Our past experiences as humans become defining moments in the development of our character.
All of our experiences are associated with feelings - feelings the experience evoke in the moment.
If the experience is positive, the positive feelings and emotions evoked with the positive experience become the association of the experience itself.
The same is also true for negative experiences and the negative feelings evoked becoming the bridge of how we associate our feelings with a particular experience.
In other words, when we experience something that evokes strong emotions, we remember the thing based off of how it made us feel in that moment.
The feeling of winning a championship title is associated with feelings of joy and excitement, and we remember this experience through the feelings of joy and excitement we felt in that moment.
The same can also be said about trauma.
The strong negative feelings associated with mental and emotional trauma almost become inescapable because the feelings of the traumatic experience are so strong.
This is often why victims of mental and emotional trauma develop particular behavior patterns that continue to reinforce the feelings in which they are most familiar with.
In other words, victims of trauma subconsciously seek out experiences that evoke many of the strong feelings in which they are most familiar with.
Many times when we think about our past experiences, we bring back many of the feelings that came along with them.
The more we think about our past experiences, the more we recreate those same experiences in the present moment, continuing to reinforce familiar thoughts and behavior patterns.
Victims of depression are often said to constantly be thinking about their problems and things that have happened to them that have negatively impacted them in their lives.
This destructive thought pattern is exactly what keeps most people trapped in a continuous loop of negativity and victimhood.
One thing that is certain about life is that it only moves in one direction: forward.
As we continue to age, everything about us begins to change.
Oftentimes you will hear about those who try and "relive the glory days" as if the way they think and operate at the age of 40 isn't any different than it was when they were 20 years old.
The problem with this is that it is not realistic because we are constantly changing as we continue to evolve.
Our bodies change and our perception of reality changes with every new experience.
The way we think and operate now is not the same as it was ten years ago, just like it wont be the same ten from now.
The more we experience, the more we open ourselves up for change.
Many people get caught reliving the same day over and over again as if it were groundhog day because the behavior pattern in which they established becomes the most familiar.
When we close ourselves off from being able to experience anything new in life, it is very easy to go through the motions everyday without any real desire to learn anything new.
You have the person that is stuck in the past, constantly recreating their own past experiences.
Then you have the person that settles for what makes the most sense to them in the moment.
And you have those that are constantly striving to achiever more and get more out of life.
We all inherently want to be the third person because most people all want more out of life, but most fall into one of the first two types of people.
The only way we break this cycle is be forcibly putting ourselves in difficult situations.
We have to be able to go out and experience new things in life to gain experience and gain an appreciation for things that were once foreign and unknown to us.
The worst thing any one of us could do is constantly be living in our own past - thinking about the coulda, shoulda, woulda.
The more we live in our past, the more we recreate many of the same experiences, and reinforcing the same thoughts and behaviors that we are most familiar with.
The second worst thing we could do is settling for what we consider to be "comfortable".
Growing comfortable with being comfortable doesn't inspire any real chnge or growth in life.
We will continue to live the same life every single day without achieving any sort of fulfillment because we have grown comfortable with what we are most familiar with.
Instead, we need to take massive action towards seeking true fulfillment.
We do this by stepping outside of our comfort zone and experiencing new things we have never experienced before.
We must be able to reinvent ourselves in order to inspire genuine lasting change in our lives.
This means we need to grow comfortable with being uncomfortable - changing our environment around us, trying new things, associating ourselves with new people etc.