How do we move on from the past, from painful, sometimes traumatic experiences? We run away from them so much, we close them in airtight boxes inside us, we lock them well and we cover ourselves with glass. We need to pass through this stage, when we freeze a little the pain we feel, to find the strength to move on, to survive in the end. How many times do we not see that inner revolt, emotional frost and the fact that we have gone through events without dissecting, digesting or understanding them, help us in the short and medium term to move forward? Whenever a painful event takes place in our life, so that we do not fall into despair, we petrified and we believe for many years that we are strong. But that box well locked in our soul, in the depths, cannot remain there forever.

When the struggle ends, when the ice begins to melt because we have decided to stop running like crazy, then the pain begins to surface. It is so hard to allow ourselves to feel it, to be sad and to feel literally how it still hurts, how we are hurt and that the wound still bleeds inside us. If we remember the people who hurt us, now all of a sudden we don’t seem to feel anger and revolt, but slowly the disappointment, the grief, the deep sadness that we hurt each other, that maybe everything could had another course. We become aware for the first time of the nonsense of what happened, we begin to understand the dynamics between us, the motives behind our actions. We are no longer the same, we have changed so much. It’s as if we didn’t want to stop at that destination, but to follow a linear path, to move towards something better for us. But we forget that those experiences made sense, built us and taught us. Until we find a meaning, we have to go through the turmoil of the feeling of the absurd, to let that dumb pain come to the surface for months or years.

Let’s be gentle with ourselves and with it, let’s allow ourselves to live it in depth and be truly convinced that this is the harsh way to heal our souls. There is no other, there are no shortcuts to help us bypass this pain and disappointment, no matter how hard we try to lie that we get over it, to minimize it, to repress it in the depths of our psyche. It is there and the more we ignore it, the more it will stop us to fully enjoy the present and life. The unfinished business with the past is repeated and appears in our life in other forms or in other relationships, until our psyche has completed this cycle and extracted a meaning for our existence. Without giving meaning to this experience and without acceptance, we believe in vain that we have healed and that we are open to ourselves, to other people.

Without understanding that this pain is more about ourselves, that we are talking about the disappointment of ourselves and how we have erroneously invested trust in a person, or having generated a dysfunctional dynamic, we will not be able to forgive. And why would forgiveness be important? Do we need to forgive others and ourselves in order to move on? As long as we are already at a distance, as long as they are no longer part of our lives, what would forgiveness help us or them with? Many times it seems useful to us to have resentment, we believe that hatred is the energy that makes us move forward, to continue on our way and that without it we would be a little deprived of that engine that would take us further.

We don’t even see the point in forgiving and closing this loop, in the absence of the possibility of transparent and open communication. In what way does accepting, understanding and finally forgiving helps us close this experience and has a repairing role? When we forgive, we release the psychic energy that we can invest in other directions in a genuine way. The past does not keep us stuck, we do not make everything reactively, but we begin to grow in the true direction. Our landmarks are no longer referenced by the past. And above all, we accept that we are all wrong and have our own guilt and responsibility, we see ourselves and others more human. Our unrealistic expectations are adjusted and allow us to enjoy the present. We see so many joys that we were not aware of and start to really value life. Forgiveness is the greatest gift we can give ourselves in the first place. It’s as if we open a wound and let everything that has accumulated there drain, as if we release the poison that risks intoxicating us.

But acceptance and forgiveness cannot go beyond the period of pain that we need to feel genuinely. Let ourselves be vulnerable, accept that we may have been hurt and that we have invested feelings. The more narcissistic a wound is and the more it touches the Ego, the harder it heals and the more it generates anger and revolt reactions. When we understand that others have hurt us in our Ego, that they have touched exactly those vulnerable areas that we have openly shown to them, we begin to see that we are strong. We are strong because even though we have been exposed, we have been hurt, we can continue and we can regenerate, we can understand much more about ourselves. People will disappoint us, but they also have the power to heal us and we need people in our lives.