To advance in life is to grow, develop the potential, design personal, professional and social projects and realize them, however, you realize more than once that you are unable to achieve that progress, that the past is still present or that everything is. happening at a very slow pace, despite great efforts. What’s going on?
It is normal for people to look for the causes of stagnation in the external circumstances surrounding the present, so explanations will appear related to environmental deficiencies and be assigned responsibilities, although the impact of these factors should not be underestimated, the fact is that, in essence, progress always depends on ourselves.
- Often we simply don’t move because there’s something in the past that’s strong enough to numb our personal evolution.
- It’s a mistake to think that the past is behind us and no longer counts.
- In fact.
- It is the exact opposite: of At every moment of life.
- The past is the most decisive.
- So it is so important to have a healthy past.
That’s right: the past always happens. In the work we do so effectively in the office today, there is also the child who has learned to earn gold stars for every task performed; in this person who today falls deeply in love, there is also the child who has kept an eye out for his mother’s gestures of approval and disapproval.
We are essentially from the past, although we must act in the present and according to what we imagine will happen in the future, that is why the past is actually that factor that pushes or emerges as an obstacle to advancing in life.
Childhood is the decisive stage of our existence. It is the original moment of our being, the moment when we absorb and face a stance in relation to ourselves and the world. The other moments of life are adaptations and remodels of this past.
There is a saying that “the best gift a human being can give to another is a happy childhood. “Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: the greatest damage to a person’s existence comes from an unhappy childhood. These are wounds that can lead a life to heal, or never be healed.
Everything we have said above does not mean that once the past has passed there is nothing left to do, in fact, each of us can take these experiences and make them a rewarding or limiting factor traumatic pasts, wonderful works of art and thoughts. unforgettable people are born, in addition to a happy childhood.
The past provides a raw material that is essentially immutable, but this raw material, as the name suggests, is only a basic material, which is built with it depends both on the substance itself and on the work of those who model it. .
No one escapes the hard, difficult, or unfair experiences of life, but the difficult, difficult, and unfair experiences of these experiences can be improved or minimized, depending on how the person treats them. Anyway, the worst of all alternatives is to pretend to deny one side, to ignore the pain and act as if nothing had happened.
This denial of the painful past only leads to confusions that are increasingly difficult to resolve, if someone has suffered, for example, the indifference or rejection of their parents and tries to ignore all the pain that this causes them, they will probably become someone of insensitivity. appearance, with difficulty creating intimate bonds with others, but breaking down in tears when seeing an ad.
You will feel a great dissatisfaction with yourself and therefore with the people around you. You’ll probably be too picky and, at the same time, hypersensitive to criticism. You will find it hard to objectively value the value of your shares and, in general, you will feel much better, or much worse than others, never the same.
This set of attitudes and emotions shape a life, in which the predominant note will be conflict and dissatisfaction, however, all this does not necessarily come from the indifference or rejection to which you were subjected when you were a vulnerable child, but from rejection. to revisit these experiences to give them constructive meaning. The refusal to experience any trace of pain that leaves a similar situation.
It is not about needing a graduate degree, a better partner, more obedient children or a more beautiful home, the answer to stagnation is in the past, in these details that we have not finished forging, in those pains that have never healed.
Clearing the past is a task that all of us must undertake at some point in our lives, especially those in which we find that our efforts are not rewarded with encouraging results. Isn’t something wrong? or something deficient. It’s just that we may not have realized that to move forward we need a healthy past.
Images courtesy of Anna Dittman.