Forgive Your Past Self

The weight of a painful childhood can be a lot to bear. Its consequences seep into so much of our lives. It never feels right that the pain we experienced at the hand of another impacts us so deeply and now we must do work of healing, grieving and recovering ourselves so we can thrive.

This is how we internalize this death mother energy, where Athena cursed Medusa for being raped and cast her out into a cave where she was feared for turning others into stone. Her rapist went free. Medusa punished for her trauma.

This happens every day in our inner worlds. We punish ourselves for what has happened in the past. We continue to treat ourselves this way because, especially as children, we learn how to mother ourselves through the way we were treated.

We adapt, becoming more like Athena, safe in the patriarchal world that perpetuates abuse while denying it and gaslighting people, even using spirituality to shame victims of trauma into thinking it was somehow their fault or projection.

Spiritualized truths do not fly in the face of recovering from any kind of trauma.  This is not what healing our relationship to our soul is about.

Trauma breaks our relationship with a spiritual source of love and spiritual gaslighting is unhelpful to say the least.

Moving from a painful past to a life affirming future means we have to do this heart work and it’s normal to resent it. It’s a bum deal.  I know. We can’t afford to get stuck here, resenting that have to do this work to grow ourselves up so we can thrive. It keeps us stuck.

Individuation has a cost…releasing the burden of the past, our unconscious loyalty to it and forgiving ourselves for what we could not and will never be able to fix.

This is grief.

Parenting ourselves is now our responsibility and it requires facing what we lack inside, the judgement we have of our own needs and the fear we have that we will turn to stone if we enter that cave in our hearts where our most tender, wounded self lives.

It’s common to have resentment about it, anger that this heart break happened and now we are here, needing to work on it.

Resentment points us to where we require self-forgiveness.

If we look at the root of this, it almost always can be traced back to love that was not available and our young self is remaining loyal to that moment waiting for something different to happen.

We must forgive ourselves for staying loyal, for waiting and wanting.

We must forgive ourselves for being human in this crazy world if we ever want to get on with this wild business of being happy and free.

If we want to thrive, we must face what we had to survive and distill from it the power and strength that preserved us and let go of our wishes that it was different.

It isn’t fair that there was no love.

It isn’t fair that many of us experience trauma.

It isn’t fair that we didn’t get want we needed.

It hurts like hell.

It’s not fair that now we are tasked with the work of undoing the damage to ourselves.

We must forgive ourselves in order to truly forgive the past.

Our attitude about healing our inner parent/child relationship, shifting this intimate relationship with our wounded self is a large mirror to what we have been holding hostage in our own hearts while resenting our lack of freedom.

Loving ourselves is to forgive our little selves, to grieve out of self-compassion, to let ourselves feel the anger and sadness that it takes to release the chains that we’ve bound ourselves to thinking that a moment in the past will bring us peace.

It wasn’t your fault you couldn’t change it.

It’s okay to retrieve your power and remember the feeling of your essence.

It’s okay to learn how to be safe here, now, free.