If you are a survivor of trauma, you have a ton of terrible memories of what happened to you. These memories are haunting apparitions that have controlled how you handle your life. Currently, your life is probably full of flashbacks, self-loathing, and pain.
This new series of articles is dedicated to trauma survivors learning how to create new healthy memories for themselves so they can live in a better future.
Tips for Letting Go of the Past
Letting go of the past is one of the hardest things any survivor can do. We tend to want to live in our history even though for many of us it is a painful place to dwell. Letting go is essential if we are to heal and move on with our lives.
There are several methods to practice letting go.
Practicing mindfulness. The more we can focus on the present moment the less pressure and pain our past gives us. When you practice being present your hurts have less control over you. Because of this lack of control, you can feel freer to choose to respond differently to your present life.
Allow negative emotions. Negative emotions are nothing to be afraid of and you need not avoid them. Many times, survivors fear feeling anger, grief, sadness, and disappointment but they are an integral part of who we are. Allowing them to flow out of you such as in tears or telling someone else your story lessons the power your past has over you and allows you to come live in the present.
Be gentle with yourself. Do not criticize yourself for not being able to feel enormous joy, especially during the holiday season. Be good to yourself and show yourself some compassion. Treat yourself as if you were a friend who is going through hard times. If you feel great pain treat yourself kindly.
Surround yourself with people who build you up. No man is an island, the saying goes, and neither are you. Humans are social animals, and we need others to remain healthy and alive. Allow yourself to lean on others and accept their support so that you will not isolate yourself. This is a powerful tip.
There are probably thousands of tips you can use to let go of the hurt of the past and it all begins with self-compassion.
Acceptance of the Past
Accepting the past as the past is an important step in building fresh memories for today and tomorrow. You will notice I did not say forget the past. That would be impossible and, frankly, unhealthy.
No, what I said was to accept the past as immutable, unchanging, and a part of history, not in the present. If it sounds easy, it is not. People who have survived severe childhood trauma, for instance, might find they are lost in the morass of the past, but it doesn’t have to remain that way.
By embracing the present and allowing the past to fade into the background, you will find that the fear you might have had about the future evaporates and you are left with a fruitful journey into the future.
Accepting the past DOES NOT involve avoiding your history and the emotions that accompany them. Instead, acceptance involves learning to accept your past as a process that isn’t easy by allowing yourself to live in the truth of what happened. It is necessary to do so without judgement and to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings.
Another important step in accepting your past is to share your feelings about your history with another person. Choose someone you can trust and allow your emotions to pour out. You will quickly find that the past loses its power over you when you share it and bring it out of the shadows into the light. Also, you can use other means to express your emotions such as playing an instrument, painting, or writing poetry.
The sky is the limit to how many ways you can express your feeling about the past so that you can accept it and move on.
Lessons Learned While Healing from Your Past
No matter who you are, where you have been, or what happened to you, there are always lessons that can be gleaned from your history. Perhaps you learned to respect others because you were not respected and that the world can be a cruel and unforgiving place.
As one can imagine, many, as those above testify, are a mixture of good and bad messages. Not only were our fundamental needs not met, but we had our bodies and our minds plundered by uncaring, selfish adults.
Healing from all the wounds and pain that childhood trauma brings is difficult, to put it mildly. Yet, through all our pain and turmoil, we have learned some vital lessons that many will never achieve.
For one, you have learned more about yourself and who you are than most people will ever admit about themselves. You have identified your flaws and positive traits, as well as self-compassion and self-awareness that go beyond the average person.
You have also learned how to have healthy and safe relationships. Your family of origin might be beyond your reach because they are harmful, but you have learned to reach out to others to build a family of choice.
Even if you suffered the death of a loved one or friend, you have learned you can sit and think about all the pleasant emotions that person evoked. Think of all the good times you had and try to live in the presence of the laughter you shared.
Those were only three of the vital lessons you can learn to face your history so you can build new memories.
Building New Memories
By this time, you may be wondering, “How do I build new memories to replace the old traumatic ones?” While you will never be able to erase the memories from your history, you can make new memories that are pleasant and powerful.
Since I am writing this piece in December, let’s take a look at the holidays which for many of us brings up memories of trauma and disappointment.
You can start new traditions either with yourself or with your family of choice. Put up a Christmas tree, buy gifts for yourself plus others, and volunteer to feed dinner to strangers with your local church or food bank. Go to a nursing home and sit with the elderly sharing the day with them and hearing their stories of Christmas long ago.
Treat yourself with love and understanding if a bad memory surfaces during your new activities. You are only human, and many things happened to you that was not pleasant. Only, remember to get back into the holiday spirit as soon as possible.
If you have children, start new traditions with them. It doesn’t matter if they are young or grown, it is never too late to begin enjoying the holidays with them.
For ideas, I’ll get you started with the following traditions you may want to begin during the holiday season:
- Host a board game tournament
- Have a movie marathon
- Hold a talent show
- Make a holiday decoration together
- Bake cookies, pies, and bread together
- Go and deliver a donation to your local food bank
- Build a gingerbread house
- Go out looking at the light displays in your area
- Eat smores and drink hot chocolate
- Have a scavenger hunt
You may have noticed that the things listed above are low-cost but the memories they make are priceless.
Ending Our Time Together
This article was written with trauma survivors in mind who are having problems letting go of the hurt of the past so they can move on with their lives. Personally, I have learned to acknowledge my trauma history but spend my days reaching out to others. That is how I deal with my past injuries and cope with today.
Try the suggestions in this article if you wish, but if they seem too difficult for you right now file them away in the back of your mind for later.
Remember, memories of trauma will never fade away, but how you respond to them makes all the difference in the world.
“Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” – Peter A. Levine
“I’m still coping with my trauma but coping by trying to find different ways to heal it rather than hide it.” – Clemantine Wamariva
Holiday Encouragement from CPTSD Foundation
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CPTSD Foundation Awareness Wristbands
Official CPTSD Foundation wristbands to show the world you support awareness, research, and healing from complex trauma.
The official CPTSD Foundation wristbands were designed by our Executive Director, Athena Moberg, with the idea that promoting healing and awareness benefits all survivors. We hope you’ll consider purchasing one for yourself and perhaps one for a family member, friend, or other safe people who could help raise awareness for complex trauma research and healing.
Each purchase of $12 helps fund our scholarship program, which provides access to our programs and resources to survivors in need.
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If you’ve been wondering how our programs work, now you can try out a free sample to see if they’re right for you. We’d love to have you join us in our safe healing space.
You are always worth healing!
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My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with over 40-years- experience writing short stories and poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has become the best way to communicate with the world. My interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science and read several research papers per week to satisfy my curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that most interest me.
As a boy with autism spectrum disorder, ACEs and high sensitivity (all of which is still not formally diagnosed) thus admittedly not always easy to deal with, the first and most formidable authority-figure abuser with whom I was terrifyingly trapped was my Grade 2 teacher, Mrs. Carol, in the early 1970s.
Although I can’t recall her abuse against me in its entirety, I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity — and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions — to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall. Fortunately, though, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg.
While there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her dark sunglasses when dealing with me.
I didn’t tell anyone about my ordeal with her. Rather than consciously feel victimized, I felt some misplaced shame. And as each grade passed, I increasingly noticed how all recipients of corporeal handling/abuse in my school were boys; and I had reasoned thus normalized to myself that it was because men can take care of themselves and boys are basically little men.
For some other (albeit likely NT) students back then and there, however, there was Mrs. Carol’s sole Grade 2 counterpart, Mrs. Clemens — similarly abusive but with the additional bizarre, scary attribute of her eyes abruptly shifting side to side. Not surprising, the pair were quite friendly with each other. It was rumored the latter teacher had a heroin addiction, though I don’t recall hearing of any solid proof of that.
I remember one fellow second-grader’s mother going door to door in my part of town seeking out any other case of a student who, like her son, had been assaulted by that teacher. … I just stood there, silently, as my astonished mother conversed with the woman while unaware of my own nightmare-teacher experiences.
IT’S amazing how frightening a positive ‘white’ scenario instantly turning into that of a negative ‘black’ can be for a very young child, for it is common enough for that child to thus experience catastrophization, even if it is of his or her own making—indeed, law-breaking mountains out of childhood-experimenting molehills.
In the White Rock of 1972, on one sunny afternoon, I was granted the honor of hanging out with my three older siblings, all of whom were accompanied by their own similarly aged friends. A five-year-old boy, I was about two years the junior of the younger of my two older sisters who was herself the next youngest amongst the whole group; thus, naturally I was the sole person to whom no one from the group (totaling seven) paid much, if any, attention.
That fact was not their problem, as far as they were concerned, on that sunny afternoon. Contrarily, it much appeared to be but mine and with which I’d have to disturbingly deal alone. Eventually came the point at which the sunny afternoon suddenly went astray and behavior became mischievous.
One moment, I was with the others inside an aged, abandoned, single-floor house as everyone investigated decrepit furniture and other items; the next moment, some of my people blurted out an alarming warning, with all of my people scattering away, outwards in every direction. I, however, just stood there completely bewildered and alone, looking around the briefly empty place for a couple of seconds. As a result of that day’s ordeal, I would know early-childhood abandonment trauma.
Instead of my people, there suddenly stood a half-dozen boys, all surely at least twice my age. They more than sufficiently surrounded me, as though they actually believed that I wasn’t too petrified to attempt a dash and perhaps successful evasion.
They all worked with law enforcement, they fooled me effectively enough to induce formidable fear in me: “Have you ever heard of the Mod Squad?” asked one, perhaps their ‘leader.’ (FYI: The Mod Squad was at first a 1968-commenced, bit-of-a-hit TV series, followed by a not-so-hot, 1999 motion picture about the three rather rogue criminals-turned-law-enforcement demi-agents.) To the present day, I can’t recall what was my intimidated reply. Perhaps a muffled and/or squeaky “Yeah,” or nothing at all.
“Well, we’re with the Mod Squad,” said another.
It’s amazing how naïve we can perceive ourselves to have been at a very young age, though of course with the advantage of clear hindsight. However, experiencing mind-numbing ordeals real-time is too immediate to adequately analyze, and exceptionally so at such a cerebrally and psychologically undeveloped point in a very young child’s life.
The rather young Mod Squad recruits soon escorted me outside and onto the street, all the while having completely encircled me. It was quite apparent that the poor condition of the abandoned house did not matter at all to them, for their disinterest in that fact allowed them artificial cause to psychologically torment a small and skinny, very young, redheaded squirt like me.
They took me along the neighborhood streets (e.g. Pacific Avenue) lining steeply-slanted southeastern White Rock, from where I could see an unobstructed sunny Blaine, Washington (State), which like White Rock was also adjacent to Semiahmoo Bay; meanwhile they acted out a fantasy of theirs as some sort of enforcers of justice or apprehenders of very young, bad boys.
But their fantasy fun was at my emotional expense, since I was the one living a daylight nightmare, whimpering and weeping a few times; it was my first brush with some form of albeit self-anointed ‘law.’
The Mod Squaders walked me a block to where two streets met, and looking up one (i.e. Habgood Street), we, the Mod Squaders and I, spotted my people, who themselves were looking down the same street at us, as they walked in the same direction (eastward, along Cliff Avenue).
It was at that point that my people may have realized that the entire bad situation may not be just my problem, but perhaps it was also soon-to-be their predicament as well; they may have then felt baffled and concerned over what they and I were supposed to and would do about it all. Both sides continued to walk our parallel paths eastward, though a long-block apart, at pretty much the same walking pace; and we both would stop two more times at two more intersections to look up and down the long-block at each other.
The last thing that I, four decades later, can recall regarding that ordeal is being at home with my unhappy parents after the police, obviously contacted by the Mod Squaders, had just left. As for my people, I don’t remember them being in the said picture at the later point of that sunny afternoon, not even my three older siblings. Logic dictated that it was not in my siblings’ best interests to be around me, Mom and/or Dad, considering the fact that they played a large part in the cause of the entire unfortunate incident.