Book summary “Getting past your past”: summary

Introduction

You often react to everyday situations with intense fear, anger, or sadness that feels completely out of proportion to the moment. These persistent emotional struggles and destructive behaviors stem from unprocessed early memories stored in your neural networks. Francine Shapiro explains that these memories operate like automatic reflexes from the past, hijacking your present responses.

Persistent emotional struggles and destructive behaviors are physical symptoms driven by unprocessed early memories stored in neural networks, which can be rapidly resolved using EMDR therapy and targeted self-help techniques.

The book provides a structured framework based on Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing to help you identify root causes, stabilize intense emotions, and rewire your internal responses. You will learn how to dismantle foundational touchstones, repair attachment wounds, and overcome chronic fear.

• Why do minor events trigger overwhelming emotional reactions?
• How does the brain store and process traumatic experiences?
• What techniques can you use to regain emotional control on your own?
• How do early memories shape your adult relationships and self-worth?

1. Why We Suffer

Mental responses often function automatically like physical reflexes. They are driven by learned patterns rather than conscious critical evaluation.

Adult emotional distress and irrational reactions are driven by unprocessed memories operating like automatic reflexes from the past.

When given the prompt "Roses are red", people automatically respond with "Violets are blue" due to childhood conditioning. This happens even though roses and violets come in various other colors. The brain automatically produces the associated continuation without evaluating whether it is logically true. This same automatic mechanism operates in emotional distress. You react based on past programming outside your conscious control.

Unconscious Mechanisms

Persistent negative emotions, beliefs, and behaviors in adults are usually symptoms. They are driven by unprocessed memories stored physically in neural networks. When an experience is overwhelmingly frightening or stressful, it can remain unprocessed. It is stored in the brain with the original emotions, physical sensations, and beliefs intact. Whenever a current situation matches elements of that past event, you react not as an adult. You respond from the emotional state of the past age.

Justine picked emotionally unavailable men and acted clingy. She threw herself on the floor begging them not to leave. Therapy tracked this to a night when she was six years old during a severe thunderstorm. She screamed for her parents, but they were downstairs and did not hear her.

The Root Cause of Pain

Irrational adult anxieties often trace back to isolated, highly emotional childhood moments. These establish deep neural associations independent of higher reasoning. Reactions that appear absurd to the conscious mind are generated by neural associations formed in early childhood. Because these memories are stored outside the control of the rational mind, an external trigger can instantly evoke physical panic symptoms. You experience self-defeating thoughts decades later.

Ben experienced severe anxiety and thoughts like "I'm an idiot" during public presentations. This stemmed from an incident at age no more than 3½ years old when a strange man on a grandfather's farm threatened in a mountain drawl to drown a talkative child in the creek. It combined with a later school incident where a teacher laughed at his book report stutter. More than 40 years later, Ben had the same thoughts during a work presentation.

Everyday life experiences can produce symptoms just as severe as those used to diagnose formal posttraumatic stress disorder. A combat veteran can be haunted by one particular death from more than 30 years ago. He feels the exact same helplessness and anger. He reacts to the current world through those past emotions.

Severe and long-lasting adult symptoms do not necessarily require a major trauma. Seemingly minor events from a child's perspective can lock in chronic problems. Janice suffered from life-threatening stomach damage from taking too many antacids out of a horror of getting sick. This originated from a grade school incident where a classmate vomited into Janice's hair.

2. How the Brain Processes Memories

Sensory inputs enter working memory and automatically connect to a wide range of stored experiences in the brain. This interconnected web of memory networks forms the basis for how you feel, think, and behave in the moment. Current reactions are thus shaped just as much by the past as by present circumstances. If someone asks you for examples of fruits, they are automatically associated within a memory network such as apples, oranges, and pears. A child seeing an apple for the first time might mistake it for a ball.

The brain is hardwired with an adaptive information processing system that naturally digests emotional turmoil and moves distressing experiences toward mental health and resolution.

Much of this processing occurs during rapid eye movement sleep. The brain integrates new experiences with previously stored useful information, discarding negative feelings while retaining necessary learning. After having an argument with a coworker, you might think about it, sleep on it, and wake up feeling better.

Major traumas or severe upsetting events can overwhelm the brain's processing system. Memories are then stored in an unprocessed, isolated form that triggers automatic distress in the present. Sights, emotions, and physical sensations are encoded in their original unprocessed form. A rape survivor years later in a loving relationship can experience sudden terror and powerlessness when her partner touches her in a way that triggers an unprocessed memory network.

The Discovery of EMDR

Francine Shapiro discovered in 1987 that deliberate diagonal eye movements reduced the emotional charge of disturbing thoughts. She tested the procedure through trial and error with about 70 people and later conducted a dissertation study focusing on sexual abuse victims and combat veterans with PTSD. This evolved into Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, known as EMDR therapy, which combines cognitive reprocessing alongside bilateral stimulation.

Alternative forms of side-to-side stimulation such as alternating hand taps or tones can achieve the same therapeutic effects as eye movements by disrupting working memory and provoking an orienting response.

Therapists can use taps alternating from hand to hand or tones played from one ear to the other. These strategies cause a constant refocusing of attention known as an orienting response that mimics the neural connections created during REM sleep.

During sessions, you can process deep-seated childhood traumas and current triggers rapidly without requiring detailed recounting or homework. Lynne suffered from severe PTSD following an earthquake, but through EMDR sessions she uncovered childhood memories of betrayal and family chaos, ultimately resolving her anxiety and regaining her sense of control. Initial anxiety often measures 8 on an 11-point scale. A set of eye movements lasts for about 30 seconds. Single traumas are processed within about 3 90-minute sessions, achieving rates of 84 to 100%.

To work with an EMDR clinician, follow these steps:

• Concentrate on a target memory identified with the clinician.
• Follow the clinician's hand with your eyes for about 30 seconds to perform a set of eye movements.
• Just notice whatever comes to mind, and let whatever happens, happen during the movement set.
• Let it go, and take a deep breath at the end of each set.

Personality and Processing

Personality traits and adult interpersonal conflicts are largely driven by groups of memory networks formed through past life experiences and childhood vulnerabilities. When two people interact, their unprocessed childhood memories can collide and unconsciously trigger defensive patterns that worsen their relationship. Barry and Trudy struggled in their marriage because Barry's passivity in the face of his wife's anger automatically triggered Trudy's childhood memories of her unresponsive mother, while Barry was enacting his submissive pattern developed with an angry father.

Test your mind's tendency to make associations with this exercise:

• Choose a quiet spot and decide that for the next 10 minutes all you will do is concentrate on your nostrils as you breathe naturally in and out.

3. Techniques for Stabilization and Control

You can deliberately interrupt automatic distress responses and alter emotional states using structured self-control practices.

You can evaluate emotional struggles by distinguishing between temporary fluctuations caused by normal life events, which are termed the weather, and pervasive, long-standing emotional states like chronic anxiety or sadness, termed the climate, which are often fueled by stored past experiences. Words carry deeply ingrained associations that trigger automatic physical responses in the body.

Francine Shapiro uses an opening workshop exercise where repeating no versus yes alters bodily sensations for participants.

• Take a deep breath and release it slowly.
• Close your eyes for a moment and notice how your body feels, then open them.
• Take another deep breath, close your eyes, and repeat the word no out loud or in your mind for about ten seconds.
• Notice any physical changes in your shoulders, chest, or stomach.
• Take another deep breath, close your eyes, and repeat the word yes for about ten seconds, noticing any differences.

Safe Place and Breathing

Accessing a positive memory network through a designated safe or calm place allows you to deliberately shift your emotional state and manage momentary distress. By recalling a purely positive past image unrelated to negative events and pairing it with a descriptive label word, you can use emotional state-changing techniques to interrupt automatic distress responses and restore balance.

• Bring up an image of a positive, safe, or calm experience from the past that is not connected to anything negative.
• Close your eyes for a minute or so, bring up the image, and notice the colors, sense experiences, and bodily sensations in your chest, stomach, shoulders, or face.
• Identify a single word label that goes with the feeling or scene, such as peaceful or forest.
• Close your eyes, bring up the image, notice the pleasant feelings, and repeat the word in your mind for a minute or so.
• Repeat this process for a total of five times, spending about one minute each time to strengthen the neural connections.

Stressed breathing patterns can be consciously corrected by shifting the breath back to the lower torso associated with calm states. Stress naturally causes breathing patterns to move higher up in the body.

• Place your hand over the part of your stomach or chest where your breath begins when feeling safe or calm.
• Close your eyes, bring up your safe place image and word, and notice the change in your breathing pattern.
• When feeling stressed or noticing your breath moving higher up in your body, bring your breath back lower to that relaxed pattern.

Body and Mind Exercises

Slow bilateral stimulation through alternate tapping can enhance and reinforce positive emotional states when anchored to a safe place. Applying brief, slow bilateral tapping on alternate thighs or using the Butterfly Hug while focusing on a safe place helps amplify positive sensations, provided that negative thoughts do not emerge during the process.

The Butterfly Hug was originally developed in Mexico to help groups of children following a hurricane.

• Bring up the image of your safe or calm place along with its connected positive word.
• When you have that sense of safety or calm, tap your hands alternately on your thighs or use the Butterfly Hug slowly four to six times.
• Stop, take a breath, and see how it feels.
• If the positive state increases, close your eyes, allow the feelings to arise, bring up the word, and repeat the alternate tapping for four to six times.

Reimagining critical internal self-talk in the voice of a familiar cartoon character can instantly dissolve associated distress due to pleasant memory associations. The brain associates cartoons with positive and humorous memories, which makes it impossible for negative, self-critical emotional states to persist when the internal voice is reframed.

• Think of a cartoon character that has a funny voice, such as Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, or Popeye the Sailor.
• Close your eyes and bring up your critical inner voice, noticing how your body changes.
• Make the voice in your head sound like the chosen cartoon character and notice what happens to the disturbing feelings.

4. Uncovering the Source

Out-of-control emotional and physical responses in the present are primarily caused by unprocessed memories stored in the brain. When events are not processed naturally or with professional assistance, the emotions, beliefs, and physical sensations from the original experience remain locked in memory networks. Current situations that resemble the past trigger these unprocessed memories, causing distorted perceptions and emotional distress.

A Touchstone Memory is the earliest unprocessed memory that establishes the groundwork for a specific current problem.

Most emotional pain and chronic negative characteristics are driven by 10 to 20 unprocessed memories that are responsible for most of the pain and suffering in most of our lives. Identifying and processing these touchstone memories allows associated memories in the same network to change automatically. Tony suffered from severe panic attacks and ducked for cover whenever a plane flew overhead due to a traumatic war experience as a medic, which linked back to underlying authority issues with his father.

Negative cognitions are verbal expressions of irrational beliefs that stem from unprocessed memories in the present. Rather than objective descriptions of fact, negative cognitions express how a person feels about themselves during triggers and generally fall into three categories: responsibility or defectiveness, lack of safety, and lack of control or power. Jon experienced intense workplace rages and self-sabotage driven by the negative cognition "I'm a failure," which originated from severe childhood abuse by his father.

Tracking Tools

The Subjective Units of Distress scale measures emotional disturbance numerically from zero to ten. The SUD scale is widely applied in clinical practice and research to quantify how distressing a memory or recent event feels, where zero represents no distress and ten represents extreme distress. A 3 or higher SUD level indicates the memory has probably not been fully processed.

Take a moment and bring up something that bothers you at a 4-5 out of 10 SUD. Use your Breathing Shift technique or bring back your Safe/Calm Place. Verify that negative feelings go away before continuing with exercises.

The Affect Scan technique uses current emotional and physical distress to trace feelings back to childhood origins. By concentrating on a recent upsetting event, identifying the worst image, and focusing on the resulting emotions and bodily sensations, a person can allow their mind to scan back and discover the earliest matching memory.

• When you think of the incident, what is the most disturbing part?
• What image in the memory represents the worst part of the event?
• When you hold the image or incident in mind, what emotion comes up for you?
• Where do you feel it in your body?
• What negative thought goes along with it?
• Now hold together the image and the negative thought, and feel the physical sensations in your body.
• Focusing on the feelings let your mind scan back to your childhood and notice the earliest memory that pops up.
• Check the SUD scale to see how the old memory feels now.
• If the SUD level is 3 or higher, pick a few words to be your cue to identify the childhood memory.
• Write down the memory opposite the recent event, including your age and the SUD score.

The Floatback technique connects current negative cognitions to foundational childhood memories. This method builds on the affect scan by holding a recent incident and its negative cognition in mind, locating the bodily sensation, and letting the mind float back to childhood to uncover the source memory. Sandra suffered from severe public speaking anxiety and used the negative cognition "I'm not good enough," which the floatback technique traced to a fourth-grade teacher calling her a doozy in front of the class.

• Think of the negative cognition and the recent event and hold them both in mind.
• Notice where you feel the sensation in your body.
• Let your mind float back to childhood while keeping the feelings in mind.
• Write down the memory that comes to mind along with your age and the SUD level.
• List the earliest memories and those with the highest SUD level using cue words.

The TICES Log is a daily monitoring tool used to track triggers, images, cognitions, emotions, and physical sensations. By recording these five components when disturbances occur in daily life, individuals can recognize patterns, identify unprocessed memories, and prepare themselves before entering challenging situations. Derek, an Iraq War veteran, used the TICES Log to discover that his severe distress when his young son Parker cried was fueled by an unprocessed wartime memory of a mother and child killed during a firefight.

• Create a notebook page with five vertical columns labeled with the letters T, I, C, E, and S.
• List a couple of words under T for Trigger describing what happened.
• Record the worst image of the event under I for Image.
• Choose the negative cognition that matches your feelings under C for Cognition.
• Write down the emotion you are feeling under E for Emotion.
• Record where you feel it in your body and note the SUD number under S for Sensation and SUD.
• Use your Safe/Calm Place or Breathing Shift technique to return to neutral.

5. Bonding, Attachment, and Responsibility

Early family misattunements and internalized beliefs of defectiveness shape your adult attachment styles and self-blame.

A parent's inability to bond with a newborn is frequently caused by unprocessed physiological and emotional memories surrounding pregnancy, delivery, or past trauma, rather than a lack of love. Unprocessed negative experiences overload the information processing system, causing physical and emotional distress that interferes with parental bonding and triggers insecure attachment behaviors in the child.

Lucille suffered from severe nausea during pregnancy, a painful C-section, and depression, leaving her unable to feel love for her baby Amy until her pregnancy memories were processed via EMDR.

Attachment and Wavelengths

Misattuned parenting styles create insecure attachments that transmit emotional struggles and defensive behaviors from one generation to the next. Psychologists estimate that misattunement occurs about 35% of the time, resulting in dismissive, preoccupied, or disorganized attachment styles that shape how children deal with emotions and view themselves.

Joan's mother avoided physical affection and considered it cheap-looking, leading Joan to develop a dismissive attachment style and grow up feeling unlovable.

Accessing and savoring strong positive memories provides a psychological resource for times of distress and helps test whether memory retrieval is blocked by depression. Emotional states affect memory retrieval; depression can prevent a person from experiencing past or present events as purely joyful, signaling a need for professional assistance.

• Write down in your notebook a sentence describing a positive memory of well-being, accomplishment, or joy.
• Close your eyes, visualize the image representing the best moment, and allow yourself to feel it.
• Identify the word that best describes it.
• Hold the image and word in mind, notice where you feel it in your body, and savor the memory.
• Let it go and repeat a few times to bring back the good feelings.

Responsibility and the Spiral Technique

Negative cognitions in the responsibility category reflect deep-seated feelings of defectiveness and self-blame that stem from hidden unprocessed memories. Even without abusive parenting, overprotection, illnesses, or childhood humiliations can cause individuals to store beliefs of being defective, inadequate, or at fault.

Ethan experienced extreme anxiety and low self-esteem due to overprotective parenting stemming from his premature birth and medical complications, which led to peer bullying at school. Elaine's sixth-grade teacher claimed students scoring in the 25th percentile would never go to college, and 40-plus years passed before Elaine processed the devastating memory of that remark.

The Spiral technique uses guided imagery to manipulate the perceived physical energy of disturbing emotions, helping to dissipate fear, anxiety, or anger. By identifying the directional movement of internal emotional energy and consciously reversing it, individuals can neutralize physical distress in the body.

• Identify something that bothers you at about a 3 level on a scale of 0-10.
• Bring up an image that represents it for you.
• As you think of the image, notice where you feel the disturbance in your body.
• Pretend the feeling is energy shaped like a spiral, and determine if it is moving clockwise or counterclockwise.
• Gently change the direction of the spiral in your body with your mind.
• Notice what happens to the feelings in your body and continue until you feel comfortable.

The Floatback technique connects current negative cognitions and bodily distress back to formative childhood memories. Tracing a present trigger or negative belief back through childhood, family members, or authority figures helps identify the touchstone memory driving current distress.

• Think of a negative cognition and recall a recent incident where you felt that way, noting where you feel it in your body.
• Let your mind float back to childhood to see what memory appears when you felt that way, and write it down.
• Rate how the memory feels now on a SUD scale of 0 to 10 and note your age when it occurred.
• If nothing comes to mind, hold the belief and body sensation while thinking individually of your parents, siblings, teachers, and peers.
• Jot down any early memory that resonates and use breathing shifts to return to neutral.

Scanning negative beliefs while monitoring bodily sensations allows individuals to uncover hidden emotional responses linked to memory networks. Because negative thoughts and physical sensations are stored together in the brain, reading through belief lists while observing bodily changes reveals active trouble spots.

• Put a heading in your notebook that says Responsibility.
• Read the first negative belief slowly and carefully, noticing how your body feels.
• If it causes an uncomfortable feeling or changes your breathing, write it down under the heading.
• Take a few deep breaths and wait for your body to return to neutral.
• Continue down the list with each belief, writing down those that cause a response.

6. Overcoming Fear and Powerlessness

Phobias, combat trauma, and chronic vulnerability stem from unprocessed memories that destroy your internal locus of control.

Inappropriate fears and phobias often stem from unprocessed memories stored in the brain's memory network rather than current objective dangers. While fear is a useful warning signal for real danger, anxiety often scales out of proportion due to past experiences encoded in memory networks. When you encounter triggers that mirror those past encoded events, the brain generates physical fear and negative emotions.

14-year-old James suffered from severe anxiety when going to sleep, fearing someone would kill him in his room. Processing revealed it stemmed from age eight when his parents left him with his grandmother during the height of the Night Stalker murders in California, causing his brain to link his parents' absence with extreme danger.

Combat-related PTSD and chronic trauma symptoms are frequently driven by deep feelings of responsibility, guilt, and powerlessness over events soldiers could not control. Veterans and first responders often demand 100 percent success from themselves in 100 percent uncontrollable situations. When horrific wartime experiences tap into earlier childhood vulnerabilities and feelings of responsibility, the resulting trauma symptoms become chronic if left untreated.

Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Hal Walters experienced severe PTSD and depression after his second tour in Iraq, triggered by watching an elderly Iraqi woman bleed to death from a bombed car. EMDR processing connected this trauma to an early childhood memory of failing to prevent his brother's injury and his grandmother leaving for Africa.

The Butterfly Hug Practice

The Butterfly Hug uses bilateral stimulation through slow alternate tapping to help individuals manage minor anxiety and stress independently. While full EMDR memory processing requires a licensed professional, a component of its bilateral stimulation can be performed as a self-care exercise for low-grade anxiety up to a 4 SUD. You must monitor your reactions to ensure the tapping does not unexpectedly dredge up highly disturbing memories.

• Position yourself to do the Butterfly Hug by crossing your arms across your chest with your left hand on your right shoulder and your right hand on your left shoulder.
• Bring up something that is causing anxiety at about a 3 SUD.
• Examine why the anxiety is there, whether it indicates a problem needing action, and what you have decided to do about it.
• Hold an image of the situation in mind and just notice your feelings as you alternately tap each shoulder slowly four to six times to complete one set.
• Take a deep breath.
• If you feel better, continue for another five sets.
• If at any time you find it getting worsening or something more negative comes up, let it go and use your other self-control techniques.

7. The Mind-Body Connection

Many physical ailments, phantom pains, and chronic medical complaints are physical manifestations of locked trauma memories.

The brain acts as your body's control center. State of mind and stored traumatic memories continuously impact your cardiac, respiratory, and immune systems. Psychosomatic issues are often mistakenly dismissed as meaning the suffering is merely imagined. In reality, they result in real physical symptoms that masquerade as medical problems.

Carl suffered from lightheadedness, shaking, dizziness, and vomiting for 30 years during stressful events. His panic disorder was eliminated by processing childhood memories of moving and sports pressures.

Phantom limb pain and long-term residual pain from healed injuries are often not nerve damage or organic failures. They are sensory records locked in unprocessed trauma memories. In the United States, an estimated 1.6 million people have lost limbs due to accidents, war, or disease. About 80 percent of limb-loss victims continue to feel their missing limb.

Marine Jim suffered from daily shooting pain, severe cramping, and excruciating weekly sawing pain following a motor vehicle accident that resulted in leg amputation. After just four sessions of EMDR processing his accident memory, his PTSD resolved and all phantom pain sensations disappeared except for an easy-to-ignore tingling sensation. Alger suffered intense 10-out-of-10 phantom pain for eight years after a motorcycle accident before nine EMDR sessions eliminated it.

Childhood asthma and other early physical ailments can be linked directly to maternal stress, a lack of maternal bonding, and difficult birth experiences. Severe depression or fear following a traumatic pregnancy can manifest physically as chronic respiratory issues in infants.

Seven-month-old Gianna suffered from daily asthma, relied on a rescue inhaler, and had frequent ER visits due to her mother Juanita's severe stress and lack of bonding. Gianna woke her mother four nights a week because she could not breathe. After three EMDR sessions processing Juanita's pregnancy and birth trauma, Gianna's asthma completely disappeared and remained symptom-free one year later.

Intense distress over body appearance, perceived physical deformities, or eating disorders can be rooted in early adolescent humiliations. Minor incidents involving social ridicule during vulnerable developmental stages remain unprocessed for decades. They drive severe psychological distress, suicidal ideation, and distorted self-perception.

Stephanie experienced hospitalizations and medication use for 15 years. She suffered for 30 years from the belief that she smelled of rotting fish and excessive sweating. The belief originated from an incident at age 12 when she forgot a cooking class bag of food over the weekend, leading to mockery from schoolmates and scolding from her principal. Three EMDR sessions permanently eliminated her symptoms.

The Lightstream Technique

The Lightstream technique is a guided imagery procedure that uses visualization of a healing color to manage physical pain and sleep disturbances.

By identifying the specific characteristics of an upsetting bodily sensation and superimposing a visualized healing light from an endless cosmic source, you can alter negative somatic feelings or induce relaxation for insomnia. In Indonesia, researchers combined the Safe Place and Lightstream techniques to treat five women traumatized by an HIV diagnosis. Within three days, all five women were able to sleep easily. This led to a broader treatment rollout where 75 percent of 106 additional patients reported improved sleep.

Use this procedure to alter physical sensations:

• Focus on upsetting body sensations and identify their shape, size, color, temperature, texture, and sound by asking: If it had a shape, size, color, temperature, texture, or sound, what would it be?
• Choose a favorite color or one associated with healing.
• Imagine a light of this healing color coming in through the top of your head from the cosmos, directed at the shape in your body.
• Let the light resonate and vibrate in and around the shape while observing changes to the shape, size, or color.
• Continue the Lightstream until you feel comfortable, or use Safe/Calm Place, Spiral, or breathing techniques to return to neutral if feelings do not change.

10 Key Ideas

1. Adult emotional distress and irrational reactions are driven by unprocessed memories operating like automatic reflexes from the past.
2. The brain is hardwired with an adaptive information processing system that naturally digests emotional turmoil and moves distressing experiences toward mental health and resolution.
3. Accessing a positive memory network through a designated safe or calm place allows you to deliberately shift your emotional state and manage momentary distress.
4. A Touchstone Memory is the earliest unprocessed memory that establishes the groundwork for a specific current problem.
5. Early family misattunements and internalized beliefs of defectiveness shape your adult attachment styles and self-blame.
6. When two people interact, their unprocessed childhood memories can collide and unconsciously trigger defensive patterns that worsen their relationship.
7. Phobias, combat trauma, and chronic vulnerability stem from unprocessed memories that destroy your internal locus of control.
8. Many physical ailments, phantom pains, and chronic medical complaints are physical manifestations of locked trauma memories.
9. You can deliberately interrupt automatic distress responses and alter emotional states using structured self-control practices.
10. The Lightstream technique is a guided imagery procedure that uses visualization of a healing color to manage physical pain and sleep disturbances.