Are you trying to move forward in life but it seems like your past is holding you back? Or maybe your childhood had many traumatic events that you've masked all your life and now it's effecting your adulthood. If so I have an encouraging message for you!
Let's begin with unpacking. It's hard to unpack the past and dissect what seems to be every little detail of the past in order to understand and figure out why its so hard for you to forgive. Or why you're so on the fence about every little thing. I mean all the way down to why you simply can't find it in yourself to trust anyone. We have a way of dealing with hurt and pain, but what if I told you that many of the ways we deal with our hurt is toxic. What if I told you that ignoring the words and actions that shifted your perspective on life and even yourself is causing you more damage for your future than it did in your past. We all know the saying "hurt people, hurt people" right? Well what do you do when you continuously find yourself in a rut? You find that you ruin relationships and friendships and you don't know why. You think you've healed from your pain and trauma because you're in your twenties, thirties, or even forties and well you probably think you've outgrown your past and everything that came with it. That's not always the case. Just because you don't outwardly react to things that trigger you like how a child would doesn't mean that you've outgrew what has caused you confusion and hurt. You still react but just in a different manner. You may always say negative things, you may always talk about people, you overly joke, you seek attention and validation...there's so many ways and yet you don't see it because you've masked it all your whole life.
We don't often realize that our past is still holding on to us until we're in a place where we want more for ourselves, someone we love outgrows us, or we simply see that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again and we end up being tired. In order to move forward we have to do some unpacking. We have to go back to the root of what has held us in our past. We have to uproot all of the negative events, the childhood, the people. We have to go back to the beginning. We can't expect to have healthy relationships with people if we are on the fence about everything, if we can't trust anyone, and if we're always negative.
Lets use this example...so lets say growing up all you heard was that you weren't good enough. You grew up to believe that you weren't good enough. Now you're an adult and you've built friendships but you're super insecure because you were always told your weren't good enough. You're easily triggered. You begin to seek validation from those around you to validate your abilities as a person. You may say you don't care but really you do. You dwell on it and it begins to frustrate those around you because you're overly insecure. You finally get to a place where you want change, you want to confident in yourself without the validation of others. You never understood why you acted this way until possibly someone has asked "what makes you seek other's validation and opinion?" That's most likely where you received your revelation and you begin to think about where the trigger for this comes from. Realizing something in order to understand where your triggers come from had you to unpack your past.
In order to be healthy and happy in our futures as we all want to be, you have to make peace with your past. Unpack and uproot everything that is holding you back and weighing you down. You'll begin to answer a lot of unanswered questions about yourself. You'll learn so much about yourself.
My prayer today is that we all get to a place where we begin to make peace with our past so that our future is peaceful. I pray that on this journey we learn so much about ourselves and make the necessary changes needed in order for our futures to be happy and for us to be healthy and maintain healthy relationships with others. I pray that we don't let fear keep us from uprooting the things that are keeping us in bondage to our past. I pray that we find the boldness and courage to address the necessary and find peace.
With love,
-Yours Truly, Eb