A Healthy Past Is Needed To Advance

Advancing in life means growing, developing potential, devising projects (personal, professional and social) and realizing them. However, more than once it is realized that this development does not occur, that the past is still present and that the latter is too slow, despite much effort being invested in it. What happen?

We usually look for the causes of our blockage in external circumstances that affect the present. Therefore, explanations arise which relate to deficits in the environment in which we live and which takes responsibility for our difficulties. Although the impact of these factors should not be underestimated, progress certainly always depends on oneself.

Many times, we simply fail to advance because there is something in the past with enough strength to numb our personal evolution. It is a mistake to think that the past has been left behind and no longer matters. In fact, the opposite occurs: of all times in life, the past is the most decisive.

The past always presents itself …

It’s true: the past always presents itself. In the work we do today so efficiently in the office, there is also the child who learned to receive the golden stars for each finished task. In this person who today falls passionately in love, there is also that little one who paid attention to his mother’s gestures of approval and disapproval.

We are essentially the past, even if we have to act in the present and according to what we imagine will become. The past, therefore, is actually that factor that catapults or hinders our progress in life.

Childhood is the decisive phase of our existence. It is the original time of our being, the period in which we absorb and process a position with respect to ourselves and the world. The other times of life are adaptations and accommodations of this past.

A maxim says that “the best gift a human being can give to another is a happy childhood”. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: the greatest traumas of existence arise from a miserable childhood. They are wounds that can take a lifetime to heal and sometimes never heal.

The above does not mean that once the past has been established, there is nothing more to be done. In reality, each of us can take the experiences we have lived and transform them into an enriching or limiting factor. From traumatic past wonderful works of art and brilliant thoughts were born, as well as from fortunate childhoods people develop “without glory and without infamy”, as they say.

The past provides a raw material which, essentially, is immutable. However, this raw material, as its name indicates, is only a basic material. What is built with it depends on the substance itself and on the work of the modeler.

Learn to purify the past

Nobody runs away from hard, difficult or unfair experiences. However, the harshness, difficulty and injustice of these vicissitudes can be strengthened or reduced, depending on how we proceed. Either way, the worst alternative is to try to hide negative experiences, with the intent of ignoring the pain and pretending that nothing ever happened.

This denial of the painful past only generates confusions that are increasingly difficult to resolve. If someone has experienced, for example, the lack of love or rejection of their parents and tries to ignore all the pain that comes with it, they will probably turn into a seemingly numb person, who is difficult to bond with others, but who bursts into tears when looking at. an advertisement.

She will not feel conformed to herself or to those around her. He is probably too demanding and at the same time hypersensitive to criticism. He will have difficulty evaluating the value of his actions objectively and, in general, he will feel much better or much worse than others, never the same.

This set of attitudes and emotions affect a whole life, in which the predominant note will be conflict and dissatisfaction. However, everything does not come from this disaffection or rejection of which one was a victim as a child, when one was vulnerable, but from refusing to review these experiences to give them a constructive sense.

For this reason, many times things do not go as we hope. It’s not about having a college degree or a better partner, more obedient children or a nicer home. The answer of the block certainly lies in the past, in these loose ties that we don’t fully tie, in these pains that don’t heal.

Clearing the past is a task that all people have to accomplish at some point in their life.  Especially those where we notice that our efforts are not rewarded by encouraging results. It is not about “having something wrong” or “not having something”. Sometimes we don’t realize that a healthy past is needed to advance.

Image courtesy of Anna Dittman