Do you ever get stuck in your past?
I certainly do, and sometimes without even knowing it. Thankfully, over the years, this tendency to get stuck in my past doesn’t happen often. But it has taken practice and an understanding of triggers that can send me there in the first place (and then avoiding or pushing past those triggers).
Sometimes getting stuck in the past means that I think about a specific event and get sad or upset. For example, for a few years after my breakup from my college fiancé, I would get upset and sad whenever I thought about the events surrounding our breakup (and I thought about the a lot). I found out he had lied to me often and even cheated on me during our three-year relationship and I was devastated.
Even as I slowly learned how to accept the reality of the situation, and even as I moved on, the negative feelings associated with that experience didn’t leave me for many years. While I did heal and find happiness in a life with someone new, the scars of that experience remained for a very long time.
But eventually I realized—and it took me years to see this—that the scars ran so deep because I had allowed certain feelings to become engrained into my very identity. After I discovered my ex-fiancé’s deception, it stripped me of my sense of worth. As a sensitive and rather insecure young woman, I had struggled with my confidence and self-worth even before knowing about his infidelity, but after we parted ways, I began to see myself as ugly and unworthy of love. Somewhere deep inside of me, I worried that I was responsible for his behavior. Maybe I wasn’t good enough. Maybe I wasn’t sexy enough. Maybe I wasn’t adventurous enough. Maybe he never really loved me.
So I allowed those feelings to fester in me and they spilled over into my next relationship and even into the way I saw myself. I became depressed, withdrawn, and very doubtful of my abilities to succeed in life in general.
Ultimately, I did not take ownership of my feelings and push myself to look at the situation in a healthy, logical way. I simply wallowed in feelings.
Of course, it sucked that my fiancé was deceptive and that he cheated on me, but that was not my fault. We were both young and we had a lot to learn about being in a relationship and becoming mature adults. This is not an excuse for his behavior, but an acceptance of the fact that he was simply not fully ready to be in a committed relationship.
In the end, his choices did not determine my value as a human being. When I finally came to embrace this truth—after years of secretly feeling ashamed, devalued, and unworthy—it freed me.
As I talked about in a previous post, I never thought the word responsibility could equal freedom, but that is exactly what it means when we start taking responsibility for every single thing in our own lives.
This can related to things other people have done to us—bullied us, cheated on us, backstabbed us—or it can related to things we have done to ourselves—failed on an important exam, let a relationship fall apart, quit a job in an irresponsible way. When things happen to us or because of us, we can either ruminate in negative feelings or we can choose to look at the situation from a realistic perspective and learn valuable lessons we will carry with us into the next chapter of our lives.
I certainly believe in allowing yourself a period of mourning over loss—whatever that loss might be for you—but then it is important to let go and move forward, armed with the knowledge that you can choose how you are going to live your life from this day forward. You can either let that negative experience shrink your sense of self or you can allow that negative experience to be a springboard for learning and growth.
Don’t allow your past to control your future. Don’t let yourself get stuck thinking more about the past than the future. Give yourself grace and understanding for mistakes you made and hurts you experienced, but then turn your sights on the horizon of the future because it is full of possibilities!
