The life inventory gives your unconscious the material to work on; enabling your unconscious mind to learn what it needs to learn from the past to enable you to move on in your life (if some or all of your current issues are rooted in the past).

If there is no substantial link into the past the inventory still allows you to see the bigger picture, the repeating patterns, the common thread. It allows you at least the opportunity, both consciously and unconsciously, to take stock, gain insight and learn what you need to learn from the past to enable you to let the past go.

It also enables you to see things as they really were, rather than how you might imagine the past to have been. That's one of the reasons why bullet points have been used in the template. When you use bullet points you tend to use less words to convey what you remember, you tend to be more objective.

The inventory approach is also arguably the best method of facilitating reverse "memory reconstruction" i.e. documenting the perceptions that you remember, remembering at all times that human memory is not an absolute record of past events, it is simply a collection of inter-related thoughts. Putting those thoughts down onto paper allows you to make sense of those thoughts and begin to realise that you can see any event from any number of perspectives.