As a people, we were wired to carefully manage physical hurdles. For example, if whilst walking you are faced with a huge stone that hinders your pathway, you either attempt to remove it or seek an alternative route to reach your destination. Flipping the coin on the emotional side is usually a huge challenge for many.
Based on my psycho-social experience as well as working with the IWRN’s team, many clients, particularly women, continue to carry mountainous emotional burdens much of which occurred in their earlier years. People create psychological pockets where they continue to store unnecessary waste from the past...a lot of which relates to terminated relationships. Research shows that such behavioural patterns are high contributors towards lifestyle diseases as well as an extremely stressful disposition. Today’s piece focuses on treating your past as the past.
Your past kills
Life is fluid and therefore what has occurred in one’s past should be treated with as experiences and lessons learnt. Thinking about pleasant and unpleasant things that have occurred in your past is not a particularly bad thing until the unpleasant pieces begin to clog the gateway to your present and future destinations. There is a clear difference between thinking about the past and living in it; if you choose to live in it then you may be hinging around some levels of insanity.
Many of our IWRN clients would often ponder “I wish those days of the 1990s would come back.” Our response is NO, they can’t as life does not evolve that way. Do you find yourself reminiscing on a former and probably painful relationship? Are you upset with your current position in life? Are you holding grudges against others and are unwilling to forgive? Are you overpowered by high levels of fear that are hindering your progress? These are some of the many questions which suggest that your past is negatively impacting your present and even future.
Bemoaning your past strips you of the opportunity to bask in the present because your past becomes a permanent stumbling block. Logically the past would not and can never return; things happened, others wronged and/or hurt you, but thankfully you are breathing healthily in the present and so you have a responsibility to maximize every bit of what is offered to create your sunshine! Publicising your past on social media platforms only pushes you further into a dark hole as such approach demonstrates your weakness and inability to face those challenges head-on. Social media is just that—it’s a means to exchange and a mechanism to share views, not to vent.
Letting go the past, embrace the present
Letting go the past can be emotionally challenging and difficult for many. The beginning of healing by acknowledging the challenges of the past as unresolved past experiences can at times produce lasting psychological and physical effects. Stop trying to pretend you aren’t affected by past events.
You can’t get over the past until you accept what has occurred. Understand that you cannot change what happened, but you can control how you move on. Many continuously maintain an angry disposition which causes more hurt than healing. When you experience anger about your past, try to remind yourself that holding on to these negative emotions destroys your health knowingly or unknowingly. Try new things aimed at improving your mental and physical health; meditation, yoga, and physical exercises are excellent healing mechanisms. Journalling is also an excellent approach to maintaining a daily account of your life’s event, it also helps you as an individual and creates a link between the how and why things happened. Start new people engagements, new relationships and in so doing, avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Avoid personalising past occurrences—instead, separate the challenges from your personal identity. One of the greatest mistakes made is clouding your past situations with subjectivity, omitting salient points in the commentaries. Remember if two people were involved, both would have contributed to the outcome, both may have been right and wrong in different instances. Pull the lessons out of the situation and learn as much as possible from what occurred. Start adapting positively to your renewed environment and avoid exporting negativity into that space. Stop dwelling and fighting with what happened…that is a recipe for self-destruction. Violation of trust is another major concern when creating new relationships—you can’t know ahead of time whether or not someone can be trusted or not based on previous experiences, just be open and trusting towards that person and observe their responses and body language with greater caution. Failure and fear are two major deterrents in moving on. Keep in mind that failure is part of the path to success, whilst fear, which is also aligned with weakness, should be eradicated at all cost.
Adriana Sandrine Isaac-Rattan is president of the International Women’s Resource Network.