How to Let Go of the Past When It Keeps Pulling You Back

Photo by Kwami Fattah Al Sissi on Unsplash

You can’t let go of the past by forcing yourself to forget it. The past keeps pulling at you because something in it never got completed: a feeling that never got to finish, a need that was never met. What lets it go is not erasing the memory but completing it now, in the present, so the old hurt finally gets answered and your body stops replaying it.

You’re washing up, or driving, or just about to fall asleep, and there it is again. The thing you said. The thing they did. The years you think you wasted. Everyone tells you to move on. You’d love to. You just can’t find the door.

When I was a boy, I was sent away to a farmhouse in East Galway so my mother could rest. Long days with nothing but cows, border collies and the ticking clock for company. Nobody asked how I was. Nobody asked what it was like to be away from home.

And when anyone did ask me anything, it was a presumptive close. “Aren’t you glad to be here, Fig?” “Aren’t you happy your mother gets a break?” There was no room for my truth. No welcome for my sadness. Only the Irish nod inward on the inhale. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That boy, with his back against the cold stone wall, learned that his real feelings were inconvenient. So he learned to hide himself, and out of that hiding came every protector I’ve spent my adult life with. The farmhouse is decades behind me. The rules it taught me took a lot longer to leave.

What’s really going on

If your chest eased a little, or your mind jumped straight to “yes, but you don’t know what happened to me,” both are welcome. That jump is a part of you that’s been guarding the door.

The body records everything. Once an experience is written into the nervous system, it can’t be unwritten. The record is the record. That’s the bit nobody wants to hear, and it’s also the bit that sets you free, because you can stop trying to change it.

But there are two kinds of experiences in the record. Some got completed: someone held you, named what happened, and let the feeling move all the way through. Others didn’t. In my book I call those open entries. They don’t go quiet. They keep broadcasting, every day, that something needs to be settled.

That’s why you can’t let go. Your mind isn’t stuck on a memory. Your body is trying to live in two moments at once, the present and the unsettled past, and it can’t do both. Whenever life brings you something that rhymes with the old hurt, you feel the old hurt again, right now.

Then the body builds protectors around the open entry. The busy one, the cynical one, the one who replays it all night looking for what you should have said. They don’t close the entry. They were never designed to. They’re not accountants. They’re noise management.

So you make sense. You’re not weak for still carrying it. You’re carrying something that was never finished.

Why you can’t let go of the past

Nobody met you in it. The hurt itself is only half of it. The other half is going through it alone. A child can’t process a hard thing on his own. He needs someone to say you’re safe, this is what it was, you’re not broken.

You were never allowed to finish the feeling. Peter Levine, who I trained with at Esalen, tells it with an impala. Chased by a cheetah, it collapses and plays dead. If the cheetah moves on, the impala gets up, shakes, trembles, lets the whole surge move out of its body, and then grazes as if nothing happened. We’ve forgotten how to shake it out. So it stays.

You’re trying to change the record. Replaying it, rewriting it, arguing with it at 2 in the morning. The mind will build stories, beliefs and entire personalities to manage what the body already knows. None of it rewrites the block.

A part of you thinks letting go means it didn’t matter. It did matter. Letting go isn’t saying it was fine. It’s letting it finally be over.

The loop, on your situation

Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go. We only address the past when it emerges in the present. So we don’t go digging. We work with the moment it shows up.

Get ground in your body first

Feet on the floor. One long breath out. Name three things you can see. You’re here, now.

What happened

One plain sentence about today, not then. “My boss said ‘calm down’ in the meeting and I was back in my dad’s kitchen.”

Where it lands in the body

Find the place that remembers. A tight throat, a heavy stomach, a clenched jaw. Rest your attention there, kindly. And now what do you notice?

Who’s driving

Which protector picked up the memory? The one replaying it, the one who wants revenge, the one who says it was your fault. It usually carries a coin: too much (I was the problem) or not enough (I didn’t matter). Thank it. It’s been on shift for years.

Trace it

Only as far as today needs. What did you need back then that you didn’t get? Not what you should have done. What you needed. To be asked. To be believed. To be held.

Feel it and tell someone

Say the feeling out loud to someone who’s glad to hear it. “This still hurts, and I’m tired of carrying it alone.” Being met, now, is the thing that was missing then.

One creative action

Give yourself one piece of what you needed. If you needed to be asked, ask yourself and answer honestly. If you needed someone to say “that wasn’t your fault,” say it to the person you were.

How to let go of the past, honestly

We don’t have to change the past to heal. We only have to change a present moment. The present moment heals the past. And it changes your future.

You can get, now, the thing you actually needed then. And when you do, the new experience goes back into the nervous system and changes the meaning of the old one. The pain eases. You become harder to trigger and easier to be. The past didn’t change. What it means changed.

I call that the missing experience. Sometimes it comes from a friend or a partner who doesn’t look away. Sometimes it comes from inside, from what my teacher Aftab Omer called the Friend. The Friend asks one question, “What do you need right now?”, and it isn’t interested in regret. It’s not too late for your needs to be met.

And be patient with the slipping back. Some days the old record will play as loud as ever. That’s not failure. That’s the entry knocking, and every time you meet it instead of running, a protector gets to rest a little.

One thing to do tonight

When the memory comes, don’t push it away and don’t replay it. Put one hand where you feel it and ask quietly, “What did I need then?” Then give yourself one small piece of it, right now. A kind sentence. A glass of water. A blanket. That’s how an open entry starts to close.

Would therapy help with this?

If the past shows up as frustration, regret, replaying and old patterns getting in the way of your life today, coaching is often the right size of help.

But if the memories come as flashbacks or nightmares, if you avoid whole parts of life because of them, or if what happened was abuse or violence, please talk to a licensed therapist where you live, ideally one trained in trauma. That’s not coaching work, and you deserve the right room for it.

The path

What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself. On the Self ground, that means a body that knows the past is over and the present is safe enough to live in.

There are two ways to keep going. You can start now with Figlet, an AI coach that’s there at 2 in the morning, on the Self ground, and it’ll help you meet the old feeling when it shows up instead of running from it. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together.

The farmhouse is still in my record. It always will be. But the boy against that wall finally gets asked how he is, by me. That’s what changed.

I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).

Common questions

Why can’t I let go of the past?

Usually because something in it was never completed. A feeling never got to finish, or nobody met you in it. Your body keeps bringing it back because it’s still waiting to be settled, not because you’re weak.

Is it possible to completely let go of the past?

You won’t forget it, and you don’t need to. What changes is its charge. When the old hurt finally gets met in the present, the memory stays but it stops running your day.

How do I stop living in the past and move on?

Stop arguing with what happened and start noticing what you needed. Each time the past shows up, meet it with one small piece of that need, now. Moving on is less a decision than a hundred small completions.

The Friend comes from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.