Your past is what forms your preasent,and if you can't fully understand your past,how do you know who you presently are to form any kind of future?*Points*

they are not able to face future

I beleieve one possibility is that some people have had a very difficult past that they have not dealt with, and since you can not truely move on without dealing with your past, they simply cannot let go. Another possibility is that there was some incident that happenened that if they let go they feel they could never recapture, so they hold on to, for instance a past relationship, or someone who passed away. Again that is just my opinion.

Coz past does not "fly past" very easily, does it?

Probably because it's more comfortable than living in their present.

Many have Very Special Past Memories!

We are a culmination of our past experiences. Maybe others can see a common thread of our past and our present behaviors (good and bad). Maybe who we were is exactly who we still are and what you thought was gone is not. Some people say the past is in the past, but those are the people who don't want consequences or face resonsibility for bad decisions. Many people just don't think. If you do things that are 'stupid' and 'irresponsible' repeatedly then you are not a very good person. If you do something and realize the ramafications of it and learn from it, you have just become a better person for it. Saying the past is the past is for ignorant people. Saying that you learned many lessons from your past means that you have some self awareness and are trying to be the best person you can be. q:)

I hold on to alot of things in my past, because i'm not over them, they haven't been spoken about or dealt with properly, when they are, i will forgive/move on/ let go! I think alot of people have similar reasoning. +3

They hold on to the traumatizing stuff so that they can keep an eye out for it in order to keep it from happening again.

It's an issue of self-definition. Specifically, there is no absolute "myself" for anybody, at least not something with a fixed form and substance which one can point to and say "that's who I am". This "groundlessness" of being causes anxiety. Literally, we do not know who we are, and that makes us a little crazy. So, we are very prone... addicted really... to concepts of our identity. "I'm this kind of person, not that kind of person" is the currency that the mind deals with when attempting to get a fix on personal identity. The past is like a huge warehouse of loose parts that can be used to assemble an identity, and that is precisely what the mind does with it... sift through the rubble of past experiences to pick out the parts that it feels most properly represent "me", glue them together into something that looks of a piece, and then smooth over the edges and gaps that occur in that hacking so that it looks like a coherent whole. So, if you try to take away something from the past, and that thing has been welded into the individual's identity, they react as if their very being is being violated -- their survival is at stake. And if there's one thing we're all well equipped for, it's survival.

Because sometimes...what you know, is better than what you don't. Even if it is bad. It is yours!

I don't think that those people are ready to let go of it.

The past is known, the future uncertain. People tend to like what they know yo...