It’s interesting how much our mind can learn. When you recall one of your childhood events when you felt good, you’re probably going to feel the same way about it now. Maybe you can even remember specific words, voices or sounds as if you had heard them yesterday. You might also be able to clearly remember a scent or taste in spite of that fact that you experienced it all many many years ago. Pretty impressive, isn’t it?

There are people who are keen on taking look at old photos or particular objects from time to time, which helps them relive those pleasant events from the past. They do this consciously because they know that it’s good practice to keep replaying good memories inside us.

However, there are also a lot of people who spend most of the day replaying bad memories in their mind over and over again—and they are not even aware of it! And on top of that, it doesn’t make them feel good at all. Why are they doing this, then? In this post, I’m going to answer this question… but before that, I’d like to take a detour for a bit explaining why it is important to change these negative memories.

It all starts with birth

When we are born, the stage is all set inside the environment we are born into: our parents, siblings (if there are any), neighbours, all have their own personality and problems. And as we are growing, our mind continuously records whatever we are experiencing in our life, storing them in the subconscious, from which beliefs and ideas are created about ourselves and the world. For instance, if child who has just started going to school experiences being bullied by older kids on the bus every day, no wonder if he thinks the whole world is like that.

And as we reach a certain age in life, we begin to think about why we have problems. The most common answers that tend to come up are the following: “it’s XY’s fault, this is my my fate, this is what I deserve for having done something bad in the past” etc. (This is called the lower model of the world, by the way, which can be summed up as the following: “they’re doing it to me and there’s nothing I can do about it’.) In reality, the reason we have problems is having sufficient resources for them in our mind—proofs (which are mainly memories) and strong emotions—and repeating them again and again. If we release these resources and change them into positive, the problem they used to support ceases to exist and we’ll be able to take more control over our emotions and achieve what we desire in life!

Stuck in the past? Time to return to the present!

While reading the above passage, if you went back to your childhood and relived that moment again and it felt real, it was your emotions and feelings that made it feel as if real. This state of mind is what we call a trance. Going into a trance means being more aware of what you’re doing inside yourself than whatever’s going on around you at the moment, and this is something that happens naturally to everyone multiple times a day. The techniques of FasterEFT help you pull yourself out of negative trances and return to the present moment. As you do this repeatedly, you break the trance and bring positive change in your life.

People tend to hold on to unpleasant memories because they have at least one negative emotion/feeling attached to them and it is safer to hold on to something that is familiar to us (especially when an undesirable event has happened more than once). From this, one may manifest an unconscious belief such as “if I keep repeating them, I’ll remind myself of what happened and protect myself from feeling bad again.” (This used to be one of my own beliefs, actually.) However, ironically, going back to the same bad experience in my mind made me feel exactly what I wanted to protect myself from. You may also be thinking, “Who would I be without this memory?” I believe you’ll become a happier, wiser, and emotionally more intelligent person if you let it go.

When we’re reimprinting a memory, we aren’t really wiping it from our mind. Instead, we’re changing the way we perceive it internally. Robert Smith often mentions the example of two people going to the cinema to watch a film: at the end of the film, the two have strikingly different opinions about the film—one of them loves it while the other finds it unbearable—in spite of the fact that they have watched the exact same film. This happens because these two people’s perception of what they have experienced during that 90 minutes is different.

And that brings us to our next question: can rewriting a memory cause somebody to do something stupid? In my opinion, it doesn’t make anyone stupid: you’ll just let go of all the stress and emotion that supports your problem. At the same time, you’ll keep the wisdom and the lesson you’ve learned, so later—if it happens again at all—you’ll act differently.

Keep the good stuff!

Feeling good is a skill, just like feeling bad. If you keep practising any of them, you’ll get better at it. That’s why I recommend my clients to keep a happy journal, which contains all the things that make them feel good whenever they think about them. These can be pleasant memories that actually have happened or they can even be memories that have been reimprented. So, if a memory is transformed, completely different from the original, and there are only good feelings and emotions associated to it, it’s a good idea to write it down and practise it as well.

Conclusion

The mind is a “learning machine” (using Robert’s words): it records everything we experience since the moment of birth and stores it in form of memories. These memories have a huge impact on our current life. They can be called treasures because the mind often unconsciously considers them valuable, even the bad ones, which is why it holds on to them so badly. Now, however, we have the ability to wisely re-evaluate and let go of those which don’t serve us well.