Cara’s Blog

There’s a very powerful message in the Easter Story, whether you’re a Christian or not. And I don’t mean the most obvious one- ‘Don’t stand out from the crowd or you get nailed to a cross!’

I mean the idea of sacrificing the old to make room for the new. Easter is not just about nailing someone to a cross. It’s about rebirth. About something amazing, world changing, coming out of a death, out of an ending, out of a horrifying experience.

I talk about not needing to have a personality transplant to become good with women. Essentially that’s accurate. But there are parts of your existing personality- behaviors, habitual thinking, that have to go, if you’re going to get really good with women.

All of us have ‘stuff’ from the past cluttering up our lives in the present. This often painful, emotional ‘stuff’ sits there like a stone in our gut, weighing us down.

Why don’t you just get rid of it, if it’s having such a bad effect on you? Because it’s become part of you. It’s a memory or series of memories that defines who you are. If you let it go, then it’s like losing a little bit of who you are.

But to move on in your life, to be confident and in control in your romantic life, as well as you daily life, you have to let go of those old memories. You have to reduce your baggage. You have to put to rest those little ‘bits’ you see as part of you.

The scientists tell us that when a traumatic event happens we haven’t got time to process it properly. Like an overstretched secretary, we just throw files in anywhere, just so we can cope with the moment. It’s these files that have been thrown in anywhere that cause us grief. Massive grief. They create stress and anxiety, they lower our immune system, they affect the way we relate to the world.

For computer types, you might understand the importance of spending time sorting through these past events, getting them filed away properly, in this way: When you defragment your files, a slow and tedious process, you have more useable space on your hard drive, so your system runs more effectively. Your computer isn’t wasting valuable time trying to find misplaced files.

Another interesting thing happens when you start defragging your human computer. By looking at painful experiences, you get to see them from a distance, get perspective. When you file them where they belong, you subtly change the memories. You subtly change the events.

This phenomenon first came to light when the police were interviewing witnesses of crimes. They found that if they slid in what they expected to hear, the witness picked up the cues and adjusted their memory of the event accordingly.

So, if the policeman was sure it was a male perp and said ‘What was he wearing?’, the perp’s memory shifted slight. If they weren’t sure if it was a man or woman, they start to ‘remember’ it was a man. They weren’t faking it, or lying to please the police. They really started to superimpose these new bits of information onto the old. Until the whole witnessed event could become something completely different.

You can use this memory shuffle to your advantage. Instead of turning away from painful past events- trying to forget they ever happened, try pulling them out, brushing them off and seeing just how accurate your thinking was back then.

We don’t think straight when crisis hits. So getting your thoughts straight about the trauma after the event is crucial.

And when you do this, you let go of the rock in your gut. It dissolves. And you feel lighter and newer, ‘reborn’ in a small but crucial way. Ready to start life afresh! See the world with new eyes. A really important message, courtesy of Easter.