How to Let Go of the Past and Move Forward — Gently, and Without Needing to Talk Through Everything
In this blog post, I’m going to cover:
How the Past Still Affects You (Even If You Think You’ve Moved On)
Why You can’t override the Past with Mindset alone
How to Move Beyond Who You’ve Been and Step Into Who You Could Become
Why We Hold On (Even When It Hurts)
What Actually Changes When You Start Nervous System Work
Healing That Starts with Safety — A Nervous System-Based Approach
Ready? Let’s dive in…
How the Past Still Affects You (Even If You Think You’ve Moved On)
The quiet weight of what’s been: You wake up, and the day already feels... heavy.
There’s nothing obviously “wrong,” but your chest is tight. Your body’s braced. Your mind is already spinning, even before your feet touch the floor.
It’s like walking through your life with a weight strapped to your back — so familiar, you barely notice it’s there.
Until you do.
There are moments many of us reach when we know something from the past is still shaping our present — even if we can’t name exactly how.
And when you do, it becomes harder to keep pretending it’s not impacting how you move through the world, because it does.
We sense it in the heaviness we carry, in the way we react, in what we avoid, and yet, the idea of revisiting that “thing” that’s causing all that unpleasantness can feel overwhelming — especially when we assume it has to involve endless talking, intellectualising, or rehashing old stories.
But what if it didn’t?
What if there were ways to process and release what’s been sitting in the background, without needing to talk through it all aloud?
A Simpler Way to Heal from the Past
Most people assume that in order to move on from the past, you have to go through it all over again — talk it out, pick it apart, analyze what happened, revisit everything that hurt.
But what if there was a different way?
One that doesn’t rely on endless words, but on integration, on release, on actually shifting how the memory lives inside your body and system — not just how you think about it.
If you could shift something old, something deep, in about 90 minutes…and come out saying: “feel like a completely different person. I remember what happened… but it just doesn’t affect me like it used to."
Would it be worth it?
That’s exactly what happened to one of my clients after just one Reset & Rewire Session, working through challenges around worthiness. A few days later, she messaged me:
"Internally I feel like a new person. I was able to dive into the same trauma topic with a new friend the other day … and I didn’t feel affected at all. Like it was something that just happened to me, but no longer had a hold over me. Also, I had the self-worth to turn down a misaligned project, and I feel lees of the need to have to do everything, and that it’s ok, I’m enough to just do the thing I’m really good at. Honestly, I had NO IDEA this transformation would happen so quickly.”
Change doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t have to involve endless hours of talking.
Why You can’t override the Past with Mindset alone
One of the biggest misunderstandings about healing is the belief that awareness alone is enough.
Yes, you can journal about the past, talk it through, understand the timeline, and name the patterns. However, when your body still feels like it’s in danger, those insights won’t register as safety. (Those things listed above are things you do with your mind, not your body, and that essentially keeps you in the loop.)
A lot of people try to deal with the past by mentally sealing it in a box. They tuck it away, shut the lid, tell themselves, “That’s over now, I moved on,” — hoping that’ll do the job.
But here’s the thing — your body doesn’t know you’ve moved on, your body still believes it’s there.
You might consciously try to push it away, avoid it, out-think it, or spiritualise it into something more “positive,” but your nervous system is still looping through the same original message: “I’m not safe.”
So every time something small happens — a comment, a specific tone, a slightly different look — your body responds as if it’s back in the thick of it. Not metaphorically, quite literally.
It shows up in your reactions, your energy levels, your relationships, conversations, and all the background buzz of stress you can’t quite name but feel every day.
Have you ever felt that nervousness in your chest when you try to rest but you can’t seem to lie down? Or you know how your heart starts pumping like crazy and your throat tightens when you’re asked to share your opinion in a group, even when it’s technically “safe”?
Those reactions are not random, and you’re not weird for experiencing them. That’s your body essentially saying: “Hey… this feels familiar. This reminds me of something that didn’t feel okay before.”
It’s your nervous system holding onto a past experience, reacting as if it’s happening again in that very moment because the original stress response was never completed. And so it has no other choice but to still loop through the same protective responses it learned to survive (i.e., tension, heaviness, feeling flooded).
That’s why these experiences don’t stay sealed.
How the Nervous System is wired for healing
Yes, you read that right, your body and nervous system are naturally wired for resolution and actually want to heal and help you let things go — you may just haven’t got the map of the “how” yet.
Often, that process of resolution gets interrupted years ago in childhood. This can be caused in various ways: maybe it wasn’t safe enough to feel and express yourself fully, or you had to stay functional and so had to repress your emotions, or no one was there to support you. What naturally happens in the body is that it gets flagged as “unfinished business.”
So the energy (i.e., the emotional stress) stays active in the background (in your cells!) — until something in your present moment feels similar… and suddenly, that old “Jack-in-the-box” pops right back up and you think “How many times do I still need to deal with this?!”
The more you try to resist or push it down with logic, distraction, or even spiritual bypassing, the more it rebounds. It just becomes louder every day. Your body doesn’t do this to overwhelm or punish you. Those emotions are essentially trying to get your attention because the energy tied to that initial event, causing you to feel this way in the first place, is asking to be released.
Why Thinking and Talking Aren’t Enough to Heal
The solution to that dilemma is helping your body catch up to where you are now, and gently showing it, “We’re not in that moment anymore.”
When your body finally gets that message — not just in theory, but through felt experience — that’s when things shift. This is the real work and where true healing begins, not in your mind, but in your tissues, your breath, your capacity to stay with what’s present without running from it.
And that doesn’t happen through fighting it harder or pretending everything is fine. It happens when you stop resisting what wants to be witnessed and let your body experience what it means to feel safe now, so it can finally let go and make space for a different reality.
Letting go doesn’t have to look the Way You Think
The kind of work I’m talking about isn’t performative or dramatic. It’s not about fixing or fighting with your past. It’s not even about making sense of everything.
It’s about working with your body and turning toward the parts of you that got neglected, pushed away, silenced for way too long.
You can imagine it as clearing out a basement, gently and steadily — one box at a time.
At first, it’s dark, hard to see, but as you slowly open a window in a musty room and move through it, bit by bit, the air starts to shift. The light starts to reach the corners. You feel there’s space, and the room starts to feel less dense, less dark, and suddenly, you can breathe again. It starts to feel more like somewhere you can actually live in — not just stuff things into and shut the door.
And let me just stretch again, you don’t have to empty the whole thing in one go, you just need to begin.
How to Move Beyond Who You’ve Been and Step Into Who You Could Become
I often think of this work as a bridge — right now, you’re standing on the edge.
Behind you: the weight of what’s been. The pain that still echoes. The old stories and self-protections you’ve built to survive, but you’re tired of living out.
Ahead of you: more ease, more space. A version of you you’ve maybe only glimpsed, who isn’t ruled by what happened anymore.
And in between — That’s the hard part. That wobbly, uncertain space where the fear lives. The not-knowing. The “What if it doesn’t work?” or “What if it’s too much?”
It can feel intense, and it’s completely valid.
It’s where many people hesitate and often unknowingly decide to stay where they are. Not because they don’t want to heal, but because they don’t know what will happen once they start. Everything feels too much to tackle, because no one’s ever told them how to walk across. They’ve never seen it done gently.
Crossing the bridge isn’t about rushing to the other side all at once. It’s about taking one small step at a time — slow and steady — gentle repatterning, while moving at the speed of safety, trusting your body will tell you when you’re ready to move.
We do the work and then we pause, letting your nervous system catch up and trusting that even if the path feels foggy, your feet will still know where to land.
You don’t even need to know what healing will look like yet. All you need to know is that you’re allowed to want it.
How Life Can Feel on the Other Side
This often looks like exhaling for the first time in months, feeling your jaw unclench, crying without needing to explain why.
Imagine coming back to yourself, not to a “healed“ version of you, but a version that feels free, clear, and resourceful.
You’ll notice how the same trigger now feels… quieter, how that situation that used to activate you… just doesn’t anymore. The loop that used to spin for days? It just stops on its own, and you realize that you don’t have to brace for life in the same way anymore.
You’re not suddenly “perfect.” — just… you, no longer ruled by what used to run the show. And that is pure freedom because it changes everything: the way you walk, talk, breathe, sleep, and show up for yourself and others.
Why We Hold On (Even When It Hurts)
Letting go isn’t always easy — not because we enjoy the pain, but because part of us believes holding on is what protects us.
It feels safer, i.e., more predictable, to know what you have because then you know what you’re dealing with (= the pain; be it physically or emotionally) than to jump into the unknown (= joy, abundance, pleasure), because that ultimately signals danger to your system.
Like:
“If I let this go, will I forget that part of me that survived all of this?”
“If I release the anger, does that mean what happened was okay?”
“If I stop replaying the pattern, who even am I without it?” (That one, for example, is often the case when you’re stuck in hyper-performance and stress feels so natural to you that you don’t know who you are without it.)
But here’s what I want to say to that part of you that’s still gripping and holding on:
Healing doesn’t mean forgetting.
It doesn’t erase your story.
It lets you step out of it and walk alongside it — instead of inside it.
You get to carry the wisdom of everything you’ve been through, not the wound itself.
Why Avoiding the Past Keeps You Stuck
If part of you is silently nodding right now…
I want to offer a few journal prompts to reflect on — not to shame, and instead to open something:
What is the real cost of not processing the past?
What if the real risk is staying where you are right now?
Is it worth staying here — stuck in the same patterns — simply because no one ever showed you another way?
Only because no one told you how to process what happened… does that really mean you have to keep carrying this for another five, ten, or twenty years?
Here’s the quiet, maybe uncomfortable truth:
You’re already holding the weight.
You’re already living in the tension.
You’re already doing the hard thing.
What we’re often most afraid of isn’t the pain itself. It’s the question of who we are without it. When pain has woven itself into everything — The way you breathe, walk, speak, move, dress, even rest… letting go can feel like losing yourself.
So if you're feeling that fear rise — that sense of “Who even am I without this?” — you're not alone. That fear makes sense, but it doesn’t have to dictate what happens next.
Give yourself permission to dream.
What Actually Changes When You Start Nervous System Work
One of my clients came to me earlier this year feeling deeply out of place, depressed, anxious, and disconnected from herself.
She’d left her job in tech, didn’t know who she was without it. The question “What’s wrong with me?” lived under everything.
Now, just five sessions in, I barely recognize the person she described a few months ago. She’s:
Experiencing less anxiety overall
Feeling more comfortable in social spaces
Letting herself be seen without needing to impress
No longer forcing herself back into a career that never felt like hers
Confidently calling herself a writer — and meaning it
On sabbatical, and actually enjoying it
Saying no to unaligned friendships
No longer spiralling when something feels hard
Starting to learn guitar
Trusting her intuition — even when it goes against what others might expect
Training to walk the Camino (!)
Showing up at the gym, despite her fears of not fitting in
Making new friends in a new country she moved to alone
This is what can practically shift when you tap into the quiet power of processing what’s been — gently, deeply — and your nervous system starts to feel safe enough to stop protecting all the time, and you finally can start living.
The Moment You Get to Choose Something Different
There’s no denying it: this work takes courage. Not the kind of courage that looks dramatic on the outside, but the quiet kind. The kind that says, “I’m ready to stop dragging this around.”
It’s okay to be afraid. (I was, too!) And honestly, that only shows how much it means to you. It would be weird if your life didn’t mean anything to you, wouldn’t it? ;)
Here’s the thing: These stored experiences from the past don’t go away just because you want them to. (I guess you figured that by now.) They need space, support, and safety to unwind finally.
If there’s a part of you that’s tired of looping through the same stories, the same reactions, the same stuckness — that’s the part you want to listen to because that part already knows what’s possible on the other side.
Again, you don’t have to do it all at once; you just have to start with one small step.
Healing That Starts with Safety — A Nervous System-Based Approach
“What if letting go could feel gentler than I thought?”
If this spoke to something inside you — the part that’s tired of carrying so much, tired of second-guessing, tired of feeling like things will always be this hard — I want you to know: there are ways of healing that honour your pace, your nervous system, and your desire to feel more like yourself again.
Not some shinier, upgraded version of you. Just you, without the weight.
The Self-Doubt Escape Route was created for moments like this and for people like you — the ones who are quietly brave enough to say, “Something has to change and I want that change to feel real.”
It’s a one-on-one space where we work together over time to gently help you unhook from the old beliefs and patterns that keep looping in the background — things like “I’m too much,” “I’m not enough,” or “I’ll never be free from what happened.” — using a blend of subconscious reprogramming, nervous system work, and emotional integration practices.
It offers your body and mind a chance to finally stop bracing and start softening, without requiring years of talk therapy or endless self-analysis. Instead, it invites you into spacious, embodied relief.
This isn’t another course to complete or a self-improvement project. It’s a space to release what’s quietly been running the show for too long, and begin to return to the version of you who never needed fixing in the first place.
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