Twine Theory: When the Past Becomes a Knot

“Sometimes healing isn’t about untangling the past.
Sometimes it’s about putting the thread down.”

One of the biggest mistakes we make when trying to understand pain is believing that if we just think about it long enough, analyse it deeply enough, or revisit it often enough, we will eventually find the answer.

The truth is that the mind doesn’t always work like that.

Sometimes the more we pull on the thread, the tighter the knot becomes.

Twine Theory is the way I describe this idea. Imagine your memories as a ball of twine. When something painful happens in life, it creates a knot somewhere in that thread. Naturally we want to untangle it. We want to understand why it happened, who was responsible, what we should have done differently, and how it all connects.

At first that process can feel useful. You pull a little thread and something makes sense. Another piece comes loose and you gain a bit of clarity. But the deeper you go, the more complicated it can become. Each time you move the thread, the pattern changes. The knots tighten in new places. Eventually you realise that what you are holding may not have a clear beginning or end at all.

Memory is not a perfect record of events. It’s a reconstruction. It is shaped by emotion, bias, missing information and the simple fact that the other people involved in our stories are not present to give their version of events.

In Twine Theory I describe this as the courtroom of memory.

When we replay the past in our minds, we become the judge, the jury, the prosecutor and the defendant all at once. But the witnesses are missing. The evidence is incomplete. The context that shaped other people’s behaviour may never be known.

If this were a real courtroom, the case would be dismissed.

But in our minds we keep retrying it.

Again and again.

“The mind can spend years prosecuting a case that can never be proven.”

This is where many people become trapped. Instead of carrying the past, they become bound by it. The difference matters. Carrying something means acknowledging that it happened and that it shaped you. Being bound by it means your life becomes an endless attempt to untangle a story that may never fully make sense.

Twine Theory suggests a different approach.

Learn the lesson.

Then drop the thread.

This doesn’t mean pretending the trauma never happened. It doesn’t dismiss pain or invalidate someone’s experience. It simply recognises that some questions about the past cannot be answered with certainty, and continuing to chase those answers can keep us stuck.

At some point the healthiest decision is to stop litigating the past and begin building the future.

This idea sits comfortably alongside many modern therapies that focus less on analysing the past and more on changing how we relate to our thoughts in the present. But the metaphor of the twine explains something simple that many people recognise immediately.

Sometimes the problem isn’t the knot itself.

It’s that we keep pulling on it.

Street Therapy carries a similar philosophy. Life burns all of us at times. We learn from those burns. The scars remain as lessons, but we don’t have to keep reopening the wound to prove the pain was real.

“The lesson is not in the knot.
The lesson is knowing when to stop pulling the thread.”

Healing doesn’t always come from understanding everything that happened.

Sometimes healing comes from deciding that the past has taken enough of your life already, and that the rest of your story deserves your attention instead.

This post is based on a published concept by Icarus (Dean Cooper), available on the Open Science Framework. Read the full paper on the OSF.