If you don't like your past, CHANGE it!

I see a connection between Charles Dickens' "Christmas Carol" and a book I just read about the psychology of time.  In the "Christmas Carol", three ghosts help Ebeneezer Scrooge develop a new perspective on the past, the present, and the future.  The book I just read and wrote about in this blog last week, Philip Zimbardo's The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time, is also about people's perspective on past, present, and future.

As I described last week, you can take Zimbardo's test for your own time perspectives at this website:  Time Perspective Inventory.  What do you do if your perspective on the past, present, or future is not positive enough?  This week I'll focus on the past.

If you don't like your past, CHANGE it!  Zimbardo points out that your memory of the past isn't some kind of perfect record of everything that happened.  It's filtered by what you focus on as you recall the past.  Do you focus on the good things or the bad?  Ebeneezer Scrooge focused on certain aspects of the past.  He needed the Ghost of Christmas Past to point out things that happened but that he'd failed to notice.  Just as the Ghost changed Scrooge's perspective, we can change our own perspective by changing what we spend time remembering about the past.

Gratitude is key.  Recalling, frequently, good things that happened, things we are grateful for allows us to rewrite the past.  By focusing on our recent good fortunes, we create positive feelings about our past.  It's probably a good idea to do this for both the recent past and the more distant past so that our overall feelings about our lives are as positive as possible.  I've often heard that these memories of good events have more of an impact if you also conjure up the feelings you had at that time, the feelings when your wife did something nice for you or when you got good news at work.  This changes your experience of the past not through distortion but through selective focus on real events and real feelings.