But it doesn’t define you. A great psychologist once said that “if you don’t like your childhood, then re-invent it.” It is part of you and yet, the emphasis is up to you. You can give power to any part of your past that you want to. Do you want to remember the embarrassment of your mother’s harsh words or do you want to remember what your mother gave to you? Do you want to remember the teacher who treated you badly in grade school, or do you want to remember the pride you felt when you earned a B in Math? All are true, but which will characterize you?
The more you tell yourself you have suffered, then the more you have suffered. What you tell yourself becomes your truth. In this brave new world, where we are scrambling to understand our higher and better selves, we are prone to an over emphasis on psycho-analysis. Both psycho-analysis and behavior modification work when you want a change, but behavior modification skips over the emphasis of what went wrong to you in your past. We have all suffered, some of it awful and traumatic, all of it traumatic, yet we cannot compare a sports injury to a rape, we cannot, one induces much more trauma than the other.
I don’t suggest that we have no need to work through our very own trauma, I suggest that we move through our traumas, not into our traumas. That may take a long time. We must be aware of the time that we spend there. Is the time we are spending inside of our past traumas, damaging the life we have available now? Are the past traumas causing belief structures that damage us, for example, does the rape victim say to herself “what’s wrong with me? I don’t matter.”? Does the child bullied live in fear for years? If this is happening to you or to one that you love, how do you empathize and encourage, either your loved one or yourself? How do you make it across the divide of great sadness to being ready to move on with this life?
The way to moving forward is not to be in the past, reliving it and psycho-analyzing it. Work through the past, yes, yet use behavior modification at its best. Decide to make things different for yourself and reward your different ~ every step of the way.
Give yourself the very best childhood that you can recall and then move proudly and confidently into the very best future that you can build.
