How Past Trauma Makes Us Predict the Future and Sabotage the Present

The thing with keeping past history and traumas alive in our mind is this: we’re trying to predict what a current event might become in the future. If something happened in the past that caused us pain, our nervous system searches for the origin of that painful outcome, as if it can prevent it from happening again.

Think about something simple. Someone once stole your money, and the situation happened when you had a joint bank account. So in a new relationship, if someone brings up the idea of opening a joint account, you don’t respond from the present moment. You respond from the moment of the past. Your body goes into that same panic as if the threat is happening again. Not when you agreed to the joint bank account but when the money was stolen.

But here’s the thing most people don’t understand.

When we go into that panic, we are not reacting to what is happening now. We are reacting from the time in our life when the bad thing originally happened. We pull an emotional reaction from the past and project it into the future. And this is exactly what new psychology is showing us.

When we react emotionally to a situation or even to someone’s facial expression, we are predicting the behaviour we think we should have. If we react to something in the moment because we believe it will turn bad in the future, we are actually expressing the emotional state of an event that has not happened yet.

That becomes the problem.

The other person isn’t experiencing our past. They are not living in our predicted future. They are responding to the emotional frequency in our body right now. They feel our tension, our fear, our guarded tone, our facial expressions, and they begin reacting to us as if the bad thing has already happened, even though they don’t know the story that is running through our mind.

Essentially, they feel you as if the negative outcome has happened.

And because now we see a partner reaction we say: “See, I knew it.” But what we’re seeing is not the truth. We’re seeing a reflection of our internal state mirrored back at us. We are seeing our partner react to our nervous system of the past event.

Now both people are acting as if a threat is present. We think the threat is coming from them; they think the threat is coming from us. What we’ve actually done is create a whole emotional scenario based on something that comes from the past, projected onto the future, and acted out in the present.

This is the loop.

Instead of staying grounded in the moment, we shift into prediction mode. Instead of regulating our nervous system, we let it run ahead into fear. We forget to ask, “Is what’s happening right now actually what I think will happen later? Or is my mind trying to protect me from the past?”

Most of the time, that’s exactly what’s happening.

We believe the moment equals our past outcome. We think A will equal A again. We don’t even consider that A might equal B, a completely different direction, outcome, or possibility.

In new relationships, similarities will always appear. But similarities are not proof of identical outcomes. They only become identical outcomes when we react as if they already are. Our internal emotional state influences the other person, and they respond to the version of us that is preparing for a future threat.

This is why so much self-sabotage happens. Really it is protection, and our energy gives off this signal.

We think the other person is reacting badly. But they are responding to our internal state, because our internal state is reacting to a future that hasn’t occurred. If the mind doesn’t know the difference between an imaginary scenario and physical reality, then the body won’t know either.

So our body tenses. Our chest tightens. Our facial expressions shift. Our tone becomes different.

And the person across from us sees that and responds accordingly. They’re not responding to the present moment. They’re responding to the version of us that is already living in the predicted future.

This is where conflict begins. Not because the moment is dangerous, but because we project danger into the moment, and our body acts in alignment with that prediction.

Grounding, emotional regulation, and returning to the actual present moment interrupts this cycle. When we stop reacting to imagined futures, we stop creating them. Most things would be fine if we paused long enough to realise that we’re not responding to what is happening… we’re responding to what we fear could happen.

The moment we return to now, the body calms, the expression softens, and the other person stops mirroring fear back to us. We stop creating the very scenario we’re afraid of.

We break the loop, and we finally allow the present moment to become something different from our past.