5 Ways To Heal The Wounds Of The Past

We have all felt damaged at some point in our life. No matter how old you are, have you ever experienced some emotional pain and you know what the hurts of the past are. 

It hurt. I get it.

But what you do with that injury is probably more important than the pain itself.

In short, how do you put aside the hurts of the past and move on? Let’s see it.

Blaming others for our pain is what most of us do in the beginning. Someone did something bad to us or offended us in some way that hurt us a lot. We want you to apologize. We want them to recognize that what they did was wrong.

But blaming others for our pain can backfire. The problem with blaming others is that it can often leave you powerless. For example, you confront that person (your boss, your spouse, your parents, your child…), and they say: “No, I did not do it”, or even worse, “so what if I did?”. Then you will accumulate anger, pain and no resolution.

All your feelings are legitimate. It’s important to feel them, allow them to flow, and then move on. Accumulating complaints indefinitely is a bad habit, because it hurts you more than it hurts them.

People who cling to these past hurts often relive the pain over and over again. Sometimes a person can even get to feel “stuck” in this pain, in this guilt.

5 ways to heal the pain of the past

The best way to leave the hurts in the past is to accept that joy and happiness can return to your life. And, for this, you have to make space. If your heart is full of pain, how can you be open to anything new?

Make the decision to let go: learn to let go

Things don’t go away by themselves. You have to commit to “letting it go.” If you don’t make this conscious choice in advance, you could end up self-sabotaging yourself and not letting go of that past pain.

Learning to let go is absolutely essential. What happened must be left behind. Not pretending that it never happened, but learning from it and evolving, but not reliving over and over again what happened. That’s just adding even more fuel to the fire. So what’s the use of continuing to whip each other? Just to make us feel worse.

Express your pain and your responsibility

Saying what pain makes you feel is helpful. And this can be done by talking directly to the other person involved, writing a diary as a vent or writing a letter that you will never send to the sender.

But simply expressing it makes you free yourself from the deepest part of you. It will relieve you. And it will help you to know yourself more:

• What can you do differently next time?
• Are you an active participant in your own life, or just a hopeless victim?

• Are you going to let your pain become your identity? Or are you someone deeper and more complex than that?

Despite the positive aspects of expressing pain, it is good to express it in its proper measure. Talk it over with close people or professionals, but don’t drag it out for a long time, you will only be reliving the same thing over and over again. Talking about it for a long time will make the wound stay open longer than necessary.

Stop being the victim and blame others

Being a victim makes you feel good, it’s like being on the winning team against the world. But you know what? The world, for the most part, does not care. Yes, you are special. Yes, your feelings are important. But do not confuse yourself with “your feelings” to “your feelings must override all things, and nothing else matters. “

Your feelings are just one part of this great thing we call life, which is complex and messy.

You need to take responsibility for your own happiness  and not put so much power in someone else’s hands. Why let the person who hurt you in the past have such power, right here, right now?

Waiting for another person to apologize to you is to leave the power of your happiness in their hands and our happiness only depends on us. This fact is sometimes difficult to understand, although the power of forgiveness is very powerful, we should not condition our happiness on asking for forgiveness.

Focus on the present and joy

Now is the time to let go of what hurts you. How the Beatles said: “let it be” (let it be). Let go of the past and stop reliving it. It can’t be undone, so all you can do is make today the best day of your life.

When you focus on the here and now, you have less time to think about the past. When memories of the past slip into your consciousness (since they are “bound” to appear from time to time), identify them, observe them but do not judge them. Then focus again on the present.

Remember, if we squeeze our brains and lives with feelings of pain, there is little room for something positive. It is a decision you must make: welcome joy back into your life.

Forgive them

We may not have to forget someone else’s bad behavior, but almost everyone deserves our forgiveness. Sometimes, we get stuck between our pain and our stubbornness, and we can’t even imagine that “I forgive you.” We mistakenly believe that forgiveness is synonymous with “I agree with what you did.” Nothing is further from reality.

The reality is that forgiveness says: “I don’t agree with what you did, but I don’t want to harbor a grudge in my heart against you. I release you from my anger “

Forgiveness is not a sign of weakness. It is wanting to move on in life and feel the joy in it again. I can’t do that completely until I let go of the pain. “

Forgiveness is a way of empathizing with the other person and trying to see things from their point of view.

And forgiving yourself can be an important part of this step, just as we can sometimes blame ourselves for the situation or harm. If you cannot forgive yourself, how will you be able to live in peace and happiness in the future?

Wrong thinking

Many people have a distorted thought about the hurts of the past: “if I stop thinking about it I am downplaying it, and what happened was very important . ” This can be translated into the belief that we must give relevance to something negative that happened, because being negative we cannot ignore it. We think we should rejoice in pain and crush another person in case we think they have to ask us for forgiveness.

However, this thought will only leave us anchored in the past. No matter how negative what happened, if we get stuck in that event, it will only cause us pain. If someone does not ask us for the forgiveness we want, we should not expect that forgiveness to be happy. Nor would it be appropriate to give it more importance than it deserves. Life continues to happen day by day, everything changes, and new challenges are always presented to us. What happened can no longer be modified, so let’s accept what happened, learn from it, and look ahead.

It is difficult, but it so relieves, that it compensates

I know this is difficult, incredibly difficult to let go of one’s pain and past hurts. If we have stayed in it for a long time, it feels like an old friend to pain. The pain is justified and it would be sacrilege to let it go.

But nobody’s life should be defined by their pain. It is unhealthy that it adds to our stress, affects our ability to focus, study, and work, and affects every other relationship we have. Every day that you choose to hold onto pain is another day when everyone around you has to live with that decision and feel its consequences.

Let go of the pain. Do something different today and happiness will come again in your life.