The Past Is Not Always Behind
How many times have you found yourself reminiscing about what it was or could have been? Or perhaps you find yourself behaving and saying something you did not mean but could not pause to think better of before it came out? Or perhaps you just reflect about how your past tends to still show up in your present? It’s easy to spiral into self-judgment, thinking, “Why didn’t I say it or did it better?” I know that instant feeling of regret of the —sharp, unfiltered, familiar words that just came out of your mouth. But guess what—snapping doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s not about weakness or failure. It is very normal to find yourself reacting due to feeling overstimulated, being tired, or perhaps you have been ignoring those parts of you that have been asking you to pause. It is also normal to find yourself replicating an action from the past or a behavior you did not like that you saw on someone else, usually your parents, being acted by your current self. We have the tendency to mimic, consciously or not, a lot of things from our past if we have not taken the time to heal it.
I understand how uncomfortable and painful it is when these unhealed wounds are triggered. Sometimes they show up in the way we react, and in the words that leave our mouth before we can stop them. They show up in the way we hold back love or push it away.
Once we become parents, we may say to ourselves “I don’t want to be like my parents” not because they were bad parents, but because we don’t want to pass down what was passed to us--the pain, the neglect, the judgement, the hurt; or because we want to make sure we give to our children what we didn’t receive—the love, the hugs, the understanding, the unconditional love, the compassion.
To start a healing journey, you need awareness, then willingness to go deep. Dr. Gabor Maté says, trauma isn’t what happened to you, it’s what happens inside of you as a result. And unless you heal it, it doesn’t stay in the past. It becomes your present. It becomes your child’s future.
Becoming more aware of your past will help you be more grounded, open, and conscious parent. I always tell my clients the beauty of our healing is that when we heal, everyone around us heals too because they start seeing and feeling a more loving, grounded, compassionate, less reactive person. Because when you start listening to your inner parts about what you need, about what you are feeling, then you are more aware of your body and you are able to pause and choose a different response while giving yourself grace and compassion. I have been more aware of my inner work since I became a mother. I learn that our children don’t inherit our words, they inherit our wounds. I noticed that I was not raising my babygirl—I was raising myself.
I became wholeheartedly aware of my wounds and open- heartedly willing to do the work. Because of the inner work I have done and continue to do, I started looking at my big reactions, not with fear, but with understanding. I started choosing differently. Because healing doesn’t happen when you run from your past. It happens when you face it with grace and compassion.
And that’s when I realized…
The past is not always behind you.