Step 1:Reconnection

In order to conquer a future, and live in the present, you must understand, accept, and connect to your past. Connection is optional, as one may have too hard of a past to want to connect, or one too full of adversity. Part of being reborn, spiritually, is becoming a new creature in Christ. And it's not easy. However, one thing that we all must eventually do is reconnect, whether we want to or not.
When someone goes through something horrific, it leaves an imprint. It leaves something behind on them. It leaves a kind of marker on them that says "I've gone through something, and I'm" either a survivor or a victim.
It is much better to be a survivor.
Your past is called a past because it has shaped you, in some measure. The word "past" probably has a bunch of root meanings that I won't even bother to look up, because the word is only a part of why I'm writing this.
You must reconnect with the injury of the past. Whether it's a bad argument when you were 7, or whether it was a fall off of a toy slide when you were 3 that you barely remember, or if it was a particularly horrible breakup when you had just started dating, whenever that was. You need to reconnect to it and figure out how to break the emotional chains that you've connected to it.
That imprint I talked about a few paragraphs ago? It creates a chain. An emotional and chemical chain inside your mind. A pathway.
Think of a mouse, or a rat, or a spider, or a cute little kitten, or what have you. It's wandering around inside your mind. It's your thoughts. And it's wandering around inside, aimlessly, as we so often think aimlessly. When it approaches a pathway, the creature, almost against your will, climbs into the pathway and follows it. The entire thing happens in under a few seconds. Sometimes under a single second. Once it's in the pathway, you've been triggered, and suddenly you find memories of an event that created the pathway.
In order to break this pathway, you must re-forge it. A pathway is made just as digging a trench is made. By doing any kind of verb, it creates the pathway, and the more often you do the same action and create the same pathway, it becomes more entrenched inside your mind.
So how do you re-forge a pathway? Most often, the pathway you created also has a "time value" attached to it. Say at 7 AM, you put a ring on your right ring finger and you start to rub it with your thumb. That is a pathway. That is a habit. In order to break it, you either have to consciously force your thumb not to rub the ring, or you have to not touch the ring at all.
You must actively go against the former pathway by replacing it with something else.
What does this have to do with the past? Because that pathway is a sign of the past. That's a remnant, just as a scar on your arm or hip or finger(s) is also a remnant.
In order for you to reconnect with the past, you may have to go through some of these pathways and reconstruct them to better suite who you want to become. A college student won't get much done if they have a habit/pathway that says "when I get onto the computer, I must play Starcraft II" or "when I start Chrome I must go to Pinterest".
Eliminate the habits that are holding you back. This is what I mean when I say that you have to reconnect with your past.

This is post 1 of a 10 post series where I ramble about stuff I've learned.