How To Stop Letting Your Past Run Your Present

You’re in the kitchen knocking out chores before the day gets away from you, when your roommate walks in, sees the way you’re doing it and says, “Hey, could you not do it like that?”

That’s it. No fight. No accusation. And still, something in you snaps awake. Your chest tightens. Your brain starts writing a closing argument. You’re suddenly angrier than the moment calls for, or quieter, or both. The old tools show up fast: go cold, get sharp, apologize, make it disappear.

Later, you replay it and can’t explain why it hit like that. Nothing “serious” happened. The reaction feels out of proportion, which is usually the giveaway: the moment wasn’t really about that moment.

Adam Young has spent years helping people name what’s happening in scenes like this, where adult life gets hijacked by something older and harder to spot. He keeps returning to a simple, unnerving idea: the past rarely introduces itself as the past. It shows up as a reflex, a survival strategy that once made sense and now just keeps firing.

“As a 35 year old man, I didn’t think I had a story,” Young said, describing how long it took him to realize his “growing up experiences” were still playing out in his day-to-day life. 

He didn’t mean story as in “a dramatic testimony.” He meant story as in blueprint. The kind you inherit without realizing you’re living inside it. Young’s work starts with a question most people avoid because it feels too big, too mushy, too unfair: What did you learn about love before you knew you were learning?

For him, the answer begins where everyone’s answer begins: Family. Not in the simplistic blame-your-parents way. More in the you-were-formed-here way. The culture of your home taught you what closeness costs, how conflict gets handled, what emotions are safe to show, which needs get met and which ones get labeled “too much.” Even if you can’t list the lessons, your body remembers them.

“All of us grew up in a family,” Young said, and those early relationships with primary caregivers had “a significant influence on the development of our brain cells and our brain structures.” 

That’s the part people don’t love hearing because it suggests their reactions aren’t random. They’re rehearsed. The brain you’re carrying now, Young says, is the same brain that learned how to interpret tone, read a room, anticipate rejection and stay safe. It “filters all of your present-day experiences,” which means today’s harmless comment can brush against yesterday’s old alarm system. 

Young talks about “family of origin dynamics” as the quiet architecture underneath adult life: birth order, family constellation, the role you slid into and never questioned. Were you the responsible one who kept things moving? The funny one who diffused tension? The peacemaker who learned that other people’s emotions were your job? Those identities can look like virtue from the outside. Inside, they can be cages.

If the kitchen scene is familiar, that’s why. You don’t just “overreact.” You reach for the tools you learned when you were small. Your adult self might be trying to communicate. Your younger self might be trying to avoid consequences.

So where do you even start without turning your life into a never-ending autopsy?

Young doesn’t tell people to force a full narrative out of their brain. He’s realistic about memory: most people don’t have a clean timeline, and they don’t need one. What they have are oddly specific scenes that float up without permission. A look on a parent’s face. A sentence that lodged in the chest. A hallway, a car ride, a tone.

“All of us have fragments of memories,” he said. “We may not have the whole memory … but all of us remember snippets.” 

The temptation is to treat those fragments like problems to solve or evidence to prosecute. Young suggests a different posture: hospitality.

“What if you treated that memory … as a guest at your dinner table and welcomed it with a posture of hospitality?” he asked. 

Hospitality does not mean romanticizing the past. It means getting curious about why a particular moment still has access to your nervous system.

That curiosity becomes even more useful when it’s shared, which is where Young gets direct: people aren’t built to do this alone. Not because everyone needs a therapist on speed dial, but because self-understanding has blind spots. You can’t always see your own patterns while you’re living inside them.

“We need one another to see ourselves well,” Young said. “I need you to see me in the context of my stories and to name me in those contexts because I can’t do that by myself.” 

It’s one thing to say, “Yeah, my childhood was complicated.” It’s another to have someone reflect what they see in you with care, to put language to the thing you’ve been circling for years but can’t quite say without feeling dramatic. Young calls that kind of presence a form of kindness, though he’s quick to separate it from being nice.

“And by kindness, I don’t mean niceness,” he said. “I mean the willingness to speak what I observe.” 

Young describes what happens when you start paying attention to your knee-jerk responses: fear surfaces, grief surfaces, anger surfaces. Your nervous system does not always applaud self-awareness.

His advice is not to treat that response as a sign you’re failing. It’s a sign you’re getting close, so follow it with curiosity rather than force.

“Go with those emotions,” he said. “Welcome them with a posture of what do you need me to know, fear? Or what do you need me to know, sadness?” 

He also gives permission that feels almost subversive in a culture that wants growth to look like productivity: go slowly. The body keeps score, and rushing tends to harden people instead of healing them.

“You can go at the pace that is right for your body,” Young said. 

The goal isn’t to become someone who never gets triggered again. It’s to become someone who can recognize what’s happening, choose a different response and tell the truth about what’s underneath without drowning in it.

“This is not a task to complete,” he said. “It’s a process to experience.” 

One of the more surprising implications of that process is what it does to your relationships. The more you understand your story, the more freedom you gain in the present, and freedom changes the system. You stop playing the old role. You set boundaries you didn’t know you were allowed to set. You speak up sooner. You don’t perform the same version of yourself to keep everyone comfortable.

“To the degree that I understand more about my family of origin, I am going to be able to experience new levels of freedom in my adult relationships,” Young said, acknowledging that kind of change can create “disharmony.” 

Once you’re honest about your story, you eventually run into the parts that feel unfair. The seasons you didn’t choose. The prayers that weren’t answered the way you wanted. The moment you look back on and think, If God was there, why did it feel like I was alone?

Young doesn’t treat that tension as a faith crisis to avoid. He treats it as a relationship issue to bring into the open, with specificity.

“Nobody is angry in abstraction,” he said. “We are angry about moments. So the question is, God, could we have a conversation about my disappointment in you in this particular moment or season of my life?”

In a way, that’s the heart of what Young is after. Not a version of you who has no past or triggers or pain; but a version of you who can live in the present without being ruled by what happened before, who can tell the truth about your story without turning it into your identity.