You Can’t Change the Past — But You Can Change How It Lives in You

Memory, Unfinished Business, and the Nervous System’s Capacity to Heal

Most people arrive at therapy with a belief that feels both realistic and discouraging:

“What happened happened. I know I can’t change the past.”

And they’re right—at least in one important way. The facts of our lives are fixed. We cannot undo losses, rewrite childhoods, or erase moments of pain or neglect.

And yet, something in us continues to react as though those experiences are still happening. The body tightens. Emotions surge or disappear. Certain situations trigger responses that feel disproportionate, automatic, and difficult to control.

If the past were truly over, this wouldn’t be happening.

To understand why healing is possible, we need to understand how memory actually works—and how the nervous system holds on to unfinished experiences.

Memory Is Not a Single Thing

We often think of memory as a mental archive: something we store, retrieve, and reflect on. But the brain does not operate with a single memory system. It uses several, each serving a different purpose.

Two of these are especially important in psychotherapy.

Explicit Memory: What We Can Recall and Describe

Explicit memory includes:

• autobiographical events

• facts and narratives

• memories we can put into words

This is the kind of memory we use when we tell our story. It allows insight, understanding, and perspective. It helps us make sense of what happened.

But insight alone often doesn’t change how we react.

Implicit Memory: What the Body Learned

Implicit memory is older, faster, and largely outside conscious awareness. It stores:

• emotional learning

• attachment expectations

• bodily responses to threat, safety, closeness, or rejection

• habits of tension, shutdown, or vigilance

Implicit memory answers questions like:

• Am I safe here?

• What happens if I need something?

• How close is too close?

• What must I do to belong?

This learning is not stored as a story. It is stored as patterns in the nervous system.

This is why someone can say, quite accurately:

“I know I’m safe now—but my body doesn’t seem to believe it.”

Nothing is wrong with them. Two memory systems are simply operating by different rules.

Why the Past Keeps Showing Up in the Present

Implicit memory is not about remembering the past as past.

It is about using the past to predict the present.

When a child repeatedly experiences fear, abandonment, emotional misattunement, or overwhelm, their nervous system draws conclusions—not in words, but in sensations and reflexes.

For example:

• “Closeness leads to pain.”

• “My needs overwhelm people.”

• “If I relax, something bad will happen.”

These conclusions once made sense. They helped the system adapt.

But they don’t automatically update just because life circumstances change.

This is why people can leave the original environment and still feel trapped in old reactions. The nervous system is still operating from earlier learning.

Unfinished Business Lives in Implicit Memory

Many of the experiences that shape us most deeply were never fully processed at the time they occurred.

Not because we failed—but because we couldn’t.

Children, in particular, often lack:

• sufficient safety

• emotional support

• cognitive capacity

• relational protection

So experiences get cut short. Emotional responses are interrupted. Defensive patterns take over.

This is what we mean by unfinished business.

It doesn’t live in conscious memory.

It lives in the body’s expectations and reflexes.

Why Revisiting the Past Can Lead to Real Change

Here is a crucial and often misunderstood point:

Memory is not fixed.

Each time an emotional memory is activated, it briefly becomes malleable. During this window, the nervous system is open to updating what it learned—if something new happens at the same time.

This process is called memory reconsolidation.

When an old emotional learning is reactivated and the system has a new experience that contradicts it—something felt, not just understood—the original learning can change at its root.

Not suppressed.

Not managed.

Not reasoned away.

Actually updated.

What “Changing the Past” Really Means

Nothing about the historical facts changes.

But something essential does.

The body may no longer brace in the same way.

The emotional charge softens or resolves.

Old conclusions lose their inevitability.

For example:

• fear no longer floods the system in the same situations

• shame no longer defines the sense of self

• closeness no longer feels inherently dangerous

In this way, unfinished business can finally complete—not by pretending it didn’t matter, but by allowing the nervous system to have an experience it never had at the time:

• protection

• support

• agency

• completion

• emotional contact

When this happens, the past stops organizing the present in the same way.

Why This Often Feels Impossible at First

Many people resist this idea—not because it’s wrong, but because it challenges a deeply held assumption:

“If I’m still affected, it must mean the past is unchangeable.”

In reality, what’s unchangeable is the event.

What’s changeable is the learning that came from it.

Implicit memory is always about prediction.

When predictions update, experience changes.

Why Working With the Body Is Essential

Because implicit memory is stored in sensation, emotion, and autonomic patterns, it cannot be accessed through thinking alone.

This is why experiential, emotion-focused, and somatic approaches are so important.

They allow:

• careful activation of relevant emotional learning

• enough safety to stay present

• new experience to register where the learning actually lives

Healing at this level often feels less like “figuring something out” and more like something settling, releasing, or finally finishing.

The Past Doesn’t Need to Be Relived — But It Often Needs to Be Felt

Resolving unfinished business does not mean endlessly revisiting old pain.

It means allowing the nervous system to update conclusions that once helped us survive but no longer reflect current reality.

When this happens:

• reactions become more flexible

• the present feels more distinct from the past

• relationships become less predetermined

The story remains.

But it no longer runs the body.

Final Thought

You cannot change what happened.

But you can change how your body remembers it.

Your reactions are not signs of weakness or failure. They are signs of learning—learning that once made sense and was necessary at the time.

And because that learning was acquired through experience, it can also be transformed through experience.

Healing is not about erasing the past.

It is about helping the nervous system recognize that the present is different—and allowing life to be lived with more freedom, connection, and choice.