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I have recently realized the past isn’t set in stone. Much of it isn’t even real. And we can control it.
During the recent very challenging period of my life I was shocked when the hurts I was suffering in the present took me back to old traumas I thought I’d moved beyond. I was staggered and incredibly angry. Are you kidding? After all this time, all the counseling, all the processing, my father, decades dead, still had that much power in my life? Angrily, resentfully even, I leaned into working, once again, to heal those old wounds.
Now, after a year of therapy, tears, facing deep primal fears and meeting my fuller self, I am finally free.
I realized I’d built my own self-identity on my past. I saw myself as a victim… and a survivor. As someone harmed but strong enough to escape. For years I’d felt my hatred and anger toward my father was a sign of strength, even though part of me always recognized the ever-present love underneath.
Now I see that those old experiences I allowed to define me aren’t even true. It’s not that they didn’t happen, that there wasn’t abuse. It happened. It’s just that as I grow I’m finding that even my past can evolve.
I’m not talking about magical thinking or denial of events that took place. I’m talking about releasing old perceptions and the old need to view those events through a hard, narrow lens.
The real truth is I can’t know what was going on with my dad to cause him to do what he did. I can’t know the terrible difficulties my mom faced trying to cope with all of it.
I do know that along with the sickness there was a lot of love in my family and a lot of fun. There was also a lot of good parenting in the mix.
In the grand scheme of things maybe all these events, dark and bright, this crazy combination of experiences, is exactly what I needed to do my best with this life. I gained a resiliency that has served me well this entire life, never more so than over these past sixteen months.
But now, going forward I am going to harness it differently. Up until now I’ve viewed myself as a tough survivor, a scrapper, someone who could fight my way through. That, I think, has set my course and generated a lot of fights.
The other day I read a piece by Mark Nemo that got me thinking, or I should say rethinking. Nemo explained that with miraculous breakthroughs in medicine it is now possible to operate on unborn children in utero. Also miraculous is that those procedures leave no scars as the infant grows. At our deepest level our repairs can become so much a part of who we are that they leave no scars.
In many ways our inner selves are always in utero, always growing, fluid. It is always in our power to treat, repair, heal and give birth to our perfect unscarred selves.
I’ve realized that staying bound to my old perspectives on my past, holding rigid memories, was limiting me, keeping me in a certain mold. And so I’m choosing to lower my fists, drop the fight and instead of fighting my way through life I intend to love my way through. As part of that, at nearly fifty years old, I am choosing to have a perfect childhood. I am birthing my past and my future simultaneously.
During the recent very challenging period of my life I was shocked when the hurts I was suffering in the present took me back to old traumas I thought I’d moved beyond. I was staggered and incredibly angry. Are you kidding? After all this time, all the counseling, all the processing, my father, decades dead, still had that much power in my life? Angrily, resentfully even, I leaned into working, once again, to heal those old wounds.
Now, after a year of therapy, tears, facing deep primal fears and meeting my fuller self, I am finally free.
I realized I’d built my own self-identity on my past. I saw myself as a victim… and a survivor. As someone harmed but strong enough to escape. For years I’d felt my hatred and anger toward my father was a sign of strength, even though part of me always recognized the ever-present love underneath.
Now I see that those old experiences I allowed to define me aren’t even true. It’s not that they didn’t happen, that there wasn’t abuse. It happened. It’s just that as I grow I’m finding that even my past can evolve.
I’m not talking about magical thinking or denial of events that took place. I’m talking about releasing old perceptions and the old need to view those events through a hard, narrow lens.
The real truth is I can’t know what was going on with my dad to cause him to do what he did. I can’t know the terrible difficulties my mom faced trying to cope with all of it.
I do know that along with the sickness there was a lot of love in my family and a lot of fun. There was also a lot of good parenting in the mix.
In the grand scheme of things maybe all these events, dark and bright, this crazy combination of experiences, is exactly what I needed to do my best with this life. I gained a resiliency that has served me well this entire life, never more so than over these past sixteen months.
But now, going forward I am going to harness it differently. Up until now I’ve viewed myself as a tough survivor, a scrapper, someone who could fight my way through. That, I think, has set my course and generated a lot of fights.
The other day I read a piece by Mark Nemo that got me thinking, or I should say rethinking. Nemo explained that with miraculous breakthroughs in medicine it is now possible to operate on unborn children in utero. Also miraculous is that those procedures leave no scars as the infant grows. At our deepest level our repairs can become so much a part of who we are that they leave no scars.
In many ways our inner selves are always in utero, always growing, fluid. It is always in our power to treat, repair, heal and give birth to our perfect unscarred selves.
I’ve realized that staying bound to my old perspectives on my past, holding rigid memories, was limiting me, keeping me in a certain mold. And so I’m choosing to lower my fists, drop the fight and instead of fighting my way through life I intend to love my way through. As part of that, at nearly fifty years old, I am choosing to have a perfect childhood. I am birthing my past and my future simultaneously.
By Cylvia Hayes
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This post is the cat’s meow….very few get what real healing is about. I don’t think I have read a more profound piece of how our perceptions of the events in our life shape our life…..changing our perceptions is such a simple thing to do…..but oh, so elusive in the human experience. The amazing truth is….when we heal our piece of the experience the rest seems to heal….all the events and people in these events… also experience a healing….this is the evolution of the spirit…..it seems to all move into a place of “mind over matter”. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.
Peace be with you, my friend.
Doll