Marisa Peer distinguishes reliving past events, which keeps childhood pain active in your present, from reviewing them with distance. The shift: visualize the scene on a screen, describe it in third person, and observe how early beliefs formed. This detachment lets you learn and move on instead of repeating the same reactions.
Chapters
I get a lot of people asking the same question. What's the difference between reliving your past and reviewing your past? Now I do therapy, do a lot of regression and I take people back and I have to say to them, look, when I take you back to a trauma, you cannot relive it. If someone slaps your leg when you're six and you remember that when you're 46, your leg doesn't sting, it doesn't feel like it's been slapped because you're not reliving being sore, you are reviewing it. If someone dumped you, broke your heart, rejected you and diminished you, and you go back to look at that, to see how it's affected you, you cannot relive it, you can only review it. And that is very, very important when you want to take a look back at your past and just work out how things shaped you, how things influenced you, how they affected you, how they're affecting your life now and say, well, God, I don't want to go back and relive all that trauma. But you can't relive it. You review it. It's rather like watching it on a screen going, oh look, there's that six year old kid whose dad left home and never came back. There's that five year old whose brother or sister was the favorite. Because when you review it, instead of reliving it, you're able to go, but that's not me, that's me when I was six and that's how I felt when I was six. When I was, I've been on the planet for only 6 years and I formed beliefs and came to conclusions that made sense to a six year old. But they don't have to make sense to me anymore. So that's something reviewing and reliving. But here's another point. I sometimes meet people who tell their story over and over again. My boyfriend broke my heart and took all my money. And what they do is they are reliving it. They're telling their story over and over again until it feels as if it's still so we all have a story. I was rejected, I was abandoned, I wasn't loved, I never felt significant, I never thought I mattered. That's okay, I had that story too. And it's fine to look at it and think, oh yeah, that's how I was and that motivated me to be something. But don't get invested in telling that story. My parents didn't want me, that's why I'm still alone. I was told I'D amount to nothing. And that's why I have no motivation. We never had money for food and that's why I can't leave food now. Please don't keep reliving that. Because if you relive it, your mind thinks it's still going on and you start to continuously feel and act and react exactly the same way you did when you were a kid. So you want to review scenes and move on. You do not want to relive them and you definitely don't want to keep them going. These are stories from our past. They're not our present, they're not our future. Work out the difference. Review, understand, learn, move on. That's very good. Relive over and over again. Very bad. So become a great reviewer and give up reliving. So a lot of people ask me, but how do I review? Well, here's how you review. Let's imagine you have a scene where you were and you had this dog that you just loved and your parents gave it away and that broke your heart. And you've never had a dog since. In fact, you've never had love since because your thought is, but they gave it away. So you go back and you look at that, but you look at it rather like you're watching on a television screen. Rather like you're watching it on a computer screen and you are watching a four year old child. You don't say, this is me, you say, this is a four year old kid whose parents gave away the thing that he loved the most. He had no power to stop them and that left him feeling helpless and hopeless. So you talk about it as if it's someone else. The scene is out there. You don't go, oh my God, I was devastated. I lost my dog and never got over it. Because then you're in it. You say, when I was four, this thing happened and that's how I felt. But I was only four and I had to make sense of that the way a four year old did. And I had to protect myself the way a four year old did by shutting down from love. But now I'm 44 and I can look over and around and through that scene and see how it affected me, how it influenced me, even what it cost me. I can also see that I'm not four. I don't have to make those choices. I can let love in. So that is how you do it. You put it on a screen, you talk about it in the third person. Here's a child who's lost his dog you make it the third person, you make it somewhat detached from you, particularly if you've been through trauma and abuse. You make it out there. It's detached. You look at it, and then because it's detached, you can look at it with fascination. Don't live it. Review it. You see, you review. Something to learn. I'm going to go back and review that book and make some notes. I'm going to go back and review that time in my life to see what I can learn. Reviewing teaches you a lot. Reliving, it just keeps the pain going. We can't relive that, but we can go and have a new experience. So now I know you get this. Reliving and reviewing. Review, don't relive. Thank you.
