Chapter 2

The Prison of Our Past

No amount of guilt can change the past,
and no amount of worrying can change the future.

—Umar Ibn Al-Khattaab, religious scholar

My friend George killed a woman when he was sixteen.

Of course, I didn’t know this when he and I met at a college coding class in Mexico in 2002. We were in our early twenties, but I could tell right away that he was more mature than our peers. He was intelligent and conscientious and a much better coder than me. As my partner for our semester project, George helped me a lot with coding, but I learned a much more important lesson from him that had nothing to do with our class.

Months into our friendship, George told me about that fateful morning when he accidentally hit a homeless woman while driving home. He couldn’t brake quickly enough when she stepped into the street without warning. The woman died hours later at the hospital. George was a sixteen-year-old kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had not been texting while driving or using any substances. It was a tragic accident, but nonetheless George was charged with involuntary manslaughter several months later. The judge spared him jail time and instead ordered five years of supervision because George didn’t break any laws and wasn’t driving carelessly or impaired. Throughout his college years, George spent every weekend making the three-hour trek to his court-appointed supervisor, then drove straight back to school to study.

Even though he avoided jail time, George’s past could have easily become a mental prison. Instead, George was grateful to the judge for giving him a second chance at life. He went to college instead of spending those prime years behind bars. Experiencing this traumatic event when he was only a teenager allowed George to see life as precious and fragile. Even though it was an accident, he took responsibility for causing the death of this woman, whose life was as valuable as his own.

Not every one of us has such a highly traumatic incident in our past, but we all have baggage. Simply saying that we have no regrets about the past doesn’t honor the complexity of our experiences or the hurt we have caused others. Of course, we regret harmful behaviors and actions. However, once we become consumed with regret and worry, we are stuck in the past. We put ourselves in a prison of our own making. If our guilt and shame cause us to surrender to the past, it will define our entire lives. Accepting the fact that we can’t change the past and understanding that we can choose how we deal with it allows us to move forward and grow from our experiences.

Even though I’m grateful George’s coding skills resulted in both of us getting top marks for our semester project, I’m much more thankful for what George taught me through the way he honored the past without letting it define him. George graduated at the top of our class and became a successful consultant. He started a family, had two beautiful children, and became a respected member of his community. George used his painful past experiences to become the person he wanted to be. He also inspired me to see that his approach to honoring the past allowed him to live fully in the present and expend most of his energy where it was needed at the time—his schooling. Watching George excel and make the most of his opportunities while coping with such tragedy, inspired me to do the same. I refocused my energy on the task at hand, my education, and graduated with honors.

How does processing our past
benefit our happiness?

• You will own and accept your life as it is and make peace with your history.
• You will liberate yourself from crushing guilt and resentment so you can rebuild your life.
• You will experience gratitude and happiness alongside your pain.
• You will feel alive again.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the different types of painful past experiences we must deal with and how to personalize our grieving process and find closure. I’ll share with you the FACT framework for dealing with challenging situations from the past. We’ll also dig into therapy and discuss whether or not it actually works in helping us process the past.

There are innumerable ways our past impacts our lives today, but I’ve found the most difficult things usually fall into one of three categories.

The Three Categories of Painful Past Experiences

1. Loss. The most catastrophic losses can be those of loved ones, including family members and close friends. However, heartbreaking losses also include pregnancy loss, the death of beloved pets, financial catastrophes such as job losses, losing a family home to a natural disaster, and losing relationships and friendships. Additionally, we may lose our quality of life when diagnosed with a chronic or fatal illness, our freedom when incarcerated, and more abstract values like faith, identity, or self-esteem.
2. Anger/shame/guilt/resentments. This category deals in regret and unresolved feelings, boundaries we never set, and conversations we never had. This can include things we did that we shouldn’t have done and things we didn’t do that we should have done. Also in this category are the ways other people have treated us that were hurtful or unfair. Items in this category are often unspoken and might only be known to one of the parties involved.
3. What-ifs. We get stuck in an endless cycle of what-ifs when we let our brain run away with the paths we could have taken and the decisions we might have made but didn’t. We play the what-if game if we’re unhappy with our current situation or future prospects and blame our past for where we are now. We conveniently forget that there is always an opportunity cost for each decision. Most likely, if we had made the other potential decision, we’d still play the what-if game. We all accept where we were born but relentlessly question why we don’t have unlimited choice (and the ability to identify the perfect option) in every other aspect of our lives.

I find it helpful to think of the acronym FACT when processing difficult situations and feelings from my past. It’s a simple way to work through a lingering issue I never quite dealt with to keep it from continually disrupting my life. Refusing to address these challenges can lead to resentment impacting my relationships, keep me stuck in the past, and prevent me from making different choices.

Use FACT to Process Your Past

The FACT model includes facing and accepting our past, calibrating our response, and taking positive action.

F – ace your history with all its contradictory emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and situations. There is no way to hide from your past because you always carry it within you. Facing painful past events is difficult, but ignoring them will prevent you from moving forward.

A – ccept your past as it was. Don’t ask why something happened but why it happened in a certain way. Was it something you or someone else did? Was it under your control or not? Accept the facts of the situation, even if they’re hard to swallow. I remind myself repeatedly of the serenity prayer, written by American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

C – alibrate your response. We can quickly get overwhelmed by guilt, shame, and resentment if we allow our thoughts to take control of us rather than controlling our thoughts. Focusing on facts, not beliefs and what-ifs, will help you calibrate your emotional response. I will teach you how to do this in more detail in Chapter 4.

T – ake positive action. Whether you believe everything happens for a reason, any situation can become a learning opportunity to teach valuable insights and inform future actions. Taking positive action can include self-care practices, seeking help for processing overwhelming traumatic events, and making amends with people we have wronged.

I used FACT to process the resentment I felt toward my parents for not allowing me to attend my preferred university. When it came time for me to choose a college, I’d already been away from my family for several years. I’d lived in Switzerland for the last two years of high school and graduated there. I had worked extremely hard throughout high school and was overjoyed when I was accepted into my top-choice school: Babson College in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a highly selective school and the only one that offered an entrepreneurship major at the time. It was a big deal that I even got in, and I was proud of myself. I couldn’t wait to go, but when I told my parents I was accepted, they said no.

Although they supported my college aspirations in general, they didn’t want four more years of our family scattered all over the place and being so far away from me that it would be hard to spend time together face-to-face. As a parent myself now, I understand their reasoning, but back then, I could only see what I wanted and that my parents weren’t willing to give it to me. I couldn’t afford to pay for school myself, so I had to rely on my parents’ support. There was nothing I could do except hold a grudge. I eventually decided to study industrial engineering at the Technological Institute of Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico.

I’ve since worked through that situation, but it...