seem like maybe you're a bit bummed-out to be at a sharp & solid level. I'd go with Brazil, especially seeing as the Trump thing is still fresh & there was that whole mass of people at the border.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Zambales »

Yohan wrote:
May 31st, 2018, 10:26 am
Zambales wrote:
May 31st, 2018, 4:48 am
These days I do briefly think of the past but then I say to myself "What's the point?". You can't control history. It's over. The future however is a different scenario altogether.
In all honesty, I really wish I could start my adult life from scratch again with the wisdom & mentality I now have...
Excellent comment, could be written by myself.

If I look back I can see my life was going on and I was working hard to improve it. I am really happy now.

Why should I even waste a single thought about my past, what bad people did to me when I was a helpless child and a young man without any life experience.

As I said in my other comment above, I noticed that HATE is a really strong trigger to recall your past and to feel bad or depressive.
I should hate my mother, members of the catholic church, bad relatives and neighbors at that time, scornful female class mates and co-workers, I should regret keeping contacts to useless friends and making wrong decisions etc. etc....

However as you said 'what's the point'...

Originally coming from an impoverished and violent environment in Europe I managed to get out of it, you cannot change anything what happened in your past.

Sometimes if I unintentionally think about my past, I never try to push it away, but to compare it with my present situation and I feel very satisfied about all and everything. What a big difference...I am happy my past is behind me and will never return.
I'm glad I went through shit. Seriously, I am, although I wish it didn't take a big chunk from my life. It's made me a stronger person. You could call it a character building exercise I suppose.

The anger, the hurt, the frustration has to be channelled correctly though. Not at innocent people because that's the easy route and not at yourself because that's the hardest route. The most intelligent route is to channel it to reach your goals.

And the best form of revenge against those who try and destroy you? Just leave it in the capable hands of Karma and to be happier than they'll ever be!
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Winston »

Yohan wrote:
May 31st, 2018, 9:54 am
Winston wrote:
May 30th, 2018, 5:53 pm
But how to you move on and focus on the future? Your past is still in your subconscious and continually haunts you, even when you don't realize it. Such as when you sit down and relax or are frustrated about something or anxious.Then bad memories from the past start to come to mind and play in your memory...

-----

Even if you focus on the future, the past still periodically comes back to haunt you and make you feel regret and anguish and desire to go back in time and fix it all or prevent it from happening. You see what I mean? It's not as easy as that. So why does everyone make it out to be so easy to just "forget the past and move on"?
I agree with you, it is not so easy.

However, as I said already, while you cannot forget about your past totally as the most important minutes of your life are recorded in your brain, you can set priorities - future first, past after...

Maybe one very important point is to learn how to remove from your thoughts any form of hate. You are aware what people did to you in the past, but you understand that hate is a way to nowhere and self-destructive.

Another way to go is to remove yourself from an environment which is disturbing you - to move away and to start a life with entire new people.

This is what I did - people who did bad things to me in my past are often even not alive anymore or are living far away from me - and my future is more important than my past...
Yes it's true that you should learn to forgive others. Not just because it's better for your soul and mental health, but also because the Bible says that if you forgive others, then God will forgive your transgresses as well. So it will help remove your negative karma as well, if you forgive others.

I guess one way to not be haunted by your past is if you stay constantly active but in a positive environment that you feel good in of course. When you are in a negative environment, like I am in Taiwan or California, your mood will turn sour and all your bad memories will come back to haunt you too, like through a gateway of depression.

Another way is to find a soulmate to be with that makes you happy and fall in love again. When you are in love you focus on the present too and forget the past. However, only some are lucky to have that. It's out of our control. For others it's not meant to be no matter how hard you try.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by fdiv »

Winston wrote:
May 28th, 2018, 9:40 pm
I just realized something sad and unfortunate earlier. Which is that no matter how many happy times or good times or romance or fun that you have in angeles or any other place, still the pain and sadness and loneliness you have in childhood is always with you. You always feel it.

So for example, the 20 years of pain and loneliness i experienced between 1982 and 2002 is always there. I can always feel it still. I cant just forget it and move on like everyone, especially Americans, claim you should do.

I wish i could do that and erase my memory and live in the present moment. But like a tree cannot remove its roots, so too one cannot remove their past. Even if one has many happy moments now, still that sadness and pain are still there in the roots of youth and early childhood. Very sad but true huh? Do you ever realize this too?

Why doesnt anyone dare to admit this truth? Instead everyone claims that you can forget your past and move on. Thats a delusion but everyone says it nonetheless. Not true but everyone says it. I hate that. Its a denial of truth.

Dont u hate when everyone says something thats not true. But they say it anyway just to sound hopeful or positive?
That is a not uncommon thing to hear nowadays. I think, if you want to improve your outcome in something, you should think and meditate on what is clear you can control, identify things you can't, and consider factors underlying each also with plenty of analysis.

I would say simply, when you focus on continual improvement in what you can control, then what you cannot control will become smaller over time. Even things seemingly totally out of your reach, like some unfortunate past events, you perspective will have a profound effect on the significance of those terrible things.


edit: I didn't see the other replies (this is repetitive) so also consider this:

Say you took some hypothetical person, maybe HAer and say that guy got to stay in the Philippines for some months. Let's say this guy is Steve Hoca like or something. Not some old fat expat type. Let's say the guy's sex life is totally non-existent the USSA. Now during the vacation, say the guy has tons of sex with sexy filipinas during that few months stay. Way more sex than he had in his life in USSA up to that point! Way more than he would ever have hoped to if he were ignorant of this option! It is safe to say, options and environment is way better in the Philippines than in sexless hell USSA! Not even in question!

So the Guy may never have been open to this overseas dating at all if he did not experience years or even decades of sexlessness (or even nene at all!). Also building on such a negative effect on self esteem and worthlessness, until an oppressive feeling is built into everything almost. Well going overseas and banging a bunch of sexy women over such a period is like a religious experience in absolutely shattering and liberating oneself of such a mindset!!

In such a manner the guy really has broken all spiritual bondage and redeemed himself in a way that is simply undeniable in reality . So you see, the ecstasy of his spiritual victory over horrible feminist sexual oppresion that WAS his life is even better than "religious" ecstacy, it's REAL ecstasy. Any doubt in the guy's mind of the victory is DESTROYED, because this spiritual victory it is backed by results that are undeniable -- the guy knows he f***ed more women than he did in his life to that point, and all of them sexy and of his choosing! The results are so secure in the factual experience of f***ing tons of sexy filipinas (or whatever), that the guy might come to a second realization. That being that even if he made all optimal major choices and life, he could never have pulled the experiences not only up to his present, but looking into future in the Philippines!!!

It really does have that powerful impact on such people. A lifetime of bitterness from terrible and unnatural sexual conditions, OBLITERATED IN AN INSTANT, simply from positive experiences overseas and the absolute unshakable confidence that they triumph over even the best of what life could have offered him sexually and romantically if he stayed in sex-hell feminist USSA, oblivious of the better life.

At least that's how I see it.
options in the US: maybe have a shot at a angry bluehaired landwhale and then, prison :roll:
options abroad: limitless 8)
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Luberg »

My past use to haunt me, I felt like I wasn't treated fairly by my family as a child. I felt like they gave me what I needed to survive physically, because it was their responsibility to me as the last child of five, but it was like they didn't really care. I suppressed this pain for years and thought I was fine. It started to affect my confidence and made me very cynical. Last year it felt like everything had reached it's peak, one day I looked back and said 'all I wanted to was to be loved', then the tears started flowing. I cried for about an hour and never knew I was suppressing that much inside.

I think it's not really possible to just forget everything and move on like nothing happened, I think it helps to go inside and deal with the pain, allowing yourself to feel the pain and letting yourself cry if your body and mind wants to. As I went back and cried, I felt the pain as if it was happening in that moment.

Now I feel a lot better and I didn't even see a therapist. I started to see things differently and realized that human beings will not always do things the way I want them to do it, and that's because we're all different. I started to appreciate everything my family did for me and now I understand that maybe they didn't show as much love for me like I wished, but they did love me, and they still do.
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Winston »

In this lecture clip, the great Zen teacher Alan Watts explains why we need to stop blaming our past for our mistakes.

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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by yick »

Forgiveness is very important if you want to BE HAPPY - in fact, it is in integral part of being happy is forgiveness and it's ongoing.

I never got this until I read the book that changed my life Geoff Thompson's The Elephant and the Twig and that book changed my life to such an extent that I was at university later on that year and now I live the life I do - which I am very happy about - the central role to the book is forgiveness, you have to forgive them (and yourself...) in your mind and when the past is brought up then you have already forgiven them because before that - I would think of vengance as well as the injustice and unfairness of what happened to you in the past - which takes a lot out of your psyche and mental wellbeing.

The film of your life and the past isn't going to change no more than if you watch Scarface a million times - Tony Montana is still going to fall from the balcony and into the pool at the end (sorry for ruining the end if you haven't seen it :lol: ) and your past is the same, all you can do if you want to be HAPPY is change your perception of this as an educated adult with things going for you.

I made a desicion one day - do I want to be happy? And the answer was 'yes' so forgiveness and a good exercise regime are now incorporated into my life. I get a good eight hours sleep every night, when my head touches the pillow, I get to sleep pretty quickly, I try and do right by others - I mess up sometimes but most times, I am pretty much on point with it - the future is more important than the past, Yohan was bang on with that and that is one thing where you can steer the direction to something that you might want - the things you do today affect what you can do tomorrow - that to me is a far better, far more productive use of my time and mental space than harking back to 1981 and when the school bully took my mars bars off me. :(
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Re: Is it impossible to forget your past and move on? Does your past haunt you forever?

Post by Winston »

I just had a horrible nightmare this morning. Woke up full of anxiety and depression. I dreamed I was back in high school and stuck and trapped in a highly negative, unfriendly, toxic environment, and feeling totally lost, scared and powerless. It was horrible. It seems I have post traumatic stress disorder. Like military veterans do if they've been involved in combat. Even if I try to forget or suppress my horrible past in high school, I still relive it in recurring bad dreams and nightmares, which are out of my control.

What can i do about that?

Im sure the feeling of being stranded and depressed in Taiwan, plus getting older, plus my sleep apnea, increases my bad dreams and nightmares. The people on the CPAP forums also told me they had frequent nightmares and bad dreams before they used the CPAP machine to treat their sleep apnea.
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