With an understanding of NLP, the idea that “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood” becomes real.
No matter what you experienced in your past, you have the ability to change your perceptions and beliefs regarding the past so that you can feel better about it right now.
There is more to us as humans than merely the sum of our past experiences. How we usually react to situations is largely determined by our past conditioning, however, we can choose how we want to feel and how to respond differently than our past habitual tendencies.
You can change your personal history by taking your current level of awareness (and life experience) and integrating it at those times of your life when you were less resourceful and being negatively influenced. You can easily imagine doing this and in so doing you’ll be re-coding the meaning which you give those past events. When negative past experiences take on a new resourceful meaning in your life, then your beliefs change and you become a more whole YOU.
Here’s how this works:
The following steps include revisiting a memory of a past event where you were treated unfairly, or verbally abused, or scolded by a ‘superior’. Don’t use the following steps to heal a past traumatic experience (for that we use a different approach). Here you’re going to provide your younger self with the appropriate awareness and knowledge that was missing to her or him at the time.
Changing Your Personal History
- Bring to mind a limiting belief that you would like to change. This could be, “I’m not good enough”, “I’ll never attract a soul mate”, “It’s hard making enough money doing what I enjoy”, “I’ll never be successful” etc.
. - Think about what you want to believe instead. Make sure this is positive and compelling.
. - Make yourself comfortable and take a few relaxing breaths.
. - Let you mind go back to the very first experience that you had where your interpretation of that past experience led you to form your current limiting belief.
. - Imagine being there now as your younger self inside that situation, but with your new resourceful belief in awareness and in light of your current level of life experience.
. - Notice how you perceive that past experience differently now. Then imagine yourself moving through your life toward your current age with your new resourceful belief colouring all significant past events up to present time.
. - Now with your new belief integrated, you can look back on your past with new eyes and feel good about your brighter future in the days, months and years to come.
One of my NLP teachers – John Overdurf said: “You never know how far a change will go…” You are changing more than you think, so you may as well choose to change in the way that you want to…
You can learn more about how to change your personal history in my free NLP training video “Healing the Root Cause” available here.
Written by Jevon Dangeli – NLP/Hypnotherapy Trainer & Coach, MSc Transpersonal Psychology
