Putting the Past Behind You

Coping Statements for Dealing with Yesterday

What is past is all said and done. What remains to be seen is what I can bring to my present and future.

Better for me to concentrate on what I’m doing today rather than on what I did or didn’t do yesteryear.

Better to do in the present than to stew about the past.

The past isn’t going to get any better!

Poor decisions made in the past do not have to be repeated in the present.

Because something once happened doesn’t mean that it has to continue to happen.

No matter how bad any event was, I do not have to allow it to continue to have a negative influence on my life.

I cannot rewrite history and change what has already happened.

Whining and screaming about the injustices and unfairness of the past will only take a bad situation and make it worse.

I don’t have to be the one person in the universe to have been treated with total fairness and kindness – and I don’t have to moan and groan about the fact that I wasn’t.

I’m going to put more money down on what can yet be made to happen than on what has already happened.

Having been treated unfairly in the past is all the more reason to treat myself fairly in the present.

Now that I have been shown how not to treat people, I can have a better start on how to treat them.

I don’t have to take the unkindnesses of the past and turn them into insults in the present.

I can use what did not kill me in the past to make myself emotionally strong in the present.

I may have suffered deprivation in the past, but I have not been degraded or demeaned by it.

Demeaningness is a state of mind that only I can give myself, and I’ve got better things to do than rake myself over the coals.

People’s treating me like dirt in the past does not mean that I am dirt.

Feeling sorry for myself, angry toward others, guilty, or ashamed for getting the short end of the stick in the past will only continue to keep me from achieving happiness in the present and future.

I am an active stewing-in-my-own-juices participant in my present victimization and can choose instead to make plans to move forward with my life.

What I tell myself today is much more important than what others have told me in the past.

Past experiences do not represent me. Rather, they represent things I have experienced; they do not make me into a better or worse person.

The enemy is not my past; the enemy is my way of thinking about my past.

Going on an archaeological dig of my past in an effort to explain my present difficulties is like trying to find a needle in a haystack and will only divert me from present problem-solving.

Everything that has happened in my life happened. Therefore, I’d better get off my high horse and stop pigheadedly demanding that it should not have occurred, when in truth it did occur.

What has happened to me is not nearly as important as what I decide to do with it.

I will try to be successful in putting my past behind me by changing my thoughts and feelings about it, but I don’t have to put myself down if I fall short of the put-it-behind-me mark.