It is difficult to know who you are, where you should go, or how you should get there, unless you know where you came from. The Past Authoring Program has therefore been designed to help you write a structured autobiography. The program will help you:

• Divide your life into seven different time periods or epochs.
• Identify the most significant events that occurred during each epoch.
• Describe how each of those experiences has shaped who you are today.

It would be particularly useful to complete the Past Authoring Program if you have memories that are more than about eighteen months old that still intrude upon your thoughts, or that still evoke emotion such as fear, regret, shame or confusion. If this is happening, it means that your mind has not yet been able to fully process your past experiences, and that the brain areas associated with negative emotion still regard the past events in question as unresolved threats. This is not good, because your brain reacts to unresolved threats with emergency physiological preparation, including the production of stress hormones such as cortisol that can be very toxic when chronically elevated.

The Past Authoring program is the most difficult and time-consuming of all the programs. We recommend that you complete it after the Present and Future Authoring programs, once you have become accustomed to the process.