Are you living in the past? 7 signs to discover it

If you are living in the past, you are not only living in a blurred present, but you are also missing out on opportunities. In general, many of those emotional injuries from yesterday lodge you in a crack of latent pain that does not close. It is very difficult to place attention in the here and now when the mind escapes again and again towards those past universes.

Losses, disappointments, frustrated dreams, loves that are not forgotten and even childhoods cut short by trauma. There are many people who end up becoming true squatters of their past.; a situation that fragments their psychological health. Buddhist philosophy already suggested it to us millennia ago: well-being is only found when we live fully in the present moment.

Now, there is a curious fact. It is very common that many of us are not aware of how attached we are to our past landscape.

Sometimes, every decision made or not made, every fear that grips us and every sensation experienced is a result of this reality. Becoming aware of this is the first step to generating changes, to allow us to be free of those old threads that detract from our potential and well-being.

Keys to know if you are living in the past

Living in the past does not always mean letting yourself be enveloped by nostalgia. This is something we must understand first. Work, such as those carried out at the University of California, for example, reminds us that nostalgia is, on average, a positive emotion.

From a psychological point of view, we know that this dimension allows us to make sense of who we are and in turn builds our identity over time. Therefore, Feeling nostalgic is not the same as living in the past, since this last state is the one that casts us into emotional suffering.

It is positioning ourselves in what is lost, it is embracing the absence, touching the open wound and immersing ourselves in what no longer makes sense. However, we do not always realize this. One can go about life, work and relate without understanding that a good part of one’s current unhappiness is the expensive result of not having gotten over yesterday.

Let’s discover those keys to know if you are living in the past.

1. You blame yourself for almost everything

Guilt is a feeling of permanent dissatisfaction that eats away and invalidates us. In general, People who have not overcome their past carry the constant weight of guilt and negative self-perception. That feeling is like an all-consuming black hole.

Nothing that is done will be processed in a positive way and there is also the echo of that negative and invalidating internal dialogue that never remains silent.

2. You compare any reality with another past (retrospective filter)

If you know someone, you can tell yourself that you wish you had met that person in your past. If you had a pleasant moment today, your gaze immediately takes you to a past moment. Your mind swings from the past to the present like a pendulum, comparing yesterday with today, and vice versa.… All of this subjects you to a state of great psychological exhaustion.

3. You are afraid of changes

An unavoidable sign that you are living in the past is resistance to change. The psycho-emotional attachment to yesterday is so pathological that you experience any variation in your reality as a threat. The simple fact that something changes in your daily life is experienced as a loss, a breach of your security..

4. You have low self-esteem

When the person lives clinging to that past dimension of their internal world, it is because something happened that they have not overcome. That wound, that latent problem, runs aground on self-esteem and boycotts one’s own image.. One feels bad about oneself, one perceives oneself as fragile, fallible and, at times, even ashamed.

They are very complex psychological realities that completely undermine the ability to be happy in the present.

5. Emotions of negative valence predominate in you: sadness, anger and loneliness

You are living in the past when what you feel every day is sadness for that yesterday that you cannot dissuade from your mind. Also when Your humor is always on edge, you get angry frequently and have explosions of anger.

Likewise, you feel that no one can understand you or know your personal reality and, all of this, at the same time, generates a feeling of loneliness.

6. You have a hard time building satisfying and meaningful relationships

Those who live in the past have all their energies and views far from this here and now, where what really matters happens.

We cannot be good couples or good friends if we are captives of a yesterday that prevents us from loving. to those around us today. This leads us to relationships that expire soon, to constant reproaches and inevitable loneliness.

7. You are not happy

Bitterness, resentment, feeling of failure… To live in the past is to live in the open wound, in that psychological region where only resistance, adverse emotions and loneliness live.

Happiness does not fit through the lock of those who only look back. Nothing new arises in the inflexible mind that does not pay attention to what happens here and now or look to the future with hope.

Let’s keep it in mind, nothing grows on that past plot. Yesterday no longer exists, it is no longer there, let’s stop paying attention to things that have no meaning or presence…

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