Your Past Doesn't Define You... And I Think I've Finally Understood Why.
How reading The Untethered Soul changed the way I understand consciousness, identity, and the stories we carry about ourselves.
I had one of those moments the other morning where something I'd been reading suddenly made so much sense that I had to stop and just sit with it for a minute.
You know when you've heard a concept before, and you understand it intellectually, but then one day something clicks, and you understand it on an entirely different level? Well, that happened to me.
I was sitting in a coffee shop reading The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer, a book that explores consciousness, the mind, and our relationship with the thoughts and emotions we experience, and I came across a passage about how we construct our identities from our past experiences.
Now, I've spent years working on myself. I've done therapy, inner-child work, explored limiting beliefs, unpacked childhood experiences, recognised behavioural patterns, and generally spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand why we humans do the things we do. It's also a huge part of the work I do with my clients, so the idea that our childhood experiences influence our beliefs, behaviour and sense of self wasn't exactly groundbreaking information to me.
But what I realised that morning? That was something else entirely.
For a moment, I genuinely felt completely free of the things I'd experienced when I was younger.
I don't mean I suddenly forgot what happened, or that those experiences had never affected me. I mean I realised that I didn't actually have to keep carrying the stories I'd created about myself because of them. Which sounds quite simple when I write it down, but the reason it was so powerful has everything to do with what Singer was explaining about consciousness.
So bear with me, because we're about to get a little woo-woo.
The Untethered Soul: Who are you, really?
If you haven't read The Untethered Soul, the book explores a fascinating question:
Who are you, beyond your thoughts, emotions, memories and the identity you've created for yourself?
Singer approaches this from a spiritual and philosophical perspective, suggesting that we are not simply the constant stream of thoughts and emotions passing through our minds. Instead, he invites us to recognise the consciousness that's aware of those experiences.
For example, think about the voice in your head. You know, the one that narrates your day, questions your decisions, replays conversations, worries about the future, and occasionally creates an entire imaginary argument with someone who hasn't actually said anything to you.
That one lol
You can hear that voice, can't you?
You can notice when you're overthinking; you can recognise when you're feeling anxious, frustrated, excited or sad; and you can observe yourself having those thoughts and emotions.
So Singer asks us to consider: if you're aware of your thoughts, are you actually those thoughts? Or are you the one observing them?
It's a deceptively simple question, but the more you explore it, the more interesting it becomes, because we spend so much of our lives identifying with the contents of our minds.
We think something, and we believe it. We feel something, and we assume it must mean something. We experience something difficult, and before we know it, we've turned that experience into a story about ourselves, and then we spend years living according to that story.
Which brings me to one of the concepts in the book that really caught my attention.
The false self: the person we've spent our lives creating
Singer talks about what he calls the false self, and essentially, it's the idea that we spend our lives constructing an identity from the thoughts, emotions, memories and experiences we've collected along the way.
We take everything that's happened to us, attach meaning to it, and gradually build a concept of who we are, and we start doing this incredibly young.
As children, we're constantly learning about ourselves through our experiences and the responses we receive from the people around us.
We learn what gets us approval.
What gets us criticised.
When it's acceptable to express our emotions.
When it's better to keep quiet.
What makes people happy with us, and what seems to make them withdraw.
And because we're children, we don't necessarily have the perspective to question what's happening. We just experience it, interpret it, and adapt.
Maybe you learned that being helpful and agreeable meant receiving praise and affection, so you became the person who always puts everyone else first.
Maybe expressing your needs resulted in criticism or conflict, so you learned to suppress them.
Maybe someone rejected you, and you concluded there must be something wrong with you.
Or perhaps you grew up feeling responsible for other people's emotions, so you became exceptionally good at reading the room and adjusting your behaviour accordingly.
Over time, these interpretations become beliefs, and those beliefs then influence how we behave, the relationships we form, the decisions we make, and the way we see ourselves.
Then eventually, we start describing ourselves through them...
I'm a people pleaser. I'm not very confident. I'm someone who struggles with relationships. I'm an overthinker. I'm just the kind of person who puts everyone else first.
And because we've identified with these things for so long, we assume they're simply part of who we are.
But Singer challenges that assumption by asking: what if the identity you've created is actually a collection of thoughts, beliefs and experiences you've become attached to? And what if you've become so familiar with that collection that you've mistaken it for your actual self?
I find this particularly fascinating because so much of what we consider our personality can be influenced by what we've learned to do to feel accepted, loved or safe, and we don't necessarily question those behaviours because they've become so automatic.
We just think, Well, that's just who I am.
Why we cling to these identities in the first place
There's another layer to this that I think is really interesting.
Singer suggests that we don't just construct identities because we want to understand ourselves. We also do it because having a defined sense of who we are gives us a feeling of stability and security.
Think about it... If you have a fairly fixed idea of who you are, how the world works, and how other people should behave, life feels a little more predictable.
You know how you're supposed to act.
You know what to expect.
You know how to interpret things.
And predictability feels safe.
But when something happens that doesn't fit the model you've created, it can feel incredibly uncomfortable.
Someone behaves differently from how you expected, or a relationship doesn't unfold the way you imagined, or something you believed about yourself gets challenged... suddenly your mind starts working overtime trying to make sense of it.
You might try to control the situation, change the other person's behaviour, find an explanation, or mentally replay everything until it fits into a story you can understand.
This is because uncertainty is uncomfortable, and our minds would generally prefer a familiar explanation over having absolutely no idea what's going on... even when that familiar explanation isn't particularly helpful.
Singer explores how we do this with other people too. We develop expectations about how they should behave, and when they don't meet those expectations, we can become frustrated, anxious or upset.
Sometimes we even try to influence their behaviour so that they fit the version of them we've created in our minds.
And the really interesting part is that we're all doing some version of this! We're constantly creating mental models of ourselves, other people and the world around us. Then trying to maintain those models because they make us feel secure.
But what happens when we stop trying to hold everything together?
What happens when we allow an experience to simply be an experience, without immediately grabbing hold of it and using it to reinforce a belief about ourselves?
This is where Singer's exploration of consciousness becomes particularly powerful, because he suggests that we can learn to observe our thoughts, emotions and experiences without needing to identify with every single one of them.
And this is where I had my little existential crisis in a coffee shop, although, to be fair, it was a very positive existential crisis haha.
The moment something completely clicked
I was reading the section where Singer explores how we hold on to memories and experiences from our past and use them to construct our identity.
He describes how we can still be clinging to something that happened when we were ten years old, pulling that memory into the collection of experiences we use to explain who we are today.
But within his perspective, we're not those events... we're the consciousness that experienced them.
And I suddenly thought... Hang on. My consciousness was there when I was a child.
The awareness I recognise in myself today was there when I was experiencing all those things when I was younger.
I was there when I was seven.
I was there when I was ten.
I was there throughout my teenage years.
I was the one experiencing those moments.
And yes, my beliefs have changed. My understanding has changed. My emotional awareness has changed enormously. But the consciousness experiencing my life was there through all of it. Then, suddenly, for the first time, I looked at my childhood experiences in a completely different way.
Yes, they were things I experienced, things that happened around me, and things I interpreted according to the understanding I had at the time, but they weren't necessarily truths about who I was, and I cannot explain how freeing that felt.
It was almost as though I could look at all the stories I'd created about myself because of those experiences and recognise that I didn't actually have to keep carrying them, or identifying with them, and I didn't have to keep using them to explain who I am today.
They were experiences, and I was just the one experiencing them.
Then I had another thought... and honestly, this was the part that completely blew my mind.
If I can let things go now, why am I still holding on to things that happened twenty years ago?
Over the last year or two, I've noticed a massive shift in the way I respond to difficult experiences.
Particularly in relationships, where I've experienced rejection, disappointment, inconsistency, and situations where someone hasn't treated me particularly well.
And while those things can still be disappointing, I don't automatically internalise them anymore.
If someone rejects me, I don't immediately make it mean that I'm not good enough
If someone behaves badly towards me, I don't decide that I'm unworthy of love or respect.
If something doesn't work out the way I hoped, I don't turn it into a reflection of my value as a person.
I can recognise that something has happened, acknowledge how I feel about it, and move forward.
Yes, I might be disappointed or frustrated, or I might even be a bit pissed off, but I don't need to carry that experience around with me and turn it into another story about who I am.
I've learned to separate what happens to me from what it means about me.
And while I was reading that morning, I suddenly realised something...
If I can do that with experiences happening to me now... Why the fuck am I still holding on to stories about things that happened when I was a child?
Seriously.
Why should something that happened when I was ten years old have more authority over who I am than something that happened when I was thirty-three?
Why can I recognise that someone rejecting me today doesn't mean I'm unlovable, but still find myself carrying beliefs formed from experiences I had twenty years ago?
Both were experiences, and both happened at a particular moment in time, and yet neither one has to become a permanent definition of who I am.
The difference is that when I was younger, I didn't have the awareness I have today.
I didn't understand human behaviour in the way I do now.
I didn't necessarily know that someone else's actions weren't a reflection of my worth.
I didn't have the emotional maturity, perspective or independence to question everything I was experiencing.
So naturally, I formed interpretations. I developed beliefs. And some of those beliefs became part of the identity I carried into adulthood.
But here's what I realised... just because I believed something about myself when I was ten doesn't mean it was ever true.
It means that was the conclusion I reached with the understanding I had available at the time, and I don't have to keep living according to those conclusions now.
I can look back and recognise that I was experiencing something, just as I experience things today, and just as I can allow an experience today to pass without making it mean something about me, I can begin to loosen my attachment to the meanings I gave experiences from my past.
I just hadn't thought to apply that understanding backwards, and that, for me, was the breakthrough.
What if we don't need to keep rewriting our stories?
This realisation also made me think about the way we approach personal development and healing, because so much of that work focuses on identifying our limiting beliefs, understanding where they came from, and replacing them with more empowering ones.
We might recognise that we developed a belief that we're not good enough, and then spend time learning to believe that we are, or we might identify a pattern of people-pleasing and work on becoming someone who feels comfortable setting boundaries, and that work can be incredibly valuable. I've done a lot of it myself, and it's helped me enormously, but what struck me about Singer's perspective is that he invites us to question something even more fundamental.
What if we didn't need to keep building a new identity every time we recognised something about the old one?
What if we didn't need to replace every painful story with a more positive story?
What if we could simply recognise that the story was something our minds constructed in response to an experience? And that we don't necessarily have to keep identifying with it?
For me, this was a completely different way of looking at the work I've done on myself, because I've spent years understanding my childhood experiences, exploring my patterns, and developing compassion for the younger versions of myself, and I don't regret any of that at all. I think it's a huge part of why I have the awareness I do today.
But this particular realisation wasn't about needing to comfort my younger self again, because I'd already done that. And it wasn't about discovering another limiting belief I needed to change, or finding another experience I needed to process.
It was about recognising that I could put the story down altogether.
And there's something incredibly liberating about that.
Because there's a difference between understanding your past and continually using it to explain who you are.
You can recognise where a behaviour came from without deciding it's a permanent part of your personality. You can understand why you developed certain beliefs without continuing to live according to them, and you can appreciate everything you've learned through your experiences without making those experiences the foundation of your entire identity.
Perhaps at some point, the work isn't about becoming another, better version of yourself - perhaps it's about recognising how much of what you've called yourself was something you learned to construct in the first place.
Does that mean our past doesn't matter?
Of course not, and I think this is an important distinction, particularly when we're talking about childhood experiences and trauma. Our experiences can have a very real impact on how we think, feel and behave.
They can influence our nervous systems, our relationships, our expectations and the ways we've learned to protect ourselves, and then understanding those patterns can be an important part of changing them.
So, I'm certainly not suggesting that someone who's experienced trauma can simply read a book about consciousness, decide their past doesn't define them, and suddenly feel completely unaffected by everything they've been through. That's not how it works for everyone, and it would be incredibly dismissive to suggest otherwise.
It's also worth remembering that Singer is exploring consciousness through a spiritual and philosophical lens, rather than presenting a scientifically established explanation of the nature of the self, but I think there's an incredibly valuable distinction within his perspective.
Your experiences can have shaped you without having to define you forever.
Something may have influenced the way you learned to see yourself, but that doesn't automatically make your interpretation of it true.
You may have developed a particular behaviour to navigate your childhood, but that doesn't mean you're destined to repeat it for the rest of your life, and even when old emotions or learned responses still arise, you don't necessarily have to turn them into evidence that you're still the person you once believed yourself to be.
You can notice them, understand them, work with them when you need to, and allow them to pass without constructing another identity around them.
Which, when you think about it, is a pretty extraordinary possibility.
Maybe freedom isn't about becoming someone else
I think one of the reasons this experience was so powerful for me is that I wasn't actually trying to achieve anything when it happened.
I wasn't sitting there doing inner-child work, or journalling about a difficult memory. I wasn't actively trying to release a limiting belief or work through an emotional block. I was just reading a book over breakfast, and suddenly something I'd spent years exploring made sense in a way it never had before.
For a moment, I felt completely separate from the stories I'd carried about myself, and I didn't feel the need to do anything with them.
I didn't need to analyse them again, find a better explanation for them, or create a new version of myself to replace the old one. I could simply recognise that those things happened, I experienced them, and I don't have to continue defining myself through them.
And perhaps that's the part of Singer's philosophy that resonates with me most, because we spend so much of our lives trying to figure out who we are. Building identities, understanding our patterns, changing our beliefs, or just trying to become a version of ourselves that we think we're supposed to be... but what if there was a different kind of freedom available?
One that doesn't require us to keep constructing, improving and maintaining a particular version of ourselves? What if we could become more comfortable simply experiencing life, without needing every experience to tell us something about who we are?
I don't think that means we stop growing, learning or changing, and I certainly don't think it means we stop caring about what happens in our lives, but maybe we can stop treating every experience as another piece of evidence in the ongoing case we're building about ourselves.
Because that's what I realised that morning.
The awareness I recognise in myself today was there throughout my life. I was experiencing things then, just as I'm experiencing things now, but the difference is that today, I have the awareness to recognise that an experience doesn't automatically determine my worth or my identity, and I can bring that understanding to the way I look at my past.
I don't have to keep living according to conclusions I reached when I didn't know what I know now.
I can acknowledge what happened; I can understand how it affected me; I can appreciate the work I've done to get to where I am, and I can let go of the need to keep carrying those experiences as definitions of who I am.
I think that's what made the moment so extraordinary, because for once, I wasn't looking at my past and wondering what else I needed to heal. I was looking at it and realising that perhaps there wasn't anything else I needed to do with those particular stories. I could just put them down.
And to be honest, after years of trying to understand myself, that might be one of the most freeing things I've ever experienced.
You don't have to keep carrying a story just because you've carried it for years.
Hannah x
Understanding yourself is one thing, but learning to live differently is another.
Sometimes, recognising where a belief or behaviour came from is enough to change how you see it. Other times, you might understand a pattern perfectly well and still find yourself repeating it, particularly when it comes to relationships, boundaries, people-pleasing or putting everyone else's needs before your own.
That's where deeper, personalised support can make a difference.
My 2-hour Pattern Intensive is designed to help you recognise the emotional and behavioural patterns influencing your choices, understand what's keeping them in place, and identify practical ways to start responding differently.
It's not about finding more things wrong with you or creating another version of yourself you need to become. It's about developing the awareness, self-trust and tools to stop living according to patterns that no longer serve you.
If you're ready to explore what's been keeping you stuck, you can book a session below:
Hello,
I’m Hannah - a burnout & self-trust specialist focused on structural pattern recognition.
I help high-achieving women identify the emotional and behavioural “leaks” behind overthinking, people-pleasing, and performing success, then shift them at the root using strategy, human behaviour insight, neurodiversity-informed coaching, and energy work.
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