THE POWER OF TRANSCENDING HISTORY

Are you your history? You certainly have history— you have lived through numerous experiences, and because you have, you also use those historical events and experiences as reference points for your thinking and emoting. What does that mean? It means that you “point” to your historical experiences, especially if they were strongly emotional, positively or negatively, as experiences that enable you to understand other experiences and people when they speak about their experiences.

So yes, it certainly seems that maybe “you are your history.” But no. This statement is too shallow and superficial an analysis to summarize you in that way. Things in the real world are not that simple. The event or events to which you refer are just that—events, and often a set of accidents in life. The fact is that you just so happened to be in a given context of place, time, people, activities, a context in which you did or received some activity.

What really matters is not what happened, but what you make of what happened— your understanding and interpretation of those events. And what you carry with you into your future as your interpretative scheme for interpreting other things are those understandings and the way of interpreting that they provide you.

So, no you are not your history! Instead of that, you are the creative result of how you interpret your history. The role of your history is entirely relative to your interpretations. How you today experience what happened to you in your past determines on how you interpret that history. So that’s why when you change your interpretation, you change your experience of your history. This is your power for transcending your history. To change your history and to thereby transcend it— Change your representations. Change your words and languaged descriptions. Change your evaluations. Change your conclusions. Change your meanings.

This is why and how you can experience what Richard Bandler famously said that has now become one of the mantras of NLP: “It is never too late to have a happy childhood.” Or, “It’s never too late to have a happy divorce,” or firing, or anything else that you’ve been through. How you feel and respond to any previous historical event today is a function of how you have come to code and frame it, and how you continue today to frame it.

The past does not exist today. What exists today is how you record and hold memories of a past. This means that your feelings, emotions, habits, style of life, responses, etc. are all symptoms of your

interpretative style. Dealing with that symptomology is dealing with symptoms, not causes.

What are the symptoms that disempower you? A sense of being stuck, of the past determining the future, of helplessness, hopelessness, discouragement, depression, built up anger, a negative frame of mind, a set of regrets about childhood or something that you lost as an adult, jealousy of what others have, envy, mean-spiritedness, and on it goes.

What’s the cause? Your interpretations. How you think about, represent, evaluate, frame, meta-state, draw conclusions, etc. — that is the cause. History is not the cause of your historical references or how you use that history. History doesn’t create anything. “History” is a generalization (a nominalization) that we use for a category of things that have previously happened. History simply speaks about the original context in which something happened. After that you interpreted those events in such a way that you now experience that history in the way that you do. If there is a problem, the frame is the problem.

Now about your experience of history, often your first interpretation which you made back then was based on insufficient information or even on a child’s mind as a way of thinking, or on toxic cultural beliefs. That’s good news. It means that you can today update your history and use a new frame to think about it ... and therefore experience it. Today you can transcend your history and learn to become the architect of your future —if you want to.

How? Well, there are numerous patterns that we use in Neuro-Semantic NLP to achieve such. From the original NLP patterns, you could use the Change Personal History pattern, the Movie-Rewind Pattern, the Decision Destroyer Pattern, or almost any of the Time-Line patterns. From the Meta-State patterns you could use Meta-Stating Emotions pattern, Meta-Stating Concepts, Meta-Stating Self, and on and on.

The bottom line? You have the power to manage, frame, and reframe your memories of what you’ve been through in such a way that it supports your hopes and dreams, your skills and possibilities, your sense of self and relationships with others. You can unleash potentials that are yet untapped and you can release toxic frames that do not serve your highest and best. It’s all up to you. You have the power to choose and to take action.

Learn more about Neuro-Semantics — Begin with Winning the Inner Game Then read Secrets of Personal Mastery Or Meta-States Or the new book — Neuro-Semantics.