Have you ever thought about what you’d change if you could go back in time?
It’s often a theme of time travel fiction that the really big events can’t be changed. In Connie Willis’s hilarious novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, for instance, no time traveller can get within 200km or 5 years of the Battle of Waterloo, which famously could have gone either way. And it’s well accepted in popular time-travel fiction that you can’t assassinate Hitler.
Steve & Terry in 1940 are reminded that you can't assassinate Hitler
But what about the events of your own life? Can you go back in time and change things, get a different outcome? Even for the big, defining events?
In fact you can, and I’ll tell you how.
1. Prepare
First of all, you need to be ready to face the past incident and put it to rest. If it’s still so painful that even thinking about it is unendurable, you’re not going to be much use to yourself.
It’s surprising, though, how much pain you can endure, if enduring it is going to remove it – and you’re not going to re-experience the pain directly in this exercise.
Sit yourself down in a comfortable place where you’ll be undisturbed. If you prefer to lie down (and are confident that you won’t go to sleep), that’s fine too.
Take several deep breaths, and as you take each breath, let your body relax, the muscles calming and loosening, and any tension leaking out and evaporating like mist on a warm road. If you find this difficult, use a self-hypnosis recording like my Blue Sky Induction to help you.
Spend a few minutes thinking of a safe place – which can be real or imaginary – where you feel completely relaxed.
Now give yourself a trigger word, like “safe”, to return you to that place in your imagination if things become too difficult to handle. You’ll almost certainly not need to use it, but just knowing it’s there will reduce any anxiety you might feel about the process.
2. Travel
Now it’s time to time-travel. I’ll assume for the sake of this exercise that there’s a specific past event you want to deal with. You’re going to go there as your present self and help your past self.
Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley off to rescue Galileo
Build the memory of that event, in its full sensory detail. See what you saw and hear what you heard – but watching from the outside, in the “cool” mode of the third person. You can see your younger self in the difficult situation.
What do you notice about the situation that you never noticed before?
3. Intervene
You have all the resources of your current self – mental, emotional and physical – that your younger self lacked. If you like, since this is an imaginary trip, you can even have more resources that you wish you’d had – anything you need to intervene effectively, up to and including magic and futuristic technology. Why not? You’re travelling through time already. If you need a wand or a phaser, it’s yours.
Step into the situation and help your younger self. This may involve confronting someone else who was in the situation on behalf of the younger self. I don’t recommend violence here. Firm intervention should be sufficient. Tell them where they get off. They may even apologise.
Whatever else you do, it’s important to comfort the younger self and help him or her to deal with the aftermath of the situation. Do this as you’d comfort your own child, or a friend (depending on the age of the younger self). It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually have children. Just hold the younger self and support him or her until he or she feels better.
4. Inform
A lot has happened in your life since the moment you’re revisiting. Some of it has been positive beyond what the younger self could hope for. (I know this because you now have the resources to go back and help.) So tell the younger self about how things do eventually get better.
Place the emphasis on ways in which the situation you’ve just intervened in is not the end or the all-defining moment, because that’s how your younger self probably thought of it at the time.
5. Grow Up With an Alternate History
Watch now as the younger self grows up in a universe in which someone came and intervened and helped and supported at that critical moment. Watch how the younger self has different experiences (and some of the same experiences) and deals with them more positively, drawing on the resources you have passed on.
When the younger self reaches your present age, embrace each other and allow yourselves to merge, and your timelines to merge.
You now have that history of the self who got the help at the critical moment and whose life was improved by it. Those are your memories too.
Return to your safe place with the trigger word, and gradually let yourself come back to your usual alert consciousness and reconnect to the real world around you. Perhaps have something to eat or drink to get yourself all the way back.
How does the world look different now?
Jamie and Adam from Mythbusters confirm time travel
I hope you’ve enjoyed and benefited from your trip into the past, and that you’ve decided to use your powers for good and not for evil. Especially since next week we’ll be travelling into the future (and not at the usual one-second-per-second pace either).
If you liked this technique and want more ways to manage your emotions and move on from painful events of the past, make sure to join the Beat the Rush List for my upcoming Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. You’ll be informed as soon as it’s available, and you’ll get a significant discount over the normal price.
(Gratitude to David Morgan-Mar, creator of Irregular Webcomic!, which is one of the most regular webcomics on the Internet, and one of my personal favourites. He generously makes his work available under a creative commons license, and never personally makes a cent from his creativity. If you want to thank him indirectly with a donation to charity, though, he has some suggestions for doing so.)
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