In a post I wrote for #transformationthursday, I talked about the way I mentally make things I no longer feel comfortable thinking about disappear. The conscious effort to make myself pretend something never happened. I do know how unhealthy it is and how possibly detrimental this could be to my psyche but even with all of that, there are sometimes where this action of mine has failed me.
As all of us are different, we have different ways of letting go of our physical and emotional baggage. But then there are some of us, especially emotionally that don’t know how to let go of these baggage and maybe even if they knew, wouldn’t want to let go of it, no matter how toxic it is, for a lot of reasons.
There aren’t many of us, if I’m being honest. There aren’t many of us in the world who don’t have or haven’t had in the past some sort of traumatic experience that left its baggage with us long after the actual incident was over. Maybe from separated parents, an abusive household, an even more abusive ex, a lost job or some other very unfortunate event, an accidental that left more emotional scars than physical and all of the other not so savoury stuff.
In as much as none of us want to be in traumatic situations that leave us with its baggage, somehow we could get hooked in on the fact that something unfortunate has happened to us, we feed into it and soon enough, it takes complete hold on us. The #KISS initiative courtesy of the Minimalist Community wants to know what advise we’d give a friend who struggles to let go of physical and emotional experiences and while I don’t think I’ve had a friend who fit into any of these categories or maybe I do and I can’t remember but I have the 5’ Why test for the one who can’t let go of physical stuff.
I believe there’s a lot of reflective and liberating stuff you can achieve if you’re able to do this test. If my friend had a whole wardrobe of clothes and artefacts she didn’t need and never touched, maybe I’d ask her to take the 5’ why test. Why do you keep them with you? She answers and asks herself another why. And maybe by the last one, she’d see just how mundane her reason for having them in the first place.
But emotional stuff is tricky. We keep being told to let go but how can we let go. I kept feeling that if I pushed these things out of existence, I would be free and while that may be true, would I really forget it? I heard a quote that said “You can’t really start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one,” and while that may be true, what about sitting in it. We try so hard to pretend some things don’t exist but we can’t truly be free of it except we consider dwelling in it.
Maybe that traumatic event that left you with an emotional baggage, you consider reliving it, following step by step everything that happened from the beginning of that day or the beginning of that phase. We ask ourselves vital questions, but not how we could have prevented it because that means we’re dwelling in the past. I think questions like, “How can I totally live and accept whatever happened in this scene so it never haunts me again?” “Why does this event affect me like this?”
Acknowledging that this is what happened, embracing the fact that while we can’t ever change what happened, it has no hold on us. I think that’s one of the surest way to letting go. Or at least finding out why we can’t let go. Maybe if we saw it in the sense that while we may not have come out of it unscathed, we still survived through it.
Emotional baggage comes with a lot because sometimes we have the physical representation of that traumatic past with us and are forced to live with it every day. Like a scar of some sort. But I’d let me friend know of that quote that says that “healing is not about forgetting or erasing the past but by creating a new present.” And you can’t create a new present if you don’t build it from the foundation of every thing you’ve been through. Pouring your energy into becoming, not a new you but a redefined version. The kind that accepts what happened, but doesn’t let it define her.
If I had a friend that was in this situation, I’d say it to her the same way I say it to myself. If I can’t do anything about the past, the last thing I want to do is dictate how it affects the rest of my life. I can’t control my past but I can define my ending.
Images are mine.
