When Old Wounds Still Speak

When the pain of your past won’t let you go, how do you manage? Do you just stand by and let the time pass by? – you’re told that time fixes everything, right? Well that’s part of the truth – but it leaves out the most important part – acceptance. What if you’re fine for a while and we feel like you’re making good progress in life, only to be shot down once again by your memories and thoughts of the past? We need to learn how to beat those thoughts.

The past is what it is – unchangeable. The sooner you accept this, the quicker you will experience a sense of freedom that says the past cannot dictate your future. Whilst the past may have hurt, the pain has passed so you need to learn to let go of it. The truth is, thoughts of the past will always surround you in day to day life – that’s how you measure your progress (what you once were compared to what you are now). If you can be better today than you were yesterday and better tomorrow than you are today that’s a valid metric for measuring your progress and our growth.

Whilst the past may have hurt, the pain has passed so we need to learn to let go of it.

Don’t instantly think that your thoughts of your past struggles should not exist. It’s natural and it’s an important part of life to understand your struggles – it makes the triumphs worth so much more – it gives you more fulfilment when you achieve.

The thoughts of your struggles make the triumphs worth so much more and gives you more fulfilment when you achieve.

The thing that you need to change is not the volume of thoughts that you have of the past, but the way you attach your past to your present. The meanings and connotations you attach to your past are so important.

The thing that you need to change is not the volume of thoughts that you have of the past, but the way you attach your past to your present.

It’s well and good to make progress, but for sustainability sake you need to keep a couple of things in mind. The key idea you must train yourself into believing (and this takes effort and consistency) is that you have learned lessons from your past that have shaped you into a better person to attack your present – to strive for more – and without these losses, failures or mistakes you would never have been as good as you are right now.

You have learned lessons from your past that have shaped you into a better person to attack your present – to strive for more – and without these losses, failures or mistakes you would never have been as good as you are right now.

You have to trust that somewhere down the track the dots will line up, even if you can’t see it right now. Steve Jobs said, “We can only connect the dots looking backwards, so we need to place trust and faith in something, whether that be God or the belief that all things come full circle.” And it actually made quite a bit of sense…

You need to place your trust in the lessons of the past you have learned – you need to believe that every good thing you have now would never have been possible without those lessons – your biggest strength is in identifying and accepting your weaknesses so you can work on them and build on them.

So, remembering old wounds should be less about the pain and more about the lesson. You should be excited that you have unrolled one more stone in your life that has shown you something you can work on to be a better person.

There will be a constant unravelling of stones in life and you have to be willing to wear your mistakes on your sleeve and take ownership of them. The most important thing to avoid is continuing to make the same mistakes and still expecting results. The analogy I use is this – you’ve just unravelled a heavy stone to reveal something about yourself, but by making the same mistake again (or ignoring it because you’re scared to face it) you are just covering back up that revelation and you’re making more work for yourself – you have to move the stone away again to reveal what you missed the first time.

So you don’t have to avoid your past wounds, you just have to use them to your advantage – make your weaknesses into your strengths.

When old wounds still speak, be brave and take ownership.

Always,

~ Adam, 2019

We have learned lessons from our past that have shaped us into a better person to attack our present – to strive for more – and without these losses, failures or mistakes we would never have been as good as we are right now. ~The Mind Connectory

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