Stop Obsessing With Your Past

17.06.25

The biggest sign of someone who is healing their wounds and integrating their shadows is creativity. When I notice my clients entertaining new possibilities and stepping away from automatic responses, I know all off their hard work is paying off.

That’s why I consider creativity one of the biggest tools when it comes to healing and integration. This isn’t a surprise when you understand how the psyche works.

Now, we’ll cover why obsessing about the past is detrimental to healing and how creativity can help us get unstuck.

Shadow Complexes

The first thing you have to understand is that the personal shadow is mainly made out of complexes. Simply put, these complexes create fixed narratives in our minds. In other words, when we’re neurotic and under the influence of a complex, we live the same story over and over again.

It’s like the movie Groundhog Day. Every day.

These complexes produce rigid scripts that condition how we see the world and shape our sense of identity, and consequently, influence all of our behaviors and decisions. This framework also aligns very well with the idea of core beliefs from CBT.

Consequently, we end up attracting the same kinds of toxic relationships, having the same frustrating experiences with work, and experiencing the same self-defeating thoughts and negative emotions. Over and over again.

Being trapped in a complex is the opposite of a creative life.

Now, the biggest mistake I see when people are trying to heal is becoming obsessed with their pasts, as this only enhances the problem.

Unfortunately, there’s a common narrative being spread saying that healing involves excavating every inch of your past and that you can only heal from trauma if you find its origins. If you haven’t found it yet is because you didn’t dig deep enough.

The problem is that understanding our pasts is only half of the equation. Moreover, this unilateral attitude goes against healing as it tends to enhance neurosis. You see, the first thing that happens when we’re dealing with traumatic influences is a fundamental dissociation from reality.

We disconnect from our bodies, and the practical aspects of life, and start living exclusively in our heads. We’re never present and we start filtering all of our reality through our wounds, thus unconsciously perpetuating it.

When you add an “obsession with the past” to this condition, you can never move on. The more you excavate negative experiences, the more you become identified with them. You develop tunnel vision and stop seeing new possibilities.

In worse cases, people retraumatize themselves and the past becomes a crutch and a great justification for not changing in the present.

But this approach fails to understand that single events are rarely powerful enough to shape someone’s identity. Rather, we have to understand someone’s life story and the series of choices and experiences that shaped them.

Moreover, even when there’s a powerful event at play, our individual perceptions influence its effects much more than we tend to believe. That’s why the solution isn’t in the past but in what we choose to do in the now, as healing involves being present.

Yes, it’s important to understand our pasts but once we map the narratives that shaped our lives, it’s time to act.

Lastly, healing is a process that happens daily by making new choices and employing different actions that support the construction of a new narrative.

• I already covered this whole process in my Demystifying Shadow Work Series.

The Healing Power of Creativity

Now, constructing a new narrative can be quite complex but I find that creative endeavors are especially helpful.

Firstly, creativity helps in cases of extreme intellectualization.

It’s important to understand that the unconscious operates with a symbolic language charged with emotions. Over-intellectual people often get stuck because they are too disconnected from their feelings and consequently, can’t properly process them.

In this case, by engaging in creative endeavors that allow them to symbolize what’s obscure, they can finally allow their emotions to move through their bodies and get unstuck.

Secondly, creativity helps with perfectionism, one of the most common trauma responses.

By freely expressing ourselves in a safe context, we can learn to accept our own emotions and make mistakes, and we can dare to be who we truly are and learn a new language. In turn, this shrinks the inner critic and helps us develop more self-compassion.

Thirdly, creativity is a great emotional regulation tool.

Especially in cases of compulsions and addictions, creative endeavors can become a substitute emotional regulation tool and over time, diminish the need for these substances.

Finally, living a creative life leads to individuation.

The unconscious isn’t only made of repressed stuff but it has a teleological component. In other words, the unconscious is also the matrix of our creative potential, new possibilities, and everything we’re yet to become.

That’s why individuation involves understanding what your soul desires to create through you. When we tap into this creative energy, we disrupt the rigid scripts from shadow complexes and adopt new behaviors, make different decisions, and build better relationships.

But for this to happen, we must bridge the gap between our creative practices and real life. This isn’t only about playing music or drawing for half an hour every other day, but envisioning real life and our relationships as our canvas.

• Read Next – How To End Perfectionism For Good

Rafael Krüger – Live an Audacious Life

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

Mentorship – Catalyze your personal transformation with 1 on 1 sessions. Master your psychology, relationships, and business.

Katabasis – The Shadow Integration Manual – My best-selling and accessible course will introduce you to all you need to know to disrupt the unconscious patterns keeping you stuck.

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