If I’m Going to Tell a Story From the Past, Will It Help Me Now or in the Future?

There is a question I have started to think about more and more when I find myself going back over something that happened in the past: if I am going to tell this story, either to myself or to somebody else, is telling it going to help me now or in the future? If it isn’t, why am I telling it? I like the question because it does not tell me that I should forget the past, pretend something did not happen, or excuse people who may have hurt me. It is much simpler than that. It asks me to think about what purpose the memory is serving today. There are things that have happened in my life that I cannot change. Some were upsetting, some were unfair, some made me angry and some changed relationships permanently. They are part of my story whether I like it or not. But I have increasingly realised there is a difference between something being part of my story and repeatedly retelling it as though it is still happening. Every time I do that, I have a choice about whether I am using the past to understand myself and move forward, or whether I am simply bringing yesterday's pain into today.

I know I have done the latter. Something might have happened years ago, but I can still replay it with remarkable detail. I can remember what somebody said, what I said back, what I wish I had said and what I think they should have done differently. The strange thing is that the event itself may have lasted ten minutes, yet I can give it hours more of my life by thinking about it afterwards. Then I can give it another hour next week, another twenty minutes next month and perhaps another evening years later when something reminds me of it. The original event happens once, but I can repeat it hundreds of times in my own head. When I think about it like that, I have to ask myself who is actually keeping the experience alive. The person who upset me may not have thought about it for years. The situation may have disappeared completely. Yet I can recreate it whenever I choose, complete with much of the anger, disappointment or hurt that came with it.

That does not mean memories can simply be switched off. I do not think it is helpful to tell somebody to "just stop thinking about it". Our minds do not work like that. Sometimes things need to be talked through. Sometimes understanding what happened is essential.

Sometimes telling our story is how we make sense of something, seek support, learn from it or finally say something we were never able to say at the time. There can be enormous value in talking about the past. The question for me is not whether I should ever talk about it. The question is what is this retelling doing for me now? Am I understanding something? Am I learning something? Am I working through an emotion? Am I helping somebody else understand me? Am I making a different decision because of it? If the answer is yes, then perhaps there is a reason for going there. But if I am simply running the same old film again and feeling exactly the same anger at the end of it, I have to question whether I am helping myself or simply reopening something that had already happened.

I think this connects strongly to negative thinking. Our thoughts rarely arrive alone. One negative thought is very good at finding another one. I can start by thinking about something somebody did five years ago and before long my mind has assembled supporting evidence from ten different occasions. That reminds me of another person who disappointed me, which reminds me of another argument, which reminds me of something else that went wrong. Within minutes I can move from one unpleasant memory to what feels like a complete case for why everything was terrible. Each thought gives the next one somewhere to attach itself. What began as a single memory becomes a chain of them, and the emotions build as the chain gets longer. Nothing new has actually happened in the present, yet mentally and physically I can end up feeling as though I am in the middle of a crisis.

That is one of the reasons I find the idea of a stress bucket useful. I imagine that throughout the day things are constantly being added to it. Work pressures, responsibilities, things I need to remember, worries about people, unexpected problems, tiredness, irritating emails, disagreements and all the normal things that come with being alive. Some days very little goes into the bucket and some days it can feel as though somebody has turned a hosepipe on. I cannot control all of those things. What I can sometimes control is whether I walk over to the bucket carrying three old containers of stress from five years ago and pour those in as well. That is effectively what I am doing when I repeatedly bring up something painful that has no useful purpose in the present. I already have enough going on today without voluntarily adding yesterday's problems to it.

I find that particularly interesting because our bodies do not always make the neat distinction between something happening now and something we are vividly thinking about. I can sit safely at home and think about a conversation from years ago and notice myself becoming tense or irritated. I can feel my mood change even though absolutely nothing has happened in the room I am sitting in. The event is over, but I have brought some of the emotional experience back into the present. That makes the question even more important to me: why am I doing this? If thinking about it helps me understand something and eventually makes the burden lighter, that may be worthwhile. But if all I am doing is making myself angry again, perhaps I do not need to keep paying an emotional bill for something that happened years ago.

There is also something about telling our stories repeatedly that can strengthen the story we have created around ourselves. If I repeatedly tell myself that I was treated badly, that people always let me down or that nothing ever went right during a particular time, those ideas can gradually become part of how I understand my life. The story becomes more fixed every time I tell it. Eventually I may stop questioning whether it is entirely accurate. This is something I have recognised in myself when looking back at different periods of my life. The painful things naturally stand out, and if I am not careful they can become the headline for everything that happened. The good gets pushed into the background. A complicated year becomes "a terrible year". A difficult relationship becomes entirely bad. A painful family situation can colour memories of everything that surrounded it.

I have written before about how I did exactly that with Newcastle. I moved away in my early twenties because of work, although I was happy to go because of some difficult family circumstances I was leaving behind. For a long time afterwards I said I hated Newcastle. A friend eventually pointed out that it was not Newcastle I hated; it was the situation I associated with it. That simple observation changed something for me. I realised I had told myself the same story so many times that Newcastle and the difficult memories had become almost inseparable. Yet Newcastle had not done anything to me. Once I began separating the place from what happened there, I was able to rediscover all the other memories I had pushed aside and eventually love the city again. The past did not change. What changed was the story I was choosing to continue carrying forward.

That experience helped me understand something else: letting go of a story is not the same as saying what happened was acceptable. I think this is where people can sometimes get stuck. We can feel that if we stop being angry about something, the other person has somehow got away with it. If we stop telling the story, perhaps we are saying it did not matter. If we choose not to revisit something, maybe we are letting somebody off the hook. I do not see it like that anymore. I can believe somebody behaved badly and still decide that I do not want their behaviour occupying my thoughts ten years later. I can acknowledge that something hurt me without continuing to hurt myself with the memory. Letting go is not necessarily something I am doing for them. In many cases, it has absolutely nothing to do with them. It is about deciding how much of my present I am prepared to give to something from my past.

In that sense, I think there is an element of taking control back. We often talk about the past as something we cannot control, which is obviously true in one sense. I cannot change what happened. I cannot go back and rewrite a conversation, make somebody behave differently or give my younger self information I know now. But I do have some control over what role those events have in my life today. If I repeatedly revisit something and allow it to affect my mood, my relationships and the way I see myself, then in a strange way the past is still making decisions about my present. The event may be finished, but it continues to have influence because I keep giving it attention.

Taking control does not mean forcing a memory away every time it appears. Sometimes a memory arrives without an invitation. For me, the control is more about what happens next. Do I follow it? Do I start building the case again? Do I replay the argument? Do I begin imagining what I should have said? Do I tell the story for the hundredth time and end up exactly where I started? Or can I recognise it for what it is: something that happened, something I remember, but something that does not require another hour of my life today?

I think there is a useful difference between remembering and ruminating. Remembering can be quite neutral. I can acknowledge something happened and know how it affected me. Rumination feels different. It goes round in circles. There is rarely anything new at the end of it. I do not arrive at a solution because there is no longer a problem I can solve; the event has already happened. I am effectively holding an imaginary meeting about something for which there can never be a new outcome. The meeting has no agenda, nobody else attends and somehow I am still exhausted afterwards.

That does not mean I want to stop telling stories from my past. Quite the opposite. Some of our stories are hugely important. They explain where we have come from, what we have learned and why we make the choices we do now. There are experiences I can look back on and recognise that, although I would not choose to repeat them, they taught me something important. Those stories can be useful because they have moved from being something I simply relive to something I can reflect upon. There is a difference between saying, "This happened to me and I am still furious about it," and saying, "This happened to me, this is what it taught me, and this is what I do differently now." The event is the same, but the purpose of telling it has changed.

That is where the future part of the question matters. Will telling this story help me now or in the future? Perhaps it helps me recognise a boundary I need to maintain. Perhaps it reminds me not to repeat an old mistake. Perhaps sharing it helps somebody else who is experiencing something similar. Perhaps talking about it with someone I trust allows me to understand why I reacted the way I did. Perhaps it reminds me how much has changed and how far I have come. Those are reasons to tell a story. In those situations, I am not simply dragging pain out of storage and placing it back in my life. I am doing something with it.

There are also times when I think the most useful thing is simply to say, "Yes, that happened," and leave it there. Not every memory needs analysing. Not every disagreement needs a verdict. Not everybody who treated me badly needs to understand that they treated me badly. I do not need to win every argument retrospectively. There is a freedom in accepting that some things will remain unresolved. I may never receive an apology.

Somebody else may remember events completely differently. They may never understand my point of view. For years I might have thought resolution required those things to change, but perhaps resolution can also mean reaching the point where I no longer need them to.

I have found that this way of thinking helps with my mental health because it creates a filter between a memory appearing and me automatically climbing back inside it. I can ask myself what I am hoping to achieve by thinking about it. Sometimes there is a good answer. Sometimes I realise there is not. I am just annoyed again. At that point I can try to bring myself back to what is actually happening today. What is in front of me? What can I influence? What deserves my energy now? My life is happening here, not inside an argument that finished years ago.

It also stops me unnecessarily filling that stress bucket. I cannot avoid every source of stress, and neither would I want to spend my life trying. Some stress comes from things that matter to us: jobs, relationships, responsibilities, ambitions and caring about other people. But because there will always be things going into the bucket, I think it makes sense not to add things that do not need to be there. If I have a busy day today, I do not need Tuesday from 2004 joining in. It has had its turn.

Perhaps the most important thing I have learned is that moving on does not require forgetting. The past remains part of me. Some of it I love remembering and some of it I would rather had happened differently. But I am increasingly conscious that every time I revisit an old story I am bringing a little piece of it into today. That means I want there to be a reason.

So now, when I notice myself telling an old story again, particularly one that hurts, angers or frustrates me, I try to ask myself a simple question:

Is telling this story helping me now, or will it help me in the future?

If it helps me understand, learn, heal, make a decision or support somebody else, then perhaps it deserves to be told.

But if the only outcome is that I experience the same pain again, I need to ask myself why I am giving it another performance.

The past has already happened once.

I do not always need to make myself live through it again.